I’m mostly not a Buddhist and if I were one I wouldn’t be a good one. That said, I do kind of resonate with the idea that suffering often comes out of the inability to accept things as they are. Or something.
At the same time I believe that drive to make things better is one of the best things about people.
So, kind of torn about all these things.
And the same is true for my feelings about Lohr, in particular. Mostly now I don’t think about him that often, compared to last year or the years before that. But I wouldn’t say I’m close to zero yet. Maybe a few times a week it still hits me: Wow. Just wow. Sometimes when Nicholas and I are emailing or talking I hit a kind of emotional bogginess where there used to be ground, and it pretty much comes down to believing what someone is saying to me.
When Mags and Lynn were back together with those guys in October, it seemed to me that the biggest problem for those of us not-Lynn was that there was no apology or awareness that leaving, calling names, and all that was mean.
Not just mean though: Lohr and I had astrally married, which to me meant something. Not just something: A whole lot. It clearly wasn’t a traditional, physical marriage. But to me it was a permanent partnership; a permanent care about and for each other’s emotional sphere. It was about staying up if a cat was sick; being at the other end of the text messages. Showing up.
Around Valentine’s Day, I read back to the time period between when they left in December 2010 and perhaps May or so of 2011, and it struck me that whether other people would perceive it or not, I was still behaving very much married: Seeking understanding and partnership, even as I was realizing we were in a badwill phase. To be honest I really thought, on some level, that something terrible must have happened within their system itself – a hidden group of people taking over or something – because without something so terrible there would be no way Lohr would not honour his word.
In September, when the astral kid stuff went down, and October, it became clear to me that his word wasn’t a consideration to him at all.
Which is why I chose to separate from him. And then, of course, he wanted a formal divorce and we divorced and we’re done. That was clearly the right thing to do and I’m at peace with my decision.
But inside me, I am still struggling with the magnitude of the betrayal that caused him to treat me that way. The whole thing. How can you lie to someone that you love them and think they are great, while you are deciding that they are abusive and not worth basic human decency?
I just don’t get it. It’s like…having so profoundly not gotten it — and looking back there certainly were other times this tendency was visible, not just with me but in the treatment of other people — I have to work through, again in my life, that things were not as they seemed.
Not only that: One person knew that things were not as they seemed, and continually led me to believe that we were loving partners together.
The date before the argument about whether it was okay or not to ask if Sass’s parents had said anything passive-aggressive at Christmas (I know, it sounds crazy doesn’t it?) Lohr and I had been cuddled up and said loving things and I had felt so warm and happy.
I actually do believe in divorce.
I stared down that choice with Carl after Emily died, and I believe our particular marriage is much stronger for having realized that yes, either one of us can leave at any time. We choose not to; we take the vow part really really seriously, but we do it from a position of choice and power. Having married relatively young (23) I think that sense that our marriage could end (and therefore needs to be stewarded) and that I would be okay, we would be okay, Carl would be okay, was a kind of essential realization to keep growing into it. For us.
But part of the vow part for me was to talk to Carl about it; to communicate what was working and what was not, and to, in other words, honour him as my husband and partner: Someone deserving of every opportunity to fix things, and deserving of my effort to look at myself and work on the things that needed changing.
We had been through so much: Coming out multiple and the whole question of polyamory and infidelity; figuring out all the relationships between Carl and everyone else, and whether people would be able to keep our marriage vows, the work of therapy and the strange little changes that happen…yes you have to call me when you’re late because I am realizing I am a human being deserving of consideration, but in return I will not go ballistic the one time you forget, except the one time in ten I still do…one time in twenty…wow, haven’t done that in a while (nor has Carl forgotten to call, funny thing).
And if we couldn’t have, I’m sure there would have been terrible times and even some disrespect and blaming and so on; that’s a part of decoupling. But he would have seen it coming.
With casual friends, casual friends on the ‘net, etc., sometimes I’ll just not like something or someone (it really is rare) and then I just communicate less. But I’m not really in relationship to them, if you know what I mean? I don’t feel that I owe them my real thoughts or self, nor they me.
But with someone close, I feel almost precisely the opposite: They deserve the most possible information, chances, etc. Not that this is always a calm process, but I’m in the game; I’m showing up.
Lohr didn’t do that. I had trust issues before, but wow, I think I had no idea what untrustworthy really was, outside of the context of adult-child stuff growing up and actual rape as a young woman, until now.
Even my/our first serious boyfriend, who did cheat on us his with his current wife (at least we get that satisfaction, that she really was all that, right?:)), cheated on us in the context of a relationship that clearly was not going well. Because we were not right for each other. And we handled it badly, all of us, but we were 21 and he was 20…at that age, it’s kind of more understandable as you just haven’t been through it before.
I tend to experience emotions in a flash, and then I kind of recentre, and then they arrive again slowly over the course of time. What is slowly rearriving as I try to take little steps of trust with new(ish) people, is that sense of absolute betrayal.
Obviously it does come out of expectation: I expected better. I expected to be treated decently. I expected that someone who intimately knew what losing Emily did to me and us would have not left in the middle of that last fight for a decent length of gestation. And even if someone did that, I would have expected that person to look at himself and consider whether it was that he wasn’t willing to go through the loss, or he had not communicated some essential information, or even just to not get that — sometimes insight doesn’t come on demand — and just treat me like a partner. Not to decide he felt bad, so I must be bad, because it must be my fault, and then treat me like crap with all this high-drama stalking/abuser/whatever crap.
(And I will say that while I will totally get that I can be argumentative and also can withdraw when I am hurt, in a kind of a whoosh, and that could cause someone to feel hurt, I have really, really, really — though you just have to believe me — thought about whether I was abusive, and I was not. abusive. Abusive is tearing a person down, not communicating hurt or problems. There was no belittling or name-calling even in some irrational anger, and for sure it wasn’t on my radar…because I was. not. thinking. that.)
That’s what vows are for, in my opinion: A final safety net when life gets insane; you say well…I can’t sort this out this week but I remember that I promised to love and cherish.
And Lohr knew I believed that, before we made them, because we had many discussions about it.
This is why I continue to suffer some, I guess. Somewhere deep inside me I am grappling with the question of why he didn’t believe I deserved basic respect as a person and his wife. The hurt abused part of me is all too ready to believe it is something fundamentally flawed in me and my expectations. I’m just not quite sure yet how to let it go, although I guess writing about it is a start.
Okay, time to get working.
I am so sorry that you are hurting, I truly am.
“Somewhere deep inside me I am grappling with the question of why he didn’t believe I deserved basic respect as a person and his wife.”
When we met them, I asked numerous questions about y’alls relationship. Mostly because it was so long distance and having never physically touched, that intrigued me particularly because sex and touching and seeing each other for me is such a big part of communication and understanding. The impression I left with was, they did not really see you as real and she was, may still be, a supreme BS artist.
You are not fundamentally flawed, you were seduced by an unstable person.
Tyler
I really appreciate your comment. And I think, right now anyway, there is probably a lot of truth to it. Certainly over the time that Sass was posting that we were reading her blogs and broken up, there was stuff she wrote – not to do with us – that were really not consistent with facts we knew, and it made me realize how capable she is of either not seeing things, or spinning them.
I mean I think blogs are not a good indicator of life over all but this was actually really out there, non-emotional things.
Also taking that step back did put a lot of things in perspective. I had always thought Sass got into trouble with a generous nature – I saw over and over and over that she would make friends, and then get really tired of them and complain and complain to us anyway or get totally set off over things I would consider minor, and then drop them in one way or another. But when I saw her go after her brother — and I am not a fan of his, but his wife was dying — I realized that I had put a generous spin on a capacity to really not see the human being in the relationship and it was around then that I started to get out of the relationship, emotionally. I suppose in a way we’ve harped on it but it was…both so clear, and also very like how she had treated us over Emily, over other tough times in our lives, to create drama about how awful things were for her.
There were lots of other red flags. Lack of friends from the past, the exes, instability in certain areas, how they treated Carl, some other stuff…
But I and we have to own that we looked past that. And it was ’cause it was online, I think – we could collectively step back and take that breath and re-centre. But I think we went overboard. It was really good for me; I feel like I’m a much better person for having not gone off on her over the secret journal, Emily’s funeral, when she broke up with us after we had Noah and all those things…I found capacities in myself that I am very glad to have.
And I did that out of love, so even if she didn’t love me or Lohr didn’t love me or didn’t exist, I guess that speaks well to that. It still hurts though. And it’s not that clean.
What I don’t know though is about other people in her system, whether they really exist or not. Over 8 years I would like to think we weren’t that idiotic and that there is something just so dissociative there that we saw…the inner people who were more generous, more capable of love and so on. Except…they weren’t, apparently. That’s where the thing with Lohr hurts.
We did meet at the start and I didn’t get the sense that she was a scammer, but I will admit that was a crazy, crazy time for us. And that Mags was fronting most of the time. In some ways it makes sense that Mags would have been attracted to someone so split, if that’s what it was. And it was an easy out for us, to have Lynn engaged online like that. Lots of stuff to own that way.
We probably won’t know. I find reading about BPD helps because the way people seem to respond in BPD relationships is about how we did, and also if I go down the checklist enough fits to be a working hypothesis. For people with BPD they really don’t perceive things the way other people do; it’s all done through (I am summarizing my understanding) a lens of an inability to really attach and a wash of perspective that basically sums up to feelings = fact, particularly in their closest relationships. And their feelings are off – they project to an insane degree.
We all do that sometimes, like when you get into a stupid argument and it seems like everything’s bad, but people with BPD don’t regain perspective and they behave in pretty out there ways.
The really interesting thing for me is that people who have narcissistic wounds/tendencies (like I do; comes from growing up) often do hook up with people with BPD because
a) the idealization phase at the start – people with BPD attach quickly and ‘mirror’ so that it’s like you met the very perfect person wow wow wow, because they are creating a fake self to suit you – plays to that need to be the best/the good and
b) once the BPD person launches the first splitting episode (where they go the other way and paint you as awful), the person who has narcissistic wounds and survived growing up by figuring out his or her parent’s or abuser’s every mood suddenly has a problem to solve, that if they can only be good enough in this relationship they’ll have sort of won over the past.
I really recognize myself in that, and it’s a good thing to have so stark and clear. But man, it does hurt. Because someone with BPD isn’t, at the core, truly interested in YOU at all. You’re just a means for them to feel better or self-soothe. And that certainly is how I feel treated in retrospect, although I am suspicious of retrospect too.
There were really good times that seemed really real. Times that we felt very connected and supported. The end does put a bullet through it though, especially the wild accusations of abuse.
Anyways thank you for posting. :) I do believe that one can have online relationships that are meaningful and real – I’ve met lots of people online who have translated into real (“real”) friendships, and real friendship that due to distance are all online, etc. And we do like our compromise around romance etc. But this may not have been one of them.
I did not mean to imply that you alls relationship was not real. I meant I was intrigued about how the dynamics worked being so far apart physically. I definitely understand that it was real for both parties because of all the anguish, anger, pain as well as delight, and times of happiness it had provided.
Oh no, I know. I just get into it sometimes.