I'd guess you could be pretty liberal in saying it as long as it had an effect. But to borrow your concept, he seems to be using his hurt feelings as currency and he's set an awfully high, perhaps unpayable, price on them. My opinion is you've been more than sorry enough, at least until he's willing to actually hear you. Eventually those words *will* lose their meaning, even to you.
Do you just bring it up out of the blue and risk ruining a relatively good evening by dredging up these memories?
Nope. Why ruin a relatively good evening for nothing?
...Am I whacked or does that make sense??
That all made perfect sense; I wasn't meaning to imply you should consider that an acceptable compromise, just that it wasn't necessarily an evil manipulation on his behalf. I think you're reacting to the real problem, which is that affection and demonstrations of care can't be currency in a loving relationship for anything other than returned displays of affection and care. And at some point a transaction based relationship is going to inevitably lead to score keeping and that's absolutely a losing game, since no two people keep score the same (among other reasons). Your M has many of the same symptoms mine did, Heather. One important difference is you might have the opportunity to jolt H into self-examination and change before you feel totally hopeless and dead to him. But it may well take extraordinary measures on your part, and even then he may not budge.
I find it really difficult to be loving and show love to someone that I don't feeling loving toward.
Yep, that's a tough one. Even if you try to fake it 'til you make it, a person can only do that so much without reciprocation before the process starts killing whatever real loving feelings may actually be there. But you do feel loving toward him sometimes; try to make the most of that. And fully realize that this is one of those areas you don't control. Your best efforts, real or fake, may fail to take root in him. And if that's what happens, it's not because you weren't good enough, it's because he wasn't capable of being part of a loving relationship. You've been extraordinarily dedicated to fixing your damaged relationship and you should feel great about that. Nothing he does can take that away from you.
Whoa, ok, did all that just come from me?????
You're more than you know! No surprise to anybody reading this (except possibly you?).
Stop WaitingFeel EverythingLove AchinglyGive ImpeccablyLet Go
