Coincidentally, I had a phone conversation a couple of days ago with K on April 20th, 2006.
She had been emailing me and my emails back to her were one sentence long, no details, just acknowledgments of her email, and I could see that she was trying to get me to talk, so I called her.
You know she had been opening up to me lately, and the call became a talk about "us" and what happened, and why it happened, and how she felt then and how she feels now, and my "changes" and my alleged healthier insights and better behaviors. Got to speaking a bit about how I've noticed how I now differently work in regards to being in a relationship. K was all "Yes! yes! That's what I wanted from you!" Bittersweet.
She let me know that it wasn't that the OM was her great love, she admits that he simply offered the validation that she felt she wasn't getting from me, telling me that she wanted me to know it wasn't anything about him per se other than that; hinted that there are problems in that relationship. That she sees me now as this "great guy", was hoping I would have gotten to this place back then when we were married (which she's expressed before) and wondered why I never could, asked why it couldn't have happened while we were together (I told her I hadn't developed and needed this unfortunate crap to happen in order to get my wake up call), and implied that I'm the guy she was wishing this would all have come from, and expressed her wish to continue our friendship. All in all, a healing talk, and very sweet coming on the anniversary of our breakup.
She found the talk to be healing for her as well, and she called me back the next day for more.
She wanted to speak some more about how she felt, what had happened. There were things she wanted to tell me. We spoke about past events. We spoke about how we felt then and after. Toward the end of our chat, she cried, she was sad that our relationship may have been doomed from the start because neither I nor she apparently had it right since Day One. Then she told me she misses me, especially now that I seem to have finally gotten it together.
That talk detailed how our interdynamics played out and why. There were some things she hadn't considered about how her behaviors affected me, there were some things about how my behaviors affected her that I hadn't considered. During the talk, I also shared what I had learned in therapy about why I acted the way I did in response to her, sharing that understanding with her. We spoke about how her conflict avoidance played a part. We spoke about why I did this, and why she did that, and we each explained ourselves.
My understanding of that statement of hers about missing me is that simply she was missing the good things about me (as she's stated in the last few months), and now that she sees me being the person, doing the things, that she would've liked me to be/do when we were together, that gives her cause to miss me more.
I told her how much I had loved her, and how hard I had found it to let her go. I told her some of the things I had missed most about her. All this appeared to be a like a revelation to her; she said she never knew I had felt like that back then.
What that leaves me with right now is the impression that we see now that ours was an unfortunate comedy of errors. I think it made clear to us that it was not necessarily about being mismatched, which had been her impression. And that I'm really, all along, her preferred choice - if only these unconscious patterns of mine, and hers, had not sabotaged our relationship. I say that not out of ego, but simply because of her statements. Her telling me that I appear to have the understanding now that she desired me to have that I lacked then, that I've become the person she wanted all along, how she cried when she concluded that our relationship was doomed from the start because of these patterns, how she confessed her degree of missing me all this time and "especially now" that I'm being the man she looked for me to be.
I have a clearer understanding of her now too. Amid all the mistrust of her words over many years since discovery of the EA in '03, I believe I had an honest conversation with her. All good.
