Oh HD, my heart aches for you... I read The Road Less Traveled years ago, and I'll dig out my copy and reread that chapter and comment later-- maybe it will give me some insight into my own sitch.
It just seems sad to me that she is completely discounting the way you want to feel in this R and suggesting that you're wanting something that either doesn't exist or is so ephemeral it doesn't count-- what about all the love poetry and songs written throughtout the ages? What about the Shir Hashirim (Song of Songs/Song of Solomon) for pete's sake? What about Dante, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Fcuking Browning? Were all those people on a temporary endorphin high?
I was thinking about y'all this weekend and the question I wanted to ask you was: how do you keep feeling any love for her after years and years of her jabbing at you and discounting your wants and feelings? I don't mean that as a rhetorical question... I mean how does one do it? I've only been at this three years in this R, but I feel that every time my bf holds up a brick wall that I run into head first, a bit of my feeling for him dies. The first year of our R I persisted, I made excuses, I had hope for the future. But I'm wearing down, and irreparable damage has been done. I'm having a hard time locating positive feelings for him beyond a general benevolence and "wishing him well." As you've said about your W, there's more to her and to the R than the sex issue, and that's true for us, too. He's the perfect partner in a zillion other ways, we completely share interests, and just the whole lifestyle vibe. But my trying to connect and his resistance to connecting (and his saying he has no idea what I'm talking about when I say I want to "connect") is like a gray, dingy film that has settled over everything. We've been to two C's and he's now going to one on his own to work on anger issues.
Anyway, how do you keep feeling anything for someone who over and over again rejects the gift of yourself that you are offering to them?
