Dear Lulu:

Mark has asked you the very same questions I had in mind after I submitted to you my post of yesterday. Your answers to his questions help me understand better. This is therefore my understanding at this point:

You met your partner in your early or mid twenties. A year after, the two  of you moved in together and have been living together for 26 years. Three years ago you asked him to initiate legal papers to be drawn so that in case of his death before yours, his half of the house will be yours, instead of going to his estranged son. That way, you will not have to sell the house and be left with half of the proceeds (minus extra legal fees, I imagine). He said he will do so, but hasn’t.

In the last year, your mother has been sick with cancer, and you are afraid of losing her. If I understand correctly she lives on the other side of the country, as well as all your family members except for your brother who is “a very badly behaved alcoholic”. You are lonely and more in more need of emotional support than before. Your partner’s distance is more noticeable for you, more distressing than before.

Reads to me that your partner was a very lonely child, that there was a lot of conflict in his childhood home, that his mother or another adult in the home shouted at him and acted crazy. (“He got very irate, told me I was shouting (I wasn’t) & that I was crazy”- reads like a projection of his childhood experience, if indeed you didn’t shout at him and were not in the habit of shouting at him).

His reaction to his childhood home of conflict and aggression is to go to any length so to avoid conflict. He avoids it in these ways: he is “Very emotionally detached… just shuts down all communication… doesn’t like discussing relationship issues… uses the silent treatment to avoid discussing any problems… talk about general stuff, rather than our relationship, to avoid argument… half listened, which is normal for him… often isn’t fully present… always very vague about what he has been doing”-

-the less he shares with you, the less he talks with you, the less he listens and is present in a conversation, the less he notices potential conflict and the safer he feels. His primary motivation in the context of the relationship with you is to avoid conflict. He is afraid of disagreements, of demands, of arguments, of shouting.

It is possible that on your end, your mother (or another adult in your childhood home) was clingy with you, demanding too much of your attention, burdening you with her/ his needs, and so  you needed distance. This may be why you chose and stayed, for 27 yeas, with a man with whom “there has always been an underlying feeling of a lack of commitment & attention from his side”-

– a “lack of .. attention” can be a relief and a sense of freedom for a person who has suffered too much attention from a parent, too much of the wrong kind of attention, the selfish kind.

I would like to communicate with you further after receiving your thoughts about what I typed here.

anita