Hello Anita,

How are you?

Thanks for your message.

Phewee was yesterday full on. I was rushed to hospital for some potential emergency surgery – getting my appendix cut out! It was scary!! After tests it turns out I don’t have appendicitis- but they don’t know what is wrong with me.
I’d have preferred it to be appendicitis if I am honest, and be done with it.
Anyway my mates and my mum took good care of me and I felt very loved. (My dad is away with work but was so worried he wanted to get a flight back from China to be here!)

1- I am monogamish. Meaning mostly monogamous but the occasional shag elsewhere is tolerated provided it is not with someone who may threaten the integrity of the relationship. (Eg. someone you have strong feelings for, an ex….) Honestly regarding these affairs is super important.

2. You wrote that you don’t know who is a decent person and who is not, let’s think about this man: do you think he is decent at times but when he rejects you or doesn’t respond to you in a timely manner, then feeling angry at him, you think he is not decent, passive aggressive and so forth? It might be the anger talking. You can trust your evaluation when not angry.

This is a fair comment. Its true I need to check in with myself and pay attention to the anger in particular. I will think about this but am unable to respond to your question directly at the moment. Lack of trust feeds the beast.

Mr Gentleman seems to have calmed down a LOT since I explained to him my reasons for meeting a bit more. He said it sounded like a positive meeting – so I think he will not bail on me this time. (Although I did pre-emptivley cancel because I believed I would be in hospital on Thursday. So we may have to re-arrange again! He was nice to me about the hospital thing.)

-Feathering

xx

PS- as we talk more and more it is getting harder and harder not to sign off with my real name.

Hello Anita,

Thanks for your concern regarding my health. My appendix is still inside me,  I was advised to see a gynecologist if the pain persits. They said they had ruled out a lot of serious causes – lets hope they meant cancer as a part of that. It isn’t an ovarian cyst. If the pain persists I need to go back to the doctor but I will go back to the doctor anyway. 🙁 It is scary.

Regarding non-monogamy.

I have a few motivations for my position. Sexual novelty is exciting, I don’t equate sex with love, it is unrealistic (and felt disingenuous) to pretend that you’re not attracted to other people. Or be afraid to voice that attraction for fear of making your partner insecure. I was with someone in an open relationship once and it was very liberating to talk openly of these things with my partner. I would like the freedom to pursue sexual novelty from time to time. It is true that this can arouse feelings of jealousy but these needed to be treated with care, discussion and honesty too.

Regarding Mr:

We didn’t have any sex while we were ‘just friends’ after we broke up.

One time, he did not respond to my message for 2-3 days. He claimed he hadn’t seen it and was frustrated that he had missed it. I took him at his word (but due to my issues it planted a seed of anxiety and doubt.) I didn’t really know how to address the issue any further at that time: It was taking his word for it or leaving, basically. I did tell him it had made me anxious, he asked me to explain that more but I dodged answering.

Other than that, he did not give me the silent treatment. He claims the one time he did was not because he was seeing someone else but because of a passive-aggressive comment I had made that made him uncomfortable.

“By his own admission he’s a mess in relationships and has frequently ambiguous platonic/ romantic ties with women”-

* What were his words on the matter, what did he say?

Those were his words, pretty much. He said he has a lot of female friends and sometimes struggled in his head to distinguish what was a platonic friendship from a romantic or sexual relationship.

That oftentimes his romantic relationships just fizzled out into friendships (but an ambiguity remained and occasionally would break out into a briefly sexual phase before fizzling out again.) He was in a turbulent on/off relationship with a woman for 7 years in which they both dated other people – although I think they had a monogamous phase to begin with. He obviously thought a lot of this woman and cared for her but they argued a lot and he dumped her a number of times.

Indeed he dumped me saying “I need friendship right now.” From the outside it looked to me as if his long-term relationship was on the brink of ending- he was under a lot of pressure and seemed quite stressed. He told her also that he “just wanted to be friends.” when he ended the relationship. He told me after, “That’s what I do.”

He claims to want a committed partner and relationship and that he is lonely.

-Feathering

Possibly tomorrow – I did cancel on him yesterday in light of having to go to hospital.

If I meet him I’ll give him the gift.

His said he was worried about meeting me for it might ‘open old wounds’ for me and be ‘uncomfortable’. This was thoughtful of him, but I think I will explain to him that the wound (that of the old anger) is already open and I strongly believe in sitting with uncomfortable feelings in order to learn from them.

As Nikos Kazantzakis wrote; “The true meaning of enlightenment is to gaze with undimed eyes on all darkness.” (He loves the existentialist philosophy and literature.)

Tell him I’ve figured I’ve got anger issues and that angry people struggle to listen and struggle to empathize properly. On that basis I’d be curious to hear his side of the story, if he is willing to share it. I won’t go into details unless he asks and I’ll be hesitant to share some of those details unless we get a relationship that is more stable going.

We are going to a pub that has loads and loads and loads of cats- that come and sit on your lap, the bar, the table… wherever they feel like. And there are kittens as well. 😀 You can cuddle cats in the pub. I thought that would be a good location.

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by Feathering my nest.