My vulnerability

Question to me:

Are you living a double life with a view to it being sustainable?

My response:

I do not know if it is sustainable.

I do know that it is what I have to do right now.

My relationship with my partner is complicated. Nothing unusual in that.

He is the father of my adult children. We were apart for 15 years with little communication. During that time, I had another partner and another child.

We reconciled a couple of years ago after the birth of our first granddaughter.

He was still carrying around a world of hurt from the first separation. He had asked me a question he did not want to know the answer to.

What he did not know was that, despite wanting to, he was far from ready to commit himself to me again. While I understood, this hurt me deep inside and I unintentionally distanced myself emotionally.

Last year about this time, he asked me that question, again. We agreed to separate, again.

He moved out. I had been prepared to. What I was not prepared for was my slow falling apart. Utterly. The result of a lifetime of accumulated rejection, and not just from him.

In the evening of the exact day that I admitted to myself that I needed professional help, he phoned me out of the blue to say that he wanted to talk. Timing…

I explained how I was and that I didn’t know If that was something I could handle. I relented a couple of days later. He finally told me a whole heap of stuff that clearly made him very uncomfortable. He has never been and is not a great communicator so this was huge. I told him that I couldn’t promise anything apart from spending time with him.

This was the end of November and I had already made plans to be away for a couple of weeks over Christmas. He stayed at my place during this time to assist our adult son with his business. He also decided to put his rental property on the market and was surprised when his long term tenants jumped ship immediately. This meant that he was financially unable to retain the flat he had rented.

In short, he never left again. I wasn’t asked or felt like I really had a choice in the matter.

The thing is I love him. Always have. Always will. But this. This is not my choice.

I was prepared to be single for the rest of my life. I would not have sought reconciliation.

Coward?