I kind of wonder though. Have I just reaffirmed all of his greatest fears. Have I gone and done what he was worried I would do all along. Just as he thinks he’s getting closer to me I go and do what his mother did to him and pull it all out from under the rug, make it conditional. Just as he was doing to me, I went and did to him.

People have asked if I waited all this time just so that I could do what he did to me. I don’t wish to punish him. I feel like I am trying to save some love for myself and whoever I may want to give it to in the future too. I felt like maybe I could deal with a right now but I think I was fooling myself.

I just wonder if maybe people are right and he was testing me to see if I would stick around and now I’ve just abandoned him. Now I see that a lot of his operations were likely unconscious and that he may never have left me for someone else, but he wanted to always have that out. What do you think about that? Do you think that if I’d stayed that it would’ve shown him that someone would ultimately be there for him despite anything and soothed some of his inner child scabs? Or would he have kept pushing me away because a mother’s love is not a void that I can ever really fill. I’m pretty sure his mother has expressed love to him at some point, it just doesn’t seem to have been a consistent thing growing up?

I just don’t know.. If love requires pain, some self sacrifice? Seeing more than the other person can and staying because they need you? Friends would tell me how **** it was that he could tell me he would eventually be with someone else, and how could I put myself through that. But should I have had the insight to see that that was all just a ruse he was using to push me away and test the boundaries of my love?

I wrote him when I got home last night. Shared a letter with him that I’d written months ago in anticipation of this time. A time where I might have the strength to not go on operating like we have been. I told him that he was the love of my life thus far and how he has taught me so much, and that he will always be loved by me and that I will always be in his corner. That I want him to have felicity, no matter who it may be with. I’ve written him letters that I never sent since we met, as a way to sort through my feelings. They remained fervent and rather unchanged since the beginning, they just became a little less optimistic with time.

I reiterated that I was leaving the situation behind and not him and that I will continue to want him in my life when we are ready. I think there is another chapter for us, in a different way I said. I told him that I believed he was saving parts of himself for someone else and ultimately we could never go as deep as we could’ve because of that. And that is something that I need, and I feel like I need to consider myself at least a little bit. I wanted us to have a love that had no limits and ultimately it was stifled in many ways. It felt as though there were parts we just weren’t exploring.

I just don’t know if I have a pattern of seeking emotionally unavailable people because maybe I too, am emotionally unavailable people. My mother was anxious avoidant in childhood and this was due to her upbringing. She sought out love from her children to fill her voids. My grandmother was very harsh but loving in her older age. Now my mom shares her love with me any chance she can get. My dad was very loving with me but passed in my early 20s. He was also a highly depressed/OCD sufferer. And I have sought out men like him for some time… I am slowly trying to accept love freely, but I am still probably more comfortable giving it. I will be working on this and trying to add more awareness to the patterns that I live out. I have been in therapy before as well. Did I mention that both me and this man have degrees in Psychology. We both wanted to be therapists at one point. It’s really hard for me to see him as a therapist because he seems so entirely uncomfortable with emotions.

So amazing that you’ve used this as an outlet to learn more and that you’ve been brave enough to do the work in therapy on your own. I mean really you don’t have to be an expert in a field to help someone else, to give them that little nugget of wisdom that they remember and take with them. I’m sure there is a lot of thanks to go around.