Dear Ann87:

Yes, I am thinking you may not have a single loving relationship in your life. This is my understanding because if you had a loving relationship in your life, you wouldn’t be as confused as you are and have been. If you had a loving relationship, I am thinking, you wouldn’t be thinking of what you had with the last guy to be a loving relationship, or be doubting that it was “normal” the way you put it.

A loving relationship with a family member or a friend would be like an anchor that would ground you, and you wouldn’t be like a ship in a stormy sea, the way you are.

I asked you to write what you do know, and you wrote that you are happy by yourself, that you like the silence, and you like not feeling that you need to “be anything”. You wrote that you value real love, that you would like to feel independent and strong by yourself. All this is strengthening my belief that you need not… not go back to that man, your “partner”.

Go by what you know for sure. All the things you are confused about, put them off for later and go with what you do know.

When you wrote that you like to have “no need to be anything”- I think you mean not having to play the part you played with your “partner”- get along as a character in a play, in a movie that someone else directs and produces. Being by yourself is freeing you from that burden of putting yourself on hold, or away, so to fit in another person’s story.

You calling that man “partner”- partner in what? I don’t see how the word “partner” could possibly apply to what he has been in your life, according to your own sharing. The way I see it: you were a character in his story, whatever his story was, not a partner in his life and neither was he your partner. I see him as holding the strings of a puppet, you being the puppet. The person holding and moving the strings is not a partner of the puppet. There is no partnership when he is moving the strings and you are the puppet.

Please do keep posting, anytime. I would like to read your thoughts about my input.

anita