Dear miranam:

“Such bossy and controlling woman”? You don’t come across like such to me, not throughout your threads. You’ve been reasonable, sensible, very attentive to and respectful of  differing opinions and input, gracious to all who replied to you.

Look how you responded in your most recent post to two members with opposite advice:  “you advice the opposite. And it expresses so eloquently my internal struggle”- you considered both, not rejecting either and answered appreciatively and respectfully to both … the opposite of bossy and controlling.

When we spend way too much time in a relationship that is harmful to us, we make cognitive adjustments (cognitive distortions, that is) so to survive it best we can: he is not so bad, must be my fault… he does say I-love-you, he is not that cold, he is only lazy, not unloving, not his fault. Must be my fault. I am bossy and controlling.

As intelligent and rational as you are, miranam, you make the same cognitive adjustments a child makes when stuck with an unloving parent, taking the blame, seeing the parent in the best possible way, no matter how untrue.

Another adjustment you make best you can is to put yourself at the margins of your own experience, as not important, literally you placed yourself in parenthesis on page 1: “(Did I mention how low and hopeless towards life in general do I feel?)”

In 2015 you wrote about him: “he is very selfish, even if he comes across as not being so”. I trust your observation made then. But isn’t it interesting, you wrote that he comes across as not selfish, to others, one would think. But no, one of your cognitive adjustments is to believe it yourself, that he is not selfish after all, just like he comes across.

In your most recent post you wrote: “he misses me when I am away… He often says ‘I love you’… And the broken heart… It can be broken even if the love is selfish…can’t it?”

I trust your evaluation from 2015: “All that matters for him is to feel good”, which is congruent with your very last words in your most recent post: “even if the love is selfish”.

To your question, can a heart be broken even if it is selfish- my answer is, every person is in pain sometimes, and pain feels the same for a selfish person as it does to the unselfish. The good and the bad experience pain the same. But having a heart, figuratively to me, means that he cares about you. And he doesn’t have a heart, not for you. So it can’t be broken.

He misses you when you travel because he is missing something that is there. He wants that something back. And he says I-love-you because it happens to be easy to say it and it brought him good results before, makes him feel good about himself… saying something like this to himself: I am a good man, a good husband, I told her that I love her.

More effort than the pronouncing of I-love-you, oh, that is too much, it doesn’t feel good to go that route. So he doesn’t. And he doesn’t have to. He still has this something that is there, so he must be doing just enough to keep that something there.

You brought up lowering your expectations as a solution, I don’t think it is possible for a person to lower their expectations to that level of becoming okay with being a something that is there. I don’t think it was possible to be okay with that when you married him at 26, nor was it possible at 36, nor will it be possible at 56 or 66.

anita