I think something must be being lost in translation. I'm simply musing on how irritating WAW's attitude continues to be -- is that an "emotional" response? Yes, I suppose so, but then that would also be the response I have to my neighbor who insists on mowing his lawn at 7 in the morning on Saturdays.
I don't initiate these exchanges with WAW, and the weirder ones (cf, @Polly) come out of the clear blue. Which is itself an irritation.
It's as if WAW is sitting around her house having this interior monologue, gets an idea, then lambastes me for it -- which wouldn't be unusual, by the way. For years in our marriage she would wake up having had a dream in which I did something that made her angry, and take her anger at my offense -- IN HER DREAM -- out on me!
My telling her that I wasn't going to be friends because of her public embrace of her now-former-lover, the one who supposedly did her so wrong and whom she now hated and the affair with which she supposedly so regretted -- yeah, that's definitely a D-emotional-protection thing for me.
But I have to say I don't find it particularly troubling, DB-wise. I think it's a fair boundary to say, "Hey, you want to sustain your relationship with the man you cheated on me with and left me and the kids for, that's your right; but it's my right to perceive that as a rather direct slap in the face and not to want to engage with you on anything but the one area of mutual interest we have, which is the kids."
Talk about cake-eating, right? She wants to be able to get together with Signore AND ex-Husband? "I wish we could just get past all this and be close again." Well if wishes were horses, even beggars would ride.
That attitude strikes me as being quite disrespectful -- or do you disagree?
