Searching for calm with shelter-in-place roommate

[may22]

If it helps, sit down and write a letter to your h today and then put it in a safe place for a while. You may decide to tear it up and not keep it, but it will help you will you are on your own journey.

Cardinal, I did this and it helped. I packed up all of H's Christmas decorations (we both have ornaments from growing up, plus he has a number given to him over the years of his alma mater, sports teams, etc.) in a separate box after Christmas this year, because I didn't want to have to see them next year if he was gone. Before I taped it up, I wrote a note to him and put it inside, along the lines of I loved him, if he was reading this on his own how sorry I was that we were over.

For me, writing that letter and packing it away was cathartic and somehow freeing. Especially once it went off down to the basement and felt kind of like I couldn't take it back, it was out there in the world and wouldn't be received for a year at the minimum.

So maybe try it? if you're conflicted about not telling him how you feel, this is a way to get it off your chest without him actually needing to read it right now.

So I sometimes wonder if he thinks things played out like he expected--I was only interested in saving the M because he said he wanted a D, and I may have been motivated at first, but now I don't care, and it's clear (in his mind) that I didn't really love him, just like he thought...So why do I still find myself at times conflicted about his only seeing the outward, carefree me that I project? Does he think all of this hasn't hurt me? Could he think he didn't mean that much to me after all?

I know I probably had way more R talks with my H than you are supposed to with DBing. And I know part of the reason that it isn't recommended is that it just doesn't do that much good. He has a narrative all built up in his head and words out of your mouth just aren't going to change that. He is too dedicated to believing his own story to let something that you say throw it off. My H had needed to convince himself that I didn't really love him (because of the SSM) and also that our M was unsalvageable in order to justify his own behavior. Me saying in those R talks that I did love him and had never stopped totally fell on deaf ears. He *couldn't* really listen and believe me because that would mean that all these cascading choices he had made were based on a fallacy and make him be the bad guy instead of me... so he just didn't believe me. And, he said a lot of things to me about how he wasn't in love with me and how he felt about AP that now I regret hearing because it is making this healing part all the harder.

That all being said, I completely understand the desire to say how you feel to the one person you are supposed to be able to say anything to.

How do you find the balance between staying true to who you are and how you love, and DB? Isn't that the question people ask over and over? Shouldn't I have learned the answer to that by now? It is love, I suppose, to recognize that he is living his own life and right now that doesn't include M to me, whether he understands it as love or not.

Honestly, I think this entire situation is an exercise in learning to stretch and expand what we mean by LOVE. Love isn't just when things are easy and fun... this is love too, and giving your H the space that he needs right now to figure himself out is an even bigger and harder kind of love for you to share with him than telling him how you feel, even though being open with him maybe used to be one of the ways you have shown your love for him in the past. Just like exercising gratitude, exercising and stretching your love muscle to new and uncomfortable places, expanding the meaning of love to this truly unselfish place where you are now for him-- that is something that will stay with you the rest of your life, and is a gift to you as much as it is to him.