What if he's living with someone now?

[semantics]

After six years (three lovely, three turbulent) I broke up with him in September. He continued to attempt contact, combatively, once a week via email, because I'd blocked all other channels. When he found out I had spoken to his ex wife, he went ballistic and told me to go and die, and never contact him again. But still emailed me as late as late November.

He wouldn't take or return my calls then, so I told him in email that the next time he baited me I'd refer it to the police, his boss, and his ex wife.

Everything went radio silent for a while. For the first time since the year after our respective divorces, the year before we met, we each spent all the winter family holidays, without each other, NC. I managed to make the transition into this year ok, focused only on my child. I don't know what he did.

In January, I saw, we were both on a dating site. I stayed on for only a week or so, unable to navigate online dating. I went for an annual exam that turned out irregular again and then had biopsies to rule out reproductive cancer. At the end of the month I called him and left a voicemail, telling him I needed to talk, if he would, and to please call me. He didn't.

In February I cried a lot and didn't understand why I wasn't angry anymore. I missed him dreadfully and wanted contact, but remained NC.

In early March I received the letter notifying me that surgery was needed immediately to remove the cells that looked like cancer. I sat with the letter in my lap for a long time, wanting for all the world for him to just know. And not two days later, he emailed me at two separate email accounts to say he missed us, and wanted to know if I did too.

The sudden timely contact spun me and I couldn't respond. Because of the baiting of any previous contact since breakup I couldn't tell if he was being real, or just fishing, bored. I didn't respond. He texted that night for the first time since September, but all he said was, "What's up". Not even any punctuation. It wasn't enough to respond to, and it bothered me, the glibness of it, the carelessness.

The week of first contact passed and at the end of the second week he sent me an email I had sent in October, a bad one. I answered that wordlessly with a photograph of a pretty wedding drawing I'd completed days before his two first emails. He sent back only a question mark. The next day I wrote that I felt he was sending mixed messages and I felt confused. That he seemed to want contact, but wasn't saying anything.

He wrote back that it was a mistake; he'd meant to reach someone on his work team with the same first name. I flipped out and wrote back everything I'd needed to say for months. Then phoned him, and got his voicemail. Told him if it was a mistake he should delete all contact information and communication from me so that nothing like it could happen again. The thought that he could mis-send any of our exchange to a coworker felt really almost dangerous, just unnecessary trouble and confusion for anyone. I think I told him to call me back, or maybe I said I would call him, daily, until we could confirm that he had deleted everything.

Seven years of communication.

The next day I emailed and just asked directly: Why are you not answering my calls. He wrote back that the last email was an honest mistake. That he wished me the best in life. That he is living with someone now.

I emailed his ex wife and asked confirmation. She wrote back and said yes, it's true. He's living with someone now.

I died on that day. I died again and again, all the holiday week. On Easter Sunday I emailed three times, not maudlin or rageful, just factually acknowledging the hurt and bewilderment. On Easter Monday I emailed again and told him to forget the ugly things I'd said to him about himself, to release himself from the pain that I had caused. On Tuesday I emailed again similarly about something else, saying I meant to release us both from the hurt. On Wednesday he responded only, "Why". I sent a photo of a beautiful landscape, taken that afternoon in a national park, and said because it felt better that way; hurting him was never on my list of things to do in a life, that I was sorry, that I want him to be happy.

He wrote back that I could not be trusted; that I had betrayed him. I wrote back, name the betrayal and I'll happily apologize for it. And went to bed.

In the morning I saw he'd written back, naming three. I was repentant. He switched tactics and told me to be honest about the guy I had been seeing in December. I told him the truth: I hadn't had sex since last March. The last time we were sexually together. He wrote back that he is happy in his new life, and wishes me the best in mine, please respect that.

I have written only once a week since but seem to be adamant about doing that now. It hasn't even been a full month since his big reveal. If I do the math I'm not even sure how that's possible; my sense of calendar time is completely screwed up. I had surgery last week. Weathering it alone has been strange.

This morning after a full night of fever I woke in the morning feeling rested and clearer. He doesn't know everything about why I spoke with his ex last summer. After thinking about it a few hours, I broke form and telephoned him, knowing he wouldn't pick up. I told it to his voicemail, for two minutes, calmly, and thanked him for listening.

BPD relationship is full of abuse. It's abuse. The tactics are abusive, the lows and explosions traumatizing. This is bad for everyone involved: for nons it is terrible; for BPDs, it's so much deepening of shame. It's bad for everyone, when there's so much bad. It's abuse.

I say so because I know it; I know this is not the kind of relating I ever want for my child, or his, or anyone. But despite that I want him in my life and world and heart anyway. Not because he is with someone else now, but because I still love him and I only broke up because he was shoving me so hard away.

I need your feedback on this, somehow; any part of it. I've posted on the Detaching board since Sunday night but I'm not detached. In all my cells I feel driven to restore us. It isn't that I don't want to let him go; its that I never did in the first place, and don't know how to, and don't know what to do.

He is living with someone and without details I will tell you I know his life changed drastically even before that. I broke up with him because he had made a life changing decision that seemed to forecast a lot more trouble in our dynamic. I expected he would be dating a lot, and hiding it, so I broke up with him.

I never, ever expected he would move someone into the house.

Is it worth anything? To try to restore relationship between us, when he is living happily with replacement? He deserves to be happy. I loved him and I want him to be. But I thought the happiness would be ours, mutually, together.

If someone new is already living in the house, do I just let go?

I don't know who it is. I don't know how long they've known each other, or how they knew each others before this at all. Or, if he's happy, why he needed me to know.

Is it worth trying to restore us?

This morning I was so strangely calm. For some reason, just before I called, I felt like he was celebrating a six-month anniversary. Some part of me telling me they've had this new relationship for six months. But, he was still contacting me at the time.

Do I continue to place myself in his consciousness? Please say what you think.

[RELATIONSHIP PROBLEM SOLVING]

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[Lucky Jim]

Hey semantics, Why did you break up with him last September?  Presumably something happened.  What?  Apparently now you would like to recycle with him, even though he is living with someone else?  Fill us in, when you can.  LuckyJim

[semantics]

Hey semantics, Why did you break up with him last September?  Presumably something happened.  What?  Apparently now you would like to recycle with him, even though he is living with someone else?  Fill us in, when you can.  LuckyJim

I broke up with him because I could no longer handle his topics of other women. We had a chronic misunderstanding of boundaries and while I was firm that I didn't want to spend my time discussing third parties, he talked a lot about his female coworkers and ex-wife and even grocery clerks, and new "business partners" that came out of nowhere. Maybe it would have been ok or manageable if I had been able to just allow it and then redirect conversation, but he was a dominant talker and I was the type to just point it out: you're doing it again; I don't want to hear about this person.

I have a history of having been cheated on and that's what his focus felt like to me. So I would point it out and then it would just turn into a huge fight, then a fight about fighting, then just ugly words escalating on both sides. I mean it was dumb: we're both in our late forties and when we weren't caught up in the traps, we really deeply enjoyed each other.

We have corresponding children inside of us. I'm not personality disordered but I do have a strange complicated history and it gets in the way. What I'm saying is that he and I both have aspects that are exquisitely childlike. It's sweet but in conflict one of us has to remain fully adult -- and usually that was me, but last summer was really hard and I was worn out.

His ex wife topic was endless and he was still emotionally with her. They both were still hashing out or reconnecting constantly even though she married someone else. In September I was done with that too, being a third wheel somehow.

In an early summer argument he suggested he could get great sex anytime without all the headache I presented. This hurt me so deeply that I assumed he was just already doing it, had been doing it for some time.

He said something ugly to me in a spar a few days later that seemed of bad intent about my child. After six years of never having any interaction with his ex, I contacted her to ask mother to mother, and woman who loved him to woman who had known him longer, whether this was just ugly provocation or something to really run from. She called me and we spoke for two hours and it was kind. I still stayed reserved from him but he never apologized for what he said, refused to discuss it, made me the bad person about it, and really, by September I was done with that too.

But what happened in September was just a conversation I don't want to repeat. It took me months of NC afterward to understand the thing he said that most distressed me wasn't even true. He has a knack for nailing the worst fear in me and exploiting it. Since then it's almost like I've figured that part out and now accept it's his weapon and knowing that makes it less effective, if that makes sense. Like I've identified what it is, loosely, and why/when he uses it. And that makes it just a conversational glitch, not the end of the world like it always seemed.

The biggest part of it was that he seemed to be telling me there were a lot of new women in his life that he would be talking about and being curious about. Not sexually necessarily but in whatever ways and levels he would interact with them. New coworkers at a new job; people in a new support community related to his recent life change. He wanted me to be able to go along with that peaceably and we both understood I'd had enough of it after so much with the ex wife.

I broke up with him to allow him to experience the specific support he needed, from whoever it came from, and to allow him to integrate with the company that had just hired him. My summer had been so personally difficult that I just couldn't face not being his priority, or not being able to talk about my own needs and experience -- knowing he would take up most of any conversation to ruminate on all the new people and tasks and realizations in his life.

I guess the shortest version is that his life was in several major transitions and I knew I was low on his list of priorities or even interests. I needed not to feel like a problem, needed not to be the one to be blamed for any bad mood, needed not to be the thorn in his paw. That sounds like I was martyring for him, but that's not what it was. I needed to not be devalued or overlooked anymore.

I needed to tend only to myself for a while, until I felt normal again.

[semantics]

You know what, thank you for asking the clarifying question. Telling about what led to September made me realize no, this really was too chaotic. It wasn't me; I'm steady unless someone deliberately unsettles me. I'm the one people rely on when they are distressed or need clarity.

People talk a lot here about codependency and I've tried that on and it doesn't sit right with me. I know I did my best to have a normal relationship with this man. It was probably the biggest relationship lesson I've learned.

It's still hard to extricate myself from the tendrils or tentacles of this. Historically contact is always reinstated at some point or another, and it's been that way now for seven years. I went almost mad the morning I received those two "miss us" emails from him, and didn't answer them, went a week in imbalance, because I had done my best to put him behind me.

Part of me is scared that another several months will go by and then he will do it again. Either to reconnect because he does miss me (and honestly for my nature in relationship, anyone would -- and I'm not being arrogant, I think this is true of any partner who consistently shows love), or, my bigger fear, to let me know he is marrying the new person, or already has, or married them some time ago.

I'm scared that I will just settle into a contented calm and find my own peace, and then for better or worse, he'll initiate contact again. In March he did it from an email address I'd never seen, so it was not blocked. The point is that if he wants to contact me, he will figure a way to do it. And I can't stop him. In earlier parts of our connection, this perseverance won me, healed something in me, and even as our dynamic started to turn bad, that he kept at me even after arguments seemed almost romantic. But my heart truly hurts and I've had health issues from the stress of push/pull. If he is living with someone and happy, terrific: let me be. Let me alone.

That is what I told him so many times. If this isn't something you want to make good and to keep, let me alone. I need to heal.

If he had been a worse person or more clearly unlikeable, the answers would be easy. Somehow I know that the answers for the worse person are probably what should be employed here. I'm closer to doing that but, still. I don't know what holds me in the garden.

[Lucky Jim]

Hey semantics, Why are you waiting around for him to surface again?  It seems a thankless vigil.  LJ

[semantics]

Hey semantics, Why are you waiting around for him to surface again?  It seems a thankless vigil.  LJ

Let me simplify:

We were together six years. It hasn't been even a year yet since final breakup.

If I showed you a contact log you would understand why I said all I said above. I am not "waiting around" for him and I completely resent your perception. He *resurfaces*. I can't STOP him from DOING it.

His name is Jim, too, so.

[Lucky Jim]

OK, sorry about any misperceptions on my part.  LJ

[livednlearned]

Hi semantics,

I hope your surgery went well. That had to be very hard to go through alone, and my thoughts are with you as you heal. 

Is it worth anything? To try to restore relationship between us, when he is living happily with replacement? He deserves to be happy. I loved him and I want him to be. But I thought the happiness would be ours, mutually, together.

If someone new is already living in the house, do I just let go?

I don't know who it is. I don't know how long they've known each other, or how they knew each others before this at all. Or, if he's happy, why he needed me to know.

Is it worth trying to restore us?

Can you clarify what you would restore? Do you mean a romantic relationship? Or just being able to be a female friend in his life?

[semantics]

I have no desire to be a female friend in his life. He's not a good friend and he's not even a good person. BPD aside.

Posting to this board is interesting because I really do have to look clearly at who he was, what really was the nature of our dynamic, and what was I even getting out of that situation.

Healing from surgery alone is better than trying to heal while weathering criticism, sarcasm, triangulations, or lying. Today I can't remember when he was last nice to me and meant it. And I realized that I will never know whether he meant any of it. I'm not a person for triangles and tricks. I can't take it, can't live life like that.

Would like to delete this thread but don't know how to.