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Double Jeopardy; A; WTH is the matter with women. Q; What is Men, Alex?

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Hopalong:

--- Quote ---I'm not clear on how just asking if her NO has possibly turned to YES amounts to some disrespect or attempt to change her mind. I'm just trying to check...
--- End quote ---

Well, this is a test. Can you discipline yourself and respect her enough to stop fantasizing about (pre-analysing) what she is thinking? Can you wait for HER reality, whatever it is? Can you back away from even the SMALLEST attempt to manage her decision?

Can you center and calm yourself, be at peace with no strategems or maneuvers and simply release the outcome? Can you stop trying, even in ("I'm just....") ways? "I'm just..." is minimizing, rationalizing, etc. It's a flag for not fully owning something.

Can you feel such profound respect for her right to choose or not choose or simply let things float unanswered that you stop pushing, even with a pinkie finger, for resolution?

Can you give the power completely to her for now? (By "now" I mean the next five years...). Can you let go of the desire to know? Can you trust not knowing is okay?

That's respecting her No, with no wiggle room.

Doesn't have to mean sweating bullets off your earlobes, nor taking to drink, nor gutting it out in misery. The goal is...to actually perceive the stand-alone wisdom of it. Not wisdom-as-this'll-make-it-work. But wisdom as in this is generous and spacious, and trusting that the outcome will be what it should be (whether you are pleased with it or not)...and having faith.

It'll be difficult. But you can do it. I bet if you do, you'll feel different.

love,
Hops

lighter:
I think we were always talking sense, Mud.

Maybe we're using more words, and expanding our points, but we were making sense.

I wish all that writing made clear to you how important it is to respect an answer you don't like from someone you care very much about. 

It makes people feel safe.  That's so important to people who've had to walk on eggshells, or pretend to keep the peace that can't be kept in their lives. 

I'm not sure you understand that yet.

Lighter

mudpuppy:
I have to sit on my hands and lower my eyes in her presence? For five years?
You do realize I was her boyfriend not her indentured servant, right?
I guess I don't get the "I am woman hear me roar" and the "I am woman, a delicate flower who will run away screaming if you look at me wrong " dichotomy [and yes that was a mixed metaphor.]


 More seriously, I do understand that any pushing will only push her further away. I suppose this will enrage the Amazons but my therapist dude equated it to being the horse whisperer with a spooked horse out in the sun of the desert. You stand in a spot where you go on about your life where she can see you but you never close the distance. Instead you stand calmly in the shade and wait for her to.
  I have a friend, a woman, who suggested I might see if she wanted me to do all the things on her house and yard we talked about doing when we were going to be man and wife, but as client and dude. Seems kind of phony to me but it would be a professional relationship only. If anything more ever grew from it that's fine, but in the meantime I'm helping her and she's helping me in a nice, safe, uninvolved and nonthreatening way for either of us.
Smacks of a game to me and I don't like games but I find many of the things that strike me as games a lot of people, woman especially, think are just being smart. Any thoughts? I can't lie and say I wouldn't want it it be more than just professional but I would love doing it even if it never was anything more. We had some really great ideas and she really needs stuff done around what is a really neat log home but there is nothing else there. No landscaping, no yard, dirt driveway, laundry room in the basement and the only access through an outside staircase. A house obviously designed by a man. :?

mud

mudpuppy:

--- Quote ---I wish all that writing made clear to you how important it is to respect an answer you don't like from someone you care very much about.

--- End quote ---

I guess I'm not sure how it is not possible to respect an answer while at the same time hoping it changes in the future. Or even asking after five or six months if there is any chance it might have.
I assume it is probably true but because I'm not built that way I don't guess I'll ever fully understand it.

But as to the idea I have to accept whatever she decides as the right answer and the way it should be that seems kind of ridiculous. People make stupid decisions all the time, including about things that would make their lives wonderful, and "the way things should be" happens in my experience pretty seldom. Doesn't mean we don't have to accept other people's decisions, stupid or not. Of course we do, but pretending whatever someone else or we decide is the way it should be, invests us with a wisdom none of us possess. 

Twoapenny:

--- Quote from: mudpuppy on September 01, 2018, 11:43:42 PM ---I have to sit on my hands and lower my eyes in her presence? For five years?
You do realize I was her boyfriend not her indentured servant, right?
I guess I don't get the "I am woman hear me roar" and the "I am woman, a delicate flower who will run away screaming if you look at me wrong " dichotomy [and yes that was a mixed metaphor.]


 More seriously, I do understand that any pushing will only push her further away. I suppose this will enrage the Amazons but my therapist dude equated it to being the horse whisperer with a spooked horse out in the sun of the desert. You stand in a spot where you go on about your life where she can see you but you never close the distance. Instead you stand calmly in the shade and wait for her to.
  I have a friend, a woman, who suggested I might see if she wanted me to do all the things on her house and yard we talked about doing when we were going to be man and wife, but as client and dude. Seems kind of phony to me but it would be a professional relationship only. If anything more ever grew from it that's fine, but in the meantime I'm helping her and she's helping me in a nice, safe, uninvolved and nonthreatening way for either of us.
Smacks of a game to me and I don't like games but I find many of the things that strike me as games a lot of people, woman especially, think are just being smart. Any thoughts? I can't lie and say I wouldn't want it it be more than just professional but I would love doing it even if it never was anything more. We had some really great ideas and she really needs stuff done around what is a really neat log home but there is nothing else there. No landscaping, no yard, dirt driveway, laundry room in the basement and the only access through an outside staircase. A house obviously designed by a man. :?

mud

--- End quote ---

Hi Mud,

I will start with the caveat that I am not good at relationships and tend to avoid intimacy (all sorts of reasons) but for what it's worth, I am not a fan of games and have no idea why other people spend so much time on them, but we are all different :)  I think just be yourself.  She knows you are interested, she knows you're happy to wait, she knows you had a good time before the blip and presumably she knows that all relationships will have blips along the way.  I don't think there's much more you could have done to be clearer about your interest and the fact that you still want a relationship.  Her reaction, to me, does seem over the top, but if she has lots of unresolved stuff then she wouldn't have been reacting to just that blip, her response will have been to every other blip that's happened before (I say that as someone who is currently experiencing twenty years worth of reactions to something as simple as a postmark on an envelope).  Working through stuff takes time, energy, patience.  Some people do it better alone, some with someone by their side.

I don't know you as well as the other posters on here but you have always come across as an honest man with a warm heart and a lot of compassion.  I think you said in an earlier post that you've set a sort of mark around October/November time to call time on the current situation if nothing's changed by then (apologies if I've got that wrong, my head is a bit all over the place at the moment so I might be confusing this thread with another).  But if I were in your shoes I'd be inclined to just get on with whatever it is I do and let what happens, happen.  I don't know if you're in a situation where your paths cross with this lady day to day but if you do a friendly hello will let her know the door is still open.  If you don't see each other naturally then maybe a call or text a bit further down the line will again indicate the door is still open.  I think you'll know in your heart how long you feel is long enough to wait.  It might end up being one of those situations where you get together ten years down the line, who knows?  But I think you've been honest about the way you feel and I don't think there's much more that anyone can do.  I hope it turns out well for you, whichever way things go :) x

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