Dear Ry:

My summary of what you shared with quotes:

Your memories from your childhood are limited, “Often, my sister tells a story involving my parents and myself and I cannot remember”, “My mother is often emotionally cool, so perhaps this plays a part in my issues?”

“I battled sell-esteem issues when I was young.. I was a tall, skinny kid with bad teeth”. It was in the military, as a young adult, that you got braces, started eating better and working out, finally feeling “damn near handsome on a good day”.

In the military you were diagnosed with dysthymia (a persistent depressive disorder, chronic), later to be elevated to a recurrent depressive disorder. “I tend to forge ahead to succeed with my goals, but my depression remains largely invisible to those around me.. I have suffered from concentration issues much of my life”, “I have fleeting moments of happiness, but largely feel mirthless… hard to describe exactly what I’m feeling. Emotional withdrawal- which affects my relationships. Decreased sex drive. Negative feelings about myself (and others to an extent). I really have little interest in any hobbies. I just remain flat”, “my practice at keeping my feelings and emotions at a distance caused (ex’s) much grief. Breakups were always bad”.

Your recent ex told you early on in the relationship: “Don’t downplay yourself, R. If there were words in the English language to express how amazing you are, what a light in my day/ life you are… I don’t know if you feel  like you don’t deserve to be loved.. but please don’t find it so hard to believe that someone could be so overwhelmingly fond of you”.

At about 21 you married a woman because you got her pregnant,  joined the military, got divorced, remarried another woman, and got divorced in less than a year. After 10 years in the military, at 35 years old, you moved back home to be close to your 13 year old daughter, and you dated off and on, “For me, it was always casual”.

Back home you enrolled in college, graduated with a BA, and got a safe and stable job with the local government. Later you moved to the US West Coast to join AmeriCorps,  and later found a federal job near Wash DC. After being offered the job, while still living on the west coast, you met who I referred to earlier as your recent ex, a single mother who lived with her parents with her toddler son. You pursued a casual relationship with her, having told her that you will be moving to Wash DC in a few months. But it took 16 months for the job in DC to materialize, and by then the relationship was no longer casual: you formed a strong bond with her son. She felt a much stronger bond with you than you did with her: “I remained in the mindset that I was leaving but she saw a future together and wanted me to see it. So strongly in fact that she found a job ..in DC and followed me up a few months later. (I .. never gave her a ‘Y/N’ on whether she should move up”.

She found a place for her and her son outside DC, expecting you to join her, but you never did. You lived an hour away from her. You enrolled as a student online (a requirement for the DC job), and you were looking for other employment because the job was “rife with deficiencies from the start”. You visited her and her son on Sundays and tried to spend a weeknight there as well. You didn’t like the following about her: “her short fuse with her child, herpes thanks to an ex, her tendency to smother”. But you liked that you and her had a lot in common: “Both suffered depression and both tried to help us see in ourselves what the other saw”, “I miss how strongly she believed in me and how much she fought to push me to see myself in a better light”.

In DC, she was “lonely and miserable being a single mom”, and regretted moving to Wash DC.  The relationship deteriorated, and “things were often bad”. In less than a year since the move to DC, in Nov 2019, she moved back to the west coast,  and on January 2020, you moved to a small town in the mid-west for work, and you currently reside there, alone and lonely . She started a relationship with another man in April this year, and “she seems happy, and her child is close to family again”.

“I’m just upset with myself for yet another failed relationship… I miss her child terribly… I miss how strongly she believed in me and how much she fought to push me to see myself in a better light.

My thoughts: you grew up with an “emotionally cool” mother, a woman who did not return your immediate and natural affection for her. As a result, you emotionally withdrew from her, from yourself and from everyone else. You were not born withdrawn, you were not born anxious or depressed, not any more than any other baby. You became these things as a reaction to your cold mother.

Fast forward, you meet your  recent ex, she tries to reach out to you, to make you feel warm inside, but she is too late- the woman that mattered most in your life has left you cold.

The only person to whom you describe closeness with is her son, not your daughter, not any of your exes, just that little boy: “there remains a strong connection in me to my ex and her son. We began seeing one another when her son was about 18-months old, so I was a part of his life for half of it. We were exceptionally close and I continue to grieve. My ex’s parents text photos/ videos of him almost every weekend, but that really doesn’t take the place of anything more substantial”- I think you saw and you still see yourself as a young boy, in your ex’s son. You feel connected to him, maybe you want to save him from the life of disconnection, loneliness and joylessness that you have experienced for four decades, at this point.

Your ex’s parents know that you feel so close to the boy, they know because they saw it in your face, because your ex told them, because they can see the gifts you send him: the clothes, the educational toys, they know you love their grandson.

“I neglected to mention that I have a daughter who’s 22”- it’s the boy that you feel connected to, the one who broke your walls of disconnect and withdrawal.

This all means, to me, that you can still connect, at 44, you can still experience a close relationship with a woman, maybe with your daughter, with others. It won’t be easy and it will not be as good as it would have been if you weren’t .. cold for 4 decades but life can get warmer for you, as you move forward step by step, with some guidance, toward more and  more healing and better living.

anita