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Ā I needed a clean/safe place for my daughter (we have a nice house now) in a fabulous neighborhood and he has a few sketchy neighbors that he hates and frankly Iām not sure I want to live next to them. The reason we would move there is because he owns his house outright (no mortgage) so it would allow us to travel/save for retirement etc. That being said, heās been putting pressure on us to move in and constantly talks about proposing.
Hello Christine,
Just these words you say above are enough of a reason not to go there.
Your house is good for both you and your daughter. It’s not mortgage free, but you work hard to pay your way for yourself and your daughter. It’s clean, it’s safe and a good wider environment for your daughter to grow up in.
It seems your alternative is to live with a man who doesn’t know the first thing about cleanliness, either of himself or his surroundings, and would be a bad influence on a growing child for a number of reasons. You and your daughter are worth more than that, surely?
Your post above is telling me that you feel really unsure about this move. Which doesn’t seem to be happening anyway and probably never will, because your boyfriend is either unable or maybe unwilling to sort out himself or his house.
How would you feel about him selling up his house and moving into your house?
Do you think that, if eventually he got his house and himself into some kind of order that it would last? That everything would be fine and continue to be?
I think him āghosting meā is really him saying- Iām not worthy of you and you deserve better. We simply canāt connect on a deeper level if he is in a deep dark place.
Whether this is true or not, I feel that 2 years of waiting for him to sort himself out is enough. You know what he is like and, unfortunately, it sounds as though he is incapable of change. Being an Empath, it’s like a second nature for you to want to try and fix things for him. I agree with Mark above on people changing.
Unfortunately, there does have to come a time, when you must give up trying to fix something that can’t be fixed – not by yourself, anyway. Put yourself and your daughter first.
With best wishes,
Jay
Hello H,
I’ve read the whole way through this thread. Forgive me if I’m interrupting.
Just to put my following comments into context, I previously worked for years in the communications dept of a large UK university, lecturing in writing related subjects. Before I did this, I spent a year learning communications as they related to teaching others, and how to communicate correctly with others, how to read body language correctly and so on. I am retired now.
The first thing that strikes me is that you have an unhealthy obsession with your phone. That’s not so unusual these days, especially with younger people!
The second thing that I noticed is that you are rarely interacting with anyone in the ‘real world’. You seem to be living in a virtual reality. Like you mentioned somewhere else in this thread, others have said you can’t really love someone you haven’t ever met in the ‘real world’. Met in person. Interacted with, face-to-face. You can like them an awful lot, you can enjoy communicating with them. You can love the inter-reaction. But unless you have known them in a physical environment, you cannot really ‘know’ them.
So what you have with this and other on-line friends is simply that. An on-line friendship. Communication via email is the modern form of having a penfriend and writing physical letters and posting by the mail. Although we have Skype and other visual electronic aids to communication, although graphical images such as smileys were developed to aid the communication of feelings digitally, it is still nowhere near having a conversation with a person face to face. You see each other on a screen, you cannot reach out and touch that person, even though you might be able to see their facial expressions.
Communication face to face is rather different from virtual communication. A face-to-face conversation with someone involves body language, facial expressions, and a whole lot of other non-verbal clues as to how both people are reacting to the conversation. Also the tone in someone’s voice is also communicated. Their scent (pheromones) is picked up by receptors in your nose and brain. Based on all those clues, either the conversation continues or it doesn’t, depending on what the content of the conversation is. And how those other clues are feeding into the conversation.
Humans have been communicating with each other for centuries face-to-face. Even without realising it, we have evolved to read the non-verbal clues – body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, pheromones, and a whole host of other things… and that dictates the way the conversation runs. This is a basic survival instinct of the human species.
A virtual conversation, either via a social website, or email or whatever else in electronic form, carries none of these clues as to how someone else is thinking, feeling or enjoying the conversation. The conversation here is simply words. It is very easy to misunderstand what someone says when it it simply written down. There are no clues as detailed above as with physical face-to-face conversations, although you might be able to see an image of somebody smiling on a screen. You still don’t have the complete picture of someone.
You are tying yourself up in knots over something you may have written and that someone *may* have taken offence to… so you over-compensate by sending more emails as that is your chosen form of communication.
Although you won’t like me saying this, I think you need to get off that phone, and get out into the real world. Make friends in reality proper, not virtual reality. Start with spending less time in your bedroom and interacting more with your mother and brother. Cook a meal for them and yourself. Sit at the table with them and share the meal, converse, interact. Spend time with real, live friends in a real live environment. Walk in the park, say hello or smile at other people. Learn to interact with real humans. You work all week, so do you email the people you work with or do you speak to them? Or are you glued to your phone at work as well, whenever possible, making conversation and inter-reaction with those that surround you impossible at work as well?
I say the above not to criticise you, but out of concern for your well being.
Try turning off your phone for one whole day. Just one day, for now. For a whole 24 hours. Can you cope with that thought? Could you do that? Can you turn off your phone for half of a day? For an hour?
With best wishes,
Jay x
The fact that you may have some similar facial features because of genetics, and the fact that you have been in each otherās lives for 55 years, these donāt matter really when there is such a disparity in what each one of you values.
You are so right. It is all about values, and morals. The only thing that worries me is that we both have children, and they will be upset, if I choose to go no contact, I am well aware that this will spread through the wider family and will make others unhappy. No-one can sit on a fence forever. Eventually they are going to take sides, either for or against me… and that is the only thing that makes me pause, stop, think. But I can’t go on like this for the rest of my life either. This makes me think that maybe I should wait until my mum passes.
If I do this while my mother is still with us, then the ‘crime’ also includes abandoning my mother to her fate, and failing as a daughter to help and protect her. I feel like I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. It doesn’t matter what my decision is, it’s going to hurt someone. Which is why I procrastinate and let things slide. Always hoping that it will go away, but it’s never going to, is it?
It takes so much courage to stand up to my sister. All my life I have been told, you should love your little sister, you should forgive her, she’s younger than you, she’s only a baby, you should be ashamed of not liking her… Forgive, forgive – how many times do you let yourself be used and abused and keep forgiving them, before you say enough is enough? How much more of a doormat do I want to be?
I could tell you some tales about my sister’s treatment of me over the years (and my mother condoning that behaviour) that would truly shock anyone.
What difference will it make if I have an interest in any future inheritance or not? When it comes down to it, my sister is going to make darned sure that there is no money left. I don’t care about that for myself, I am not motivated by money. But eventually, my mother is going to need specialist care, and is going to need to go into a care home. But there won’t be any money left for a good home. Good homes cost a lot of money here. The welfare state will pick up the bill most of the time for people who need a care home but have no money, but it’s the cheapest they can find. The poorest of care and the lowest standards.
That above is the motivation I have for looking after my mother’s money I suppose. I don’t have the money to pay for her eventual care. My sister has declared herself bankrupt twice, and spends every penny she has. She has no idea how to save money for a rainy day.
My sister thinks that she will be able to look after my mother until she passes, but if my mother lives for a lot longer, the dementia will progress past the point where she will be able to cope. It is unrealistic to think otherwise.Ā I think I mentioned earlier that I have a suspicion that once my sister has spent all of my mother’s money on the house and spent all of her savings she will no longer be of use and will be put into a care home anyway. A poor one.
I’m not sure if I need a solicitor or a counsellor! LOL.
SoĀ often, Family is just another Foul word (what do you think about this line, reads poetic to me)
I think this is a great line. Brilliantly put. I do truly respect you for what you have done and the decision you have made. You are an amazing person, Anita.
I mentioned my ‘Dysfunctional Family’ to a solicitor last year… he said there was no such thing as a ‘Functional Family’, well not in his line of business! š
Hi Hella,
I don’t know if recounting a similar situation might help, but here goes.
My boyfriend left me for my best friend. I don’t know if you could actually call him a boyfriend – we hadn’t slept together, but had been gradually becoming closer. We moved in the same circles, we both went to the same kind of social events (it’s how we met) so we also had the same friends. We went out for meals, walks, and spent time together on our own, but we were both taking it slowly. I had hopes that we would eventually have a full relationship, and I felt this would happen when we were both ready.
And then, without any warning, he went off with my so-called best friendĀ 2.5 years ago, and I never heard from him again until recently. I had ‘invested’, if you like to call it that,Ā 12 months of my time with this guy, first a friendship for around 3 months, then a little more than that, then a little more. Taking time over getting to know each other as friends first, before any larger commitment.
It hurt like hell at first. The dialogue that went on inside my head was never ending. I didn’t sleep for a week from the shock, then afterwards it took a long time, over a year, to let it go. I avoided the places we used to go together, even though there were other friends there that would have been glad to see me, I never wanted to bump into him or the former best friend ever again.Ā So for a while there I was very isolated and pretty lonely.
I found an article ‘Forty Ways to To Let Go and Feel Less Pain’ and it was on the Tiny Buddha website somewhere here. I followed quite a number those 40 ways and found them very useful.
If what you’re going through is the same as I did, your brain, without any help from you, constantly revisits the past and tries to make sense of it. Of course, there is no sense to it, you don’t have the answers – so on it goes. Then it starts up with ‘what you are going to do next’, how you are going to handle any situation that you think might arise, and so trying to foretell the future.
Of course, the past has been and gone, it’s history. The future hasn’t arrived yet, so you can’t do anything about that either. So all you are left with is the present, which feels pretty empty, so your mind constantly tries to hang onto the past, and the happiness you think you had and which was stolen away from you, or envisage the future, what you will do or say if you ever meet up again – none of which you can do anything about right now. But still it goes on and on inside your mind, constantly taking your other thoughts over.
I don’t know what it’s called, but I think it has something to do with thoughts turning into an obsession which haunts you day and night.
Until you finally realise that you are allowing this to happen. You are giving your brain permission to carry on just the way it has been doing… and so the torture continues.
Occasionally you take a step backwards and wallow a bit. Feel sorry for yourself, feel guilty, feel angry, feel bitter. But eventually you have to move forwards. One step at a time, one less thought at a time.
I put a hairband around my wrist and ‘snapped’ it against my skin when I realised I had once more returned to the subject in my thoughts. I told myself, out aloud if there was no-one around – “OK. I hear you, brain. That’s enough on that particular subject for today, thank you.” “I cannot and I will not allow myself to think about that again today.”
Sometimes it didn’t work, but most of the time it did. Gradually the thoughts and emotions associated with the betrayal might be in my thoughts, but only in passing. Eventually I ceased to think on them at all. I built a new reality for me, and it didn’t include those two people or any thoughts about them either.
I don’t know if this will help you, but I hope you eventually succeed in simply shrugging when you think of him, and saying to yourself, That’s History. It’s in the Past now.
And eventually when you bump into him, you will simply say, Hi!… quickly followed by Bye!…. and turn away and talk to someone else. If you visualise yourself doing this, it will be easy to do just that one day.
Here’s that article I mentioned.. it helped me, and might help you too.
With best wishes
Jay x
Though I run this site, it is not mine. It's ours. It's not about me. It's about us. Your stories and your wisdom are just as meaningful as mine. 