Dear Boris:

In May 2020, in your first thread, you shared that you were a “normal ten-year-old”, before your parents split up. After they split up, you became “intensely shy, withdrawn, socially awkward and timid”. Later on, you were diagnosed with “an extremely high-functioning Asperger’s”. You joined the Navy and got married at about 19. In your 30s you’ve been seasonally depressed, and clinically depressed at about 36 and onward.  You were prescribed anti-depressants but “very little relief.. or progress”.

“The more depressed I became, the more emotionally numb I became, absolutely indifferent to people.. just neutral, numb, indifferent. Plodding, marching… but never dancing.. Things are either bad, or not  bad, but never good. I absolutely cannot remember the last time I was excited over something, or eagerly looking forward to something”.

In your 48 year marriage, you “don’t feel much of anything for (your wife).. never really did… we do things together and have our little routines and rituals and all.. but it’s so sterile for me, no joy, no real happiness”, and you were aware that she had a series of extramarital affairs during  the marriage to you.

At 67, you met a 52 year old woman in AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) and you experienced an emotional awakening (my term): “joy, anticipation, eagerness, a fierce desire to protect and nurture.. it’s like she threw some switch that somehow turned on all those emotions… I find myself crying.. or  just in joy of being alive. I finally feel alive and happy… The thought, now, of going back into that dead, gray emotional void is just intolerable…. I’ve been living from the neck up for the vast majority of my life”.

Ten months later, in your second thread, you shared that your contact with the woman who awakened your “joy, anticipation, eagerness and fierce desire” was limited to AA meetings three times a week and to emails, texts and some phone calls, “but no more than that”. Yet, she “completely occupied (your) thoughts for over two.. years”.

But as of late January this year, “nobody has seen or heard from her. She’s entirely dropped off the radar, won’t answer emails, texts, calls… nothing”, and you are “absolutely in mourning over her disappearance”.

Your questions:

1. “can what I’m feeling for her be love?” – my answer: yes.

2. “I’m wondering if A:) I actually love HER, the woman, or B:) what I’m attached to is my mental image of her, the idea of her”- my answer: B.

3. What exactly am I in mourning over?” – you answered this question yourself: you are mourning “the loss of a dream”, the dream of a life of emotional awakening, awakening from “neutral, numb, indifferent. Plodding, marching.. dead, gray emotional void, to “dancing.. looking forward to something… joy, anticipation, eagerness, a fierce desire to protect and nurture.. the joy of being alive”.

Like you wrote last year, “it’s like she threw some switch that somehow turned on all those emotions.

“I keep telling myself I shouldn’t mourn the loss of something that I apparently never had”- by something-I-apparently-never-had, you are referring to the woman who turned on all those emotions in you. She/ your mental image of her awakened emotions that were in you dormant. You experienced that joy of being alive long ago, when you were a child. But because you also experienced too much anxiety in your young life, there was a shut down of these emotions, a dissociation.

I’m having a very tough time of sorting things out, separating fantasy from reality”- your awakened emotions are reality, they were always there within you- dormant, but not dead. These emotions are alive within you now.

anita

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