Dear Anita,

Please feel free to ask all the questions that come to your mind. I am truly grateful that you are trying to help, and questions are necessary for you to achieve a better understanding of my situation.

I do tend to forget to congratulate myself for leaving my ex. I do this in general. It’s always on to the next challenge. Never enough. Thank you for reminding me to give kudos to myself. 🙂

The excuses I used for my ex were that he was stressed, unhappy with his job, which he found asked too much of him. Unhappy with life in general. I told myself that he had difficulty facing the challenges of life. And I thought I was partly responsible for his unhappiness, for neglecting him when my son was a baby.

With P, well he is explaining to me, in his emails, what is going on in his life. It’s clearly hectic. It was already quite hectic before the pandemic, to the point where I was already questioning whether he did have room for me in his life. And it has become worse with the pandemic. I believe him, when he explains to me how busy he is. But for me, deep down, this does not justify his failure to take 5 minutes, just a couple times a week, to write a few lines. He was able to write much more often before and his life was hectic back then, so why not now? If I am not worth 5 minutes a couple of times a week, then what am I worth in his eyes? Does he not want to know how I am doing? So I do not have to makes excuses for him. Rather, the similarity to my relationship with my ex is that I am still being understanding and patient with a man, hoping that things will get better.

When we spoke about my separation, P did not seem to fear me asking more from him. What he told me was that he might lose me to another man now that I was single.

The reality of P’s partnership I know quite a bit about. He stays with her for his children. Coming from a broken home – is father was completely absent, he never met him- P’s priority are his children. He wants to be there for them. He feels that his partner is focused on her business, on building it for their children, leaving no room for their love life. He says that they consulted with 2 therapists to try to make things better. They diagnosed her as asexual, and one of them suggested that perhaps P could find another woman to fill his sexual needs (like me, he has a strong libido). His partner was never opened to it, so after a while, he decided to find someone. That’s when we met.

Writing these lines, I am realizing that one thing that has been tormenting me about my relationship to him is that I feel that he broke my trust. When we started emailing back and forth, I told him that I was looking to find a friend with whom to also develop sexual intimacy. Because I could not – and still cannot – see myself just having sex without some sort of affection towards the other person. He completely agreed and said that this was exactly what he was looking for. When I was writing to him about my hesitations and worries with regards to my relationship with my partner, he encouraged me to open up and explicitly said that he really wanted to be my friend. And then, after we met for the first time, I felt him pull back a bit. He started writing less often, apologizing when he did not write for several days and explaining what had kept him. I feel betrayed because he has been acting less and less as a friend. I wrote him, the other day, that I felt like I had lost a friend and did not know why. He answered that his life was hectic, that he was having a hard time coping with the pandemic, that he really missed me and often thought about me. His emails are actually really sweet. But then I wonder, if things are so difficult, why is he not reaching out to me more? I did offer to lend him an ear.

So where I always end up is OK, I just have to be patient. Wait for this crazy period to come to an end, and then see what happens.

I did express optimism, didn’t I? 🙂 I think that writing here is really helping me.

Thank you, Anita. Take care.

Isabelle