Okay, cobra, I get where you're coming from. I agree that bf still being so mad at ex is a hindrance to our intimacy. But get this wrinkle: his character is such that he uses his still being angry AS A WAY of avoiding intimacy, kwim? The two go hand in hand.
I think he realizes that his still being angry is a hindrance to his growth sort of, but it feels so right and so righteous and so justified to him, that he probably doesn't believe that getting past it would make much difference. (How can something that feels so Right be so Wrong?) He knows he needs to get past it, but he clings to it.
I think this clinging to resentment is also tied up in FOO issues with his mom. That's a huge can o' worms! When she comes over for dinner every other Sunday (and yesterday, being Father's Day, she was here), she gets me in the kitchen and tells me about all the men at the bar who tell her they love her and want to hug and kiss her and dance with her. God, it is so pathetic. Such tales week after week would be pathetic coming from a girl of 20-- let alone a woman of 88! She has no real friends, people who really care for her. Her social life is those barflies! Anyway, don't get me started.
I think my bf has only experienced the love of a woman (his mom and his ex) when it's mixed up with strings, weirdness, drugs, danger, punishment, etc. I don't think he has ever experienced simple sweetness, except for a short time after the twins were born and he was the stay-at-home dad and his ex was the breadwinner. He recalls those days as happy. Of course, he WAS drinking then, so who knows. He had been sober for four or five years, and told me the (to me, icky) story of New Year's Eve when he fell off the wagon when he and then-W shared a bottle of champagne and "that night the twins were conceived." Ugh! Hearing that makes me nuts. He hasn't told me the story recently, but it is forever etched in my memory. And you'll probably wince when I tell you that that very champagne bottle sits on his coffee table in front of his face to this day, made into an oil lamp. He says the bottle reminds me of the happy event of the twins' birth.
