Originally Posted by bluecastle
Glad to hear you're taking the steps you're taking. Hard as it is at the moment, I think you'll find that a lot of what has you spun around right now will level off pretty quickly after the bandaid is ripped off. Remove the toxins from our diet and, after a brief period of withdrawal, we tend to feel better pretty fast; this guy is a toxin in your diet, and with some space and some reflection I suspect you'll maybe see that those toxic qualities weren't the exception but the rule, the glue that binds, the dangerous drug that produced a potent high.
I think this is a good experience to work on redefining what success and failure looks and feels like when it comes to romance, to give yourself time to reset those gauges. Merely being in a relationship, grinding to make a relationship "work"—that isn't success if the price of admission is feeling gutted, "depleted" by "caring," since that's essentially the equivalent of "working" a grueling job that doesn't even produce a paycheck. In binary terms, I'd say that's all closer to a failure, since you're neglecting your own spirit and conditioning yourself to equate some craggy, corrosive feelings with love, to gauge a connection's power and worth based primarily on how awful it makes you feel.
Therapy is great for helping us understand why we may be drawn to things that make us feel sick, finding those places in our head where some wires are crossed. Because it's generally the head—not the heart, not the body, contrary to the language of romance—that gets us into these knots. Your heart and body, literally and metaphorically, have been signaling to you for a long time now that something here is off; something in your head, meanwhile, has kept overriding that, finding ways to reinterpret discomfort as meaning. Find out what that something is and you'll be more free, more you, and less resistant to connections that feel powerful for destabilizing you, blurring you to yourself. That toxic glue just becomes less sticky.
I can't help but feel, in this case, that what you have been compelled by with him is an idea far more than person, an idea that probably existed in your head before even meeting him, and in him you found a vessel for realizing it. What is that idea? Only you can find it. Sounds like some kind of atonement to me—that "making things work" with this guy quickly came to represent something for you: growth, success, a different, deeper connection than you'd known, or perhaps a genuine connection where past connections have been more artificial. Or, well, something awaiting you to mine it, so it can be purged, so you can listen more clearly to your heart and body.
I've been in your shoes, as have most. Have spent some time in versions of his shoes too. Speaking for myself, I spent a lot of time getting intimate with those parts of me that are prone to searching for intimacy in the shade, be it the shade of another or myself. Seeing that, recognizing the potential in me, has made it easier to step away where I once would step in—to value the feeling of the present above all else so the drug of "getting back to when things were good" loses its potency.
It's a general rule of thumb, in my opinion, that when our goal is "going back to how things once were" that we've already lost. Means the genuine prospect of a rewarding future is so intangible that we can only search for a version of it by moving backwards. In a marriage, with a mortgage and kids and rich shared history, that can be a worthy fight. Ideally not even a fight, but just part of the shared, forward-moving journey. But six months in? No. That's just trying to build a home on a foundation that was always more cracks than anything else, a foundation that can't shelter you. Better to "get back" to how you once were, and to accept that you were doing better and feeling better outside of the relationship than in it.
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