IP and Confused, thank you so much for your input. It's really, really helpful to know that even though this stuff is tough, I'm at least not
alone in it.
And on the Oona stuff . . . I was really thinking about it (among a million other things) in the shower this morning, and I realized something: there are always going to be people unhappy with and judging me for the decisions I make in life.
There were people who judged me for getting with Rider, and there will be people who judge me if we split. There are people who judge me for being at the same job since right out of school (rather than hopping companies to try to make more money) and there are people who will judge me if I quit to change careers. There are people who judge me for going to protests, and there are people who judge me for not being active enough when I get burned out.
There are people who judge me for having two partners, and there are people who will judge me if I end my relationships. There are people who judge me as self-involved for not having kids, and there are people who will judge me if I decide to leave my marriage to pursue having them. There are people who judge me for having brightly colored hair, and there are people who will judge me if I go back to henna.
People like to judge other people, and they like to think they know what the right thing to do is as they look in from the outside. They like to feel knowledgeable, and even sometimes superior. They like to compare their own lives to other people's lives and use that comparison either as a stick to beat themselves with or as a reason to pat themselves on the back.
Hopefully, one's friends will love them and support them and stand by them while they do the (sometimes tough) shit they gotta do as they (like everyone) bumble around looking for happiness, as long as they're not being toxic, malicious, or callous to other beings. Or at the very least, if the friends decide that their lifestyles and outlooks are no longer compatible enough to support and stand by them, then they should be willing to step away rather than try to change the course of someone else's life to better suit them.
I may have never been single for very long, but that does not mean I'm afraid of being alone. Indeed, I can easily picture a life of relative solitude. I don't have a need to be surrounded by a large circle of friends the way Rider does, and I don't have much of a free-standing sex drive that is independent of my feelings for a particular person. I'm not dependent on my family, and I don't socialize much at work. If left to my own devices, I'll write or read or learn something or go spend time in nature. And if I have one or two people to do that stuff with, all the better, but I don't mind doing it alone. All of this is actually part of the reason I think I may be ready for a child—I can picture myself pretty content for a few years in a small family unit with limited social contact, focusing on teaching and learning and exploring the world.
So I feel a lot more stable emotionally right now than I did a few days ago, even if my situation itself is still unsettled. It's a long-term kind of unsettled, so I can't let it get to me every day. And I'll come to a more solid decision if I'm doing it from a place of peace instead of turmoil.
Another thing that happened was that Rider and I were talking about healthy expression of emotions. I've recently discovered about myself (not sure if I ever mentioned it here) that I have not usually processed certain emotions, including anger, in a healthy way. I've usually denied anger and transmuted it into annoyance or sadness. I've been working on getting in better touch with all my emotions and learning to recognize them and feel them and sit with them. One thing that helped me was
this article, which I then showed him.
I told Rider that it's OK for him to be angry with me about all of this, and to express it, if that's what he feels. I'm not going to hold it against him. Because he'd said a lot of things, and none of them were about anger, and I thought that if I were in his situation, I probably would be angry. At first, he was confused. "You want me to be angry with you, and express anger at you?"
I told him that it's not that I wanted that. It's that, if that's how he feels, I won't hold it against him for feeling that way and for letting me know about it. He seemed thoughtful and said that makes sense and he would think about that for a while.
When he came back to me about it, he said that he does think that he, too, has problems recognizing and feeling and expressing the emotion of anger—that he puts pressure on himself to turn it into something less threatening to other people. He said that, thinking about it, he was angry about the whole thing, as well as angry at some things in the past, too.
I asked him what they were, and he said that he was angry that I'd wanted to close the relationship in the winter, and that I became interested in someone so soon after our wedding, and that my NRE with Dustin was so strong that it made me want to renegotiate agreements we had on things such as how much time we spend with other partners. He'd never expressed anger about those things before, so I guess it is a good thing that he did. I didn't know he still had negative emotions bottled up from as far back as January.
I thanked Rider for expressing his feelings, and I apologized for the poor timing and for the game-changing nature of my relationship with Dustin. I acknowledged that my decision to date Dustin was a choice I'd made, and, while I hadn't
realized at the time that it could get as serious as it has, I suppose I did know conceptually that it was possible, so I could have chosen otherwise to avoid the risk. I cannot honestly say I regret that I chose to start seeing him, but I can honestly say that I feel sorrow about the negative things it's made Rider feel. I wish it had happened sooner, or later, or maybe unfolded a little differently.
I had to take longer thinking about the January thing before figuring out the parts I could apologize for. Rider had seemed so genuinely happy and peaceful with his decision back then—and I had been so relieved—that I was surprised to learn only now of his anger. After I thought about the abovementioned stuff about Oona, still in the shower, I spent some time thinking about that.
At the time, I was trying to prepare for a wedding and a honeymoon and was overwhelmed by all kinds of emotions. I was emotionally exhausted by Jasper and by processing with Rider about Hannah. I honestly
couldn't see moving forward with a wedding while I felt that way. To me, it seemed like my options were 1) postpone the wedding and keep the status quo of my own exhaustion, 2) break up with Rider and begin healing in peace, 3) give Rider the choice of partially closing the relationship and proceed with the wedding.
#1 did not seem tenable to me at the time. My exhaustion was too great. #2 seemed unfair to do unilaterally without giving Rider #3 as a choice. So I gave him the choice. But I do understand that he was angry about it. So when I got out of the shower I ended up apologizing for making him feel that way. It’s OK to have emotions when all the options suck!
He said that it bothers him that he doesn't have Hannah anymore now that I have Dustin. I was briefly confused, because in the interim, he'd said a lot of things about how she wasn't exactly right for him anyway. But when he said this, I asked him why he hadn't reached out to her. After all, she'd told him that she'd be open to dating him again if our agreements changed, and they'd left things friendly and hung out a time or two since—why not ask her? What's the worst that could happen? She could say no . . . he's lost nothing!
He didn't seem keen on it, though. He said that he thinks there might be weirdness between them. I asked why he thought that, if she'd seemed so open and friendly and the end, and they'd hung out, and he eventually sighed and said he was probably not a very good friend to her in that time period. And he said that he probably DID want to find someone who was a better fit for him. So I can at least recuse myself from blame for that part of things—Rider doesn't want Hannah, or he'd want to try to rekindle things. He wants some person in the slot that Hannah had briefly filled.
Rider also apologized to me. He said he's sorry that he was holding on to anger from old stuff, and he realizes now that was unfair, but he hadn't known how to express it until I talked to him about it. He thanked me for talking with him and said he feels a lot better today and actually slept well last night.
(continued . . . )
