Hello Fellow DBers! Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and thoughts which have been so helpful to me these past few days.
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I am not pitying you Portia, but do feel so sorry that you have never felt more than second best, even in the beginning.
Sorry, Linda. I guess I wrote that badly because I was trying to be brief. Once upon a time, I did feel first best in our relationship. In other areas of my life and to other people, I never did. I think that comes from being the person that is always leaned on, it is just assumed that I never needed to have someone to lean on. But you did hit the nail on the head. Whatever relationship I have in future, I want the feeling that I am important - "first best".
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And I don’t feel that I NEED to be done anymore. I just want to enjoy my life and take care of ME right now. I kind of put the R on the back burner right now. I know I’m not done, I still have some hope for reconciliation. However, just like you, I don’t want to initiate any contact with H, I’m past that point. I will respond to him initiating the contact though, if I feel like it.
Bright and BR, I like your perspective. I will not actively DB him or contact him until and unless I feel it is the right thing for me to do. Maybe I don't contact him at all. But I focus on me and on the things that were interrupted due to the events of the past year.
Rock, BR, Linda, Dawn and AJ, I wonder, too if having an MLCer living with the LBS makes a difference in the amount of hope the LBS feels towards whether or not there will be a reconciliation. In reading so many threads in the past year and given your responses, I believe that it is not physical proximity that matters, it is the type of contact that two people have. Many who have separated, reconcile. But when I read their situations, I notice that there is heavy contact including outings and in some cases, still regular sex. How can a person not be slightly hopeful that things will work out in those cases? More so than in my sitch where we have not spoken in three months and had one rather flat five-text conversation? We do not live in the same city. Hope seems futile.
BR, you have always felt me:
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I have often wondered if it would be easier if my H was home too! Rock, I see you have an opinion of NO. But I wonder the chances of a reconciliation with them gone like mine is....
Not just because they are gone, but as a result we lose hope and once that is gone, it makes me feel used to even keep trying. I could try to contact him again but I can't help but feel what is the point? As he waltzes around with GF?
I also believe that our individual personalities have a great deal to do with whether or not hope gets fostered or shelved.
Nero, you said:
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no wonder i don't know anything about this all anymore- i don't know him and he sure doesn't know me. we are, strangers who have this long long history- some kind of attachment and no idea at all what it means now and what to do with it- or about it. i stumble forward -
I could not agree more. We had this history. HAD. But our recent history and present is so different and painful.
So, I am learning that as hope dies, it hurts. I am learning how to work through the pain as well as accepting, like Bright and BR, that this time is for ME.
AJ, putting yourself first is not automatic even when there is no one else in the house. I love living alone and the space it affords me and I have been doing it a long time. The only thing my xSO will know about me, if he even thinks of me, is that I texted him two weeks ago. The last thing I know about him for a fact is that he had a week of holidays in June. And he did not contact me or try to see me. I accept that his crisis is not about me. But they do blow our lives to bits, don't they?
