"Give Up" just meant not hoping or expecting or working towards having a workable relationship. We have had minimal contact since my last post. I have asked him to drop her off at the Y day care so we avoid contact. He keeps asking me to come to his house to pick her up because it is more convenient for him (but 20 miles out of my way!).
I keep switching gears. I have been trying for years to figure out exactly what he is thinking and exactly what the problem is and how to fix it. He doesn't want anything fixed. He doesn't even want to go back to the pretty good rapport we had a couple of years ago.
I blocked his phone number. He hung up on me the other day when I tried to get him to talk about our problems. I called him 20 times over the next day and a half and when I reached that magic number, I left him a message saying I was blocking his number. He was able to send me a text this morning when he dropped my daughter off at day care, to let me know I could pick her up.
My plan is to not communicate with him at all unless and until he decides he wants to communicate with me on MY terms. We basically have a routine down. If there is some emergency, we can use a third party as a go-between to send a message. I require that he do what he has not been willing to do in over a year and a half, and what I did not do when he offered, because I was too pissed off with him: Sit down and have a heart-to-heart talk. He needs to be open and honest with me. He needs to be able to look me in the eye when he talks to me. He needs to want to have a good rapport and he needs to help me understand how he feels. I don't know what will happen. I want to have a good relationship. If I can't, I don't want to have any contact with him at all.
I don't understand why he can't look me in the eye. Either he really doesn't like me or else he likes me and he doesn't want to. My teen-aged daughter was with me the other day and a strange thing happened: He acted like I was "normal" and not somebody he was treating weirdly. He smiled and looked at me when he talked to me and when he was listening to me (I NEVER feel like he is listening to me unless he is looking at me!) I told him that either 1. He got distracted when my daughter was there and forgot to play his "game" of avoiding eye contact to annoy me. 2. He didn't want to act weird in front of my daughter. 3. He got distracted and "dropped his guard" and acted happy and relaxed around me like he used to.
I have a friend who just got diagnosed with "terminal" stage 4 stomach cancer. I am praying for God to heal him. I have more faith that God can cure cancer than that he can cure my exBF's bad attitude. I am constantly trying to improve myself and to figure out what I can do to make things better. I am leaving things up to God. Asking for what I want and believing he'll make it come to pass.
I am open to dating, I have a couple of guys I see and keep in touch with from time to time. I am not looking for anyone new, but I'm open it something drops in my lap.
If he'd simply treat me like he treats everyone else, and like he treated me a couple of years ago, that is all I require. I would like a romantic relationship with him...if he could meet my needs, he would fit into my life a lot better than someone new...but I am not trying to get him to fall in love and marry me.
I don't know if he is still acting out his anger and resentment because I started dating other men a year and a half ago, or if he is keeping his distance because he is really attracted to me but is scared of intimacy.
I thought it was better for us to be happy apart than miserable together, but I never thought we couldn't be happy together if he wanted to be. We are not happy apart. Clearly. But I can not do anything directly. If he wants me, he'll have to come get me. The reason I would not sit and talk with him a year and a half ago is because I didn't think there would be any real change. I think he was just wanting to string me along and throw me enough crumbs to keep me waiting. I could not live off those crumbs and he never gave me any reason to think that anything would ever be any better.
I am doing okay. I'm not terribly stressed. I am not lonely. I am not angry or bitter. I just told him that we needed to address the underlying problems. Me avoiding seeing him was just a "bandaid" but even if it made me feel better, it was not resolving anything.
I want to peel off the layers of the "onion" and get to the heart of the matter and deal with whatever issues are keeping us from acting like normal people in a healthy relationship.
If he doesn't want to clear up the problems and communicate with me effectively, I'm going to keep my distance in every way. I am going to expect him to contact me soon and want to talk. I am going to expect that we will work out our issues and be able to have a healthy coparenting relationship. I am going to expect him to act like the good friend I used to know him to be. I don't know how long it will take. I am not going to be holding my breath or watching the clock. He can take all the time he wants. But I am going to stay out of his life. I don't know what I will do when we run into problems. I guess I will wing-it.
