Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board
Relationship/s
lighter:
Grrr..... M accusing YOU of being self absorbed.... is... heinous fockery, in my book.
Gaslighting. Trying to shame you into complianc while relegating your needs to the woodpile.
Your outlandish need for reciprocity.
Again....
THE NERVE!
He'd have you sitting, mute, at his table. Yumming over all his delicious dinners..... hmmmmm....
I'm hungry.
It's just not enough and he's unwilling to give an inch.
AN INCH.
Willing to make you doubt yourself, make you stop asking for anything FOR yourself..... he wants you to sit there and look pretty and smart. He wants a worthy prop to drop into his life, move out of his life, back in then out....
and you're not a prop, Hops.
Lighter
Hopalong:
Lighter, were you ever a little girl named Johanna who really digs Aretha? LOL.
Thanks. Your indignation on my behalf is very affirming. Y'all been flies on the wall or something? (You and poet friend sound very similar!)
I think that when M is not getting what he wants, he does exactly what you described. But the rest of it is apt, too...it's really a dismissiveness that comes from entitlement. His whole long life. Somehow, he missed empathy training. Doesn't matter any more why (I suspect being parented by cooks and yanked from Costa Rica to Hollywood as a child while his mother drove around in her pink cadillac being eccentric....he finished raising himself and discovered intellect. Most of his joy since has been from that. Success, too.)
What you particularly highlight that's extra helpful right now, is showing me what over-compliance looks like, and in fact that's right. (I miss the food but it gave me something to do while mute...) Not to be too cruel, he did tell me cooking food is how he shows love, and to the degree he can, I believe sometimes it was that.
More to the point, about him tossing my needs into the woodpile and me daring to want reciprocity .... also true. But the good news is that I really did make a decision because those things kind of came utterly clear to me in the last week. It's not tenable to try to be his best friend while he refuses to acknowledge, ever, anything he also contributed to the relationship's problems. He just can't.
So I'm clear. I replied with both assertiveness and gratitude for the time when it felt very exciting to be "his person" and tried to put it all in a growth context, with understanding that we're very different humans and so it's best to let it go. By "it" I mean the close friendship he intended to resume with me in a couple months.
I've decided that will not be good for me in three months either and am letting it go permanently. Said so in so many words and explained that I'm filtering his emails now not to be spiteful but so I don't let myself get drawn back into arguing. It's done.
I think we both tried to be as gracious as we could so it wasn't a horrible ending. But it was an ending. Whew.
(Between Tupp giving him a proper arse-whipping and you calling him out on a billboard, he wouldn't dare try again. Poor guy. I do feel sorry for him, he's so trapped in himself. But I'm not fitting into his frame any more.)
On to the geezer hunt! And the rest of life too.
hugs
Hops
sKePTiKal:
Phew!
I'm happy for you, that you may take on several options instead of just one during this next phase Hops. I think sometimes there is an unconscious reflex to closely attach when there is only one choice or option in your life at a time. And that may actually be bearable long-term and yet STILL not be completely what you want.
I'll bet you do your research, read reviews, and the long term reports when buying a car. Or making any other large significant investment. You take the car for a test-drive; see how it fits your unique requirements and driving style. What the fuel efficiency is, the safety features/record. We should do no less with those intimate relationships (knowing full well, it's not completely "knowable" what risk we're taking over time).
Remember my advice to Hol, when she was dating -- you have to kiss a lot of toads, before you find the frog who is really a prince. I have kissed a LOT of toads, LOLOLOLOLOL. I may have been a cheap date - but was never "easy". And over the course of "shopping", all those years, and even actually accepting certain vehicles... I kinda gained a new perspective about how important my participation, choice, discernment, and plain old druthers were to the whole process. It's a quiet and internal - and open - form of power. Not control - just not being at the mercy of my own foibles, appearances, conditioning, social pressure or relational pressure.
After all, we're making a choice that will be with us for years, right?
Hopalong:
Yup. In this chapter of life, choices do seem weightier.
Fewer big blocks of stretchy unstructured time are ahead to reboot and redo.
And you're right, Amber, doesn't matter if power is quiet, loud or manipulative, it's still power. And for that matter, it's responsibility and ethics too.
I think, not that I'm objective, that the religious training of my childhood was SO dark and intense that I almost over-empathize in my relationships, and don't realize until I'm pretty well in that it's got to be two-way for me to be able to hang in.
I agree that not focusing on one gent too fast or hard will be helpful too. Maybe nothing happens with any of them, or something does. I'm not going to obsess, but am going to keep that door open.
hugs
Hops
Hopalong:
The synchronicity of a Poetry Daily selection can amaze me; it did today. Love this:
The Funeral
--Felicity Sheehy
What we learned the day of the service
was that the reception had been moved
out of the church galley down the hall
to the third-grade classroom, decorated
with cut-out Christs and handprint turkeys,
a motto hung over the door: Be Good.
The priest showed us the way, sweating
and swinging his bad leg, explaining
we'd thank him later for the air conditioning.
Inside, the desks were shoved to one wall,
and a fold-out table perched its legs
by the blackboard. We arranged the pictures
at the front of the room, where they looked
from their June barbecues and Florida vacations
at the concrete out the window, gently steaming.
Back in the church, the fans were running
so loudly we couldn't hear ourselves
and the readings evaporated in the rafters,
where the only things listening were the faces
of window saints. Towards the end, the priest
made a joke about the coolness of heaven.
We followed him back to the classroom,
which now held an array of danishes
and cardboard boxes of coffee ("Half-off
from TOPS," he said). I drank cup after cup
of decaf, lightening and lightening
and lightening them with cream, watching
the silent pictures watching us. How little we
had in common. Their whole world had ended,
while somewhere ours continued, past the flat
voices and the shuffle around the room, past
the borders of this town, where the fields fill
with the flashlights of so many people
looking for each other, flooding the skies
here, floors and floors beneath the stars.
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