If you will not love me the way I want you to love me then I will not like you.
Originally Posted By: Coach
Steve, How would you define friend?
What terms and definitions I place on people that come and go from my life has no concern. The consideration is how I have treated those people and how I have affected their lives. I have bonded on an emotional level, spiritually to borrow a term from my wife's vocabulary, and have had those people drift from my life like a hawk on the wind, I interact with people daily who rely on me for a paycheck to feed and clothe their children whom I don't even know their middle names, the past 20 years of better and worse have been spend with my wife, none of them do I have the authority over to place a demand of how they should feel about me at any given time. They after all living beings just like me and you.
Anger, hatred, disdain, are negative energies. You should not harbor them within yourself. Coach, you speak so often about "cat whispering," you should know, if you bring any of those negative emotions into a room you will not find your cat purring in your lap. It is not attractive, so to say. This site is about Busting Divorces, saving relationships, loving other people. To view someone with such negative emotion that they become your enemy is antipodal to why we spend our thoughts and time here. Anti-friend.
People come into your life for a reason. You affect them and they affect you in a way that can be loosely term "character." There are negatives. There are positives. You accept what you can from what if offered to you and what you are able to comprehend. I am a botanist and ecologist by trade. I have spent the past 40 years walking around in the woods. One freezing cold morning in spring, long ago, I was walking in the Bitteroots trying to find markers I left the previous summer so I could set up plots for the coming research season, when a man came up curious why another was this high up the mountainside in the morning. We walked and talked an hour or so and before he parted he reached into his pack and said, "your ears are cold take this hat." I carried that hat with me for years as good luck. When I moved back east, I did rt. 64 to 66 through Shenandoah under 20# solo in the rain and on the way back hiked along with some thru-hikers. One of the girls started off ill-prepared, sent the wrong gear home, and now was starving, soaked to the bone and freezing. I gave her that hat. We stay in contact and hike the Presidents every couple years. She brings the food. 'You sleep with other boys. I hate you. You disgust me. If you do not change your mind in the one last chance I am giving you.' Does not make sense to me. Sounds to me like you do not Know Yourself and can not extract the positives from your life to grow on them. To love someone else you must first love yourself. To not like someone must mean you do not like yourself because of the way they make you feel about yourself. Feeding off negative emotions is not healthy. Find the positives.
Originally Posted By: TimeHeals
Doesn't work out in real life. It's not about not loving them, not liking them, it's about healthy boundaries that allow them and yourself to do exactly what they want to do: move on.
You do not need "healthy boundaries" to move on with your life. You simply move on. Happily. Rob put it excellently in another post:
I wouldn't bother busting the affair, if she wants the other guy so badly, let her have him
... Let her go ... Set yourself free ... Enjoy your life ...
There is not much more to it then that my friend.
Maybe I have diverged from this man's original question but I come on here and read of many men and women so codependent on their spouse they do not understand life without them that I felt I needed to make a point:
Originally Posted By: Steve McQueen
If you will not love me the way I want you to love me then I will not like you.
That is not Love nor Altruism that is Codependency.
