Hi, Matt,

Yes, my weekend went very well, thank you for asking (and thank you for wishing me a great one before that ;)). This weekend and the one before that was very productive, I’d put it this way. I do seamanship training once every two weeks, had to do a make-up in addition to that and also it was time for my fall cleaning. Some things remain to be done this weekend, but after that I can relax and really savour being at home and not having to go anywhere and be on time for anything.

I need to be able to honestly communicate with my wife on a very deep and open level. Something that I had never practiced in the past. You know the whole men talking about their feelings thing

Aha, so psychologists are right more often than not after all! :))) Of course, one always has to adjust for that particular given individual, but still…

Maybe, but maybe as my wife and I communicate more, and I start to give her the attention that she is craving, an open marriage is not needed.  My wife told me this weekend that since I have been opening up with her, and have been spending more time focusing on her that she hasn’t been texting with Jay as much.

That is such good news!!! Do keep it up! Very happy and glad for you both!!! So she was craving attention from you. Another thought had also crossed my mind before – that open marriage thing might be also a desire to have one’s cake and eat it, too. Here, however, again, one needs to root for the cause of it. Say, I am convinced that in the case of my ex, his not divorcing straight away, when he was head over heels for me, was due to the fact that that would have put him back on his career path and he didn’t have that many years ahead of him to fulfill the dream he had been pursuing since childhood. Later on, however, when everything seemed to be going as planned, not quite, but more or less, he didn’t want to divorce her (his love for me already being on the wane EVEN THOUGH there were a lot of things that could be seen as proof that that was not so) because he needed somebody there to keep up the house for him, him being so focused on his career. He basically kept his wife as a housekeeper and me as a mistress dangling that carrot before both of us that he would eventually choose either one. Of course, all that on the subconscious level, like a dog would know whom to approach for a handout or a two-year old kid would know with whom of his family throwing a fit would work and with whom – no way. Actually, I was the one who told him that when the wife and the mistress are so locked in their positions, neither one budging, the man finds a third one. Which exactly what happened.

So your wife may have been indeed communicating that much with Jay to provoke a response from you, to make you think what you might be missing (and she succeeded!), or she may have indeed been in limbo, like I was at one point not knowing whether to stay with my married #2 (who stopped even mentioning divorce after having said that he would be considering it once I had returned back from my home country) or to go to #3 (who was also married, but seemed to be willing to go to great lengths for me to be in his life while he was married and to divorce “after a year or two”). I was very much in love with #2, but the disappointment was already starting to take its toll and the love for #3 was already starting to develop. It was a terrible six weeks emotion-wise, wouldn’t wish it upon the worst enemy (not that I have one).

It has been shown that just touching your partners skin releases an endorphin rush in the brain. Increased dopamine, that feeling of pleasure is what keeps you connected with that person.

True. At the same time, I also read that men often withdraw there and when women feel the utmost connection. You can find more on this, I’ll just quickly quote what I have read before in a number of spots. “Men feel love when a woman is happy resulting from something he did. This causes him to bond with her. Once he bonds, oxcytocin, another hormone, gets pumped into his system. While oxcytocin helps women relax and causes them to bond and fall in love after sex, this hormone  makes men feel stressed. This is partly because their testosterone levels drop below normal. As a result, men often withdraw to recoop. They need to remember their independence and do “guy stuff” in order to rebuild their testosterone to normal levels. That’s when they are ready to come back to you. Turns out this is all very normal for the regular guy. Too much closeness can cause him to retreat and this is a direct results of his hormones.”

So… Would this be true for you as a man?

I will start first with the idea of exploring these emotions. This process is surely new to me, I have lived my life burying my emotions and feelings. Most of my life has gone by with an emotional flat line. There were up and down spikes here and there but looking inside and expressing those feelings/emotions was not something that I did. So why now, I don’t know exactly other than it feels like the thing I need to do. It is extremely uncomfortable, but quite freeing. Kinda like that flashlight idea, the more I shine that light around these areas that I have been hiding, the more I realize that I have been lying to myself, hiding things from myself, or not really living life to the fullest. And I like that notion of living life outside your comfort zone. I have felt more alive over the last couple of months than I have in awhile. Even though it has caused some hurt and misery. I like the idea of spending more time exploring who I really am.

That is great for a number of reasons! One, it proves my guess that all those books, classic novels that critics tout as ingenious insights into the human psyche showing HOW EXACTLY the characters arrived at this or that, achieved some sort of enlightenment, became better persons, are pretty much nonsense. One can, I think, list all the reasons and events leading up to the realization of something, but I don’t think one can really describe how exactly or when it worked. It just happened, like an idea forming in one’s mind, like a bulb in those comic books. Only later, when we try to reason, to talk to oneself, only then do we start forming sentences; before that, it was a sudden occurrence of an idea, nothing more.

Second, I would very much love your case to be the reason for me to hope that my “most recent” guy will finally find peace with himself. (And yes, I would like to have reason to hope that he will search me out again, like he did two times already, one out of the blue (even though I knew that we had chemistry – we met originally when I was still with my ex) and the other one after a two-month silence. But I want (and sort of hope, but not hold my breath and live my life) him to do it this time for real, because he would have healed.)

I don’t think he and his wife will ever really get back together. Out of curiosity, I looked up his Twitter account yesterday after a lapse (not so hard to do now) of over a month. Still no ring (it has been over a year now), doing a tour (you could call him a public figure, and it might be one more reason for him not to divorce his wife lest she should start a smearing campaign and make his affair of several years ago known), ticking off his bucket list items (he retired quite early), looking as if he sometimes drinks in the evenings and as if he put on a little weight. Avoids being at home at all costs.

Now, I don’t know if he is going to continue like this forever (though I wonder what will happen once his bucket list is all done and the daughter is off to college – or maybe his wife WILL finally realize that this is NOT a family life (if she hasn’t done it already and is merely waiting for the girl to leave the family nest; but my ex’s wife was doing all she could to turn a blind eye to her husband living a full double life with me – she was so blindly in love with him as I was and as his current wife is – narcissists are great at that) and take the decisive step), and I certainly can’t count on him searching me out again but for good this time when he could try and get back with that other woman (I don’t know the details of their romance at all), but I do hope he finds peace with himself, because what he is doing right now sure looks like distracting himself while avoiding being with his wife. For my ex, it would certainly be a no-brainer to fall in love with somebody new (and I expect him to do it again in several years), but this guy had been faithful to his wife for 25 years and still can’t forget that other woman completely even though it has been seven years now since the affair, so there is reason to believe that he is not somebody who falls in love just like that.

I am certainly not in love with him. I don’t even know him well – we did discuss nearly everything in writing, but it is not the same as getting to know the person in everyday life, even our regular communication lasted for four months.

I am willing to understand and forget his behaving as if he was falling for me and then basically ghosting on me. I can very well see how intense prolonged stress at home could be the root of it.

I could say that I would be willing to explore the possibility of being with him should he be free and available, also mentally. ‘Cause even though he acted as if he were falling for me two years ago, there were a few red flags that didn’t allow me to believe that he was “all there.”

But I still can’t forget how much chemistry we had, how good it felt to be cuddling with him and, OMG, how witty our chats were, it felt as if fireworks were crackling all around when we chatted! And we discussed some pretty serious things, too, so that also adds to my bewilderment as to how somebody, who feels things so deeply, could behave like that.

Well, I did try to get a rebound with somebody else when my ex announced that he was no longer in love with me. But I checked myself in time, in one day, basically, not after four months.

Add to that all that guy’s blushing and coming up to talk to me later, after “ghosting” on me, and I should really think that he liked me; at least he would consider me an option if he were free.

On the other hand, I knew a couple of guys on whom I would produce that “bowerbird” effect, but their actions would show later that that “effect” only proved that they were willing to have sex with me, not to really care for me.

Still, the vibes I was getting from them were just like that – “sex only,” but the vibes from that guy were totally different.

Pity I haven’t met him in person since August 2016 – I am sure I would know if we met face to face. But he is still in the area, so who knows-?…

She is my soulmate, during our 13 year hiatus when we had zero contact, she always had a place in my subconscious. She was the bar that every other woman I met/dated had to live up to. I none of those individuals even came close to making me feel the same as my wife. Sure there were some who had I had intense physical connection with, and some who I had great social chemistry with.

So I wonder, if there is any way you can dig it up in your psyche and heart, how you managed not to forget her and, at the same time, how you managed to be with somebody else (and kind of compare them to her) if you still remembered her?

I also wonder (and forgive me for the way I put this) why you are not afraid or, rather, ashamed to acknowledge that you love your wife so much, to the point of willing to try an open marriage? (At least, were; hopefully, this is no longer the case.) Or you were able to do it only because no one knows who you are on Tiny Buddha? And you wouldn’t be mentioning this to your male friends for fear of being ridiculed? Or they would understand and not ridicule you for this?

And, since you seem to be such a perfect specimen (no offence intended) of a loving husband and doting father, I would like to hear your thoughts on the following. You know, I must have had some sort of that Electra complex (anita and I dug into this on my thread), because I was totally aware of the fact that my desire not to have children was due not only to the fear of pain when giving birth and not only to the unwillingness to be responsible for somebody spending attention, time, money on him or her and (possibly) getting nothing in return, but primarily, it was due to the unwillingness to share my partner with anybody, even if it were our child. Of course, the fact that nothing is guaranteed and that the father of my child(-ren) may die, leave us, etc. didn’t add to the desire to have children either. Well, I was more willing to have a son than a daughter, but how can one predict?

So I would be grateful if you could elaborate a bit more on how different your feelings towards your daughter are from those for your wife and why somebody like me needs not to be afraid of having children if their father is somebody like you?

Finally, if you could please cast a glance to that other thread of mine and maybe share your thoughts on my response to your guess as to what the reason for my running into unavailable men is, I would really, really appreciate it!

Have a wonderful evening!

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