Report begun: 08/17/05-16:07

In-n-Out, Long Beach. Late lunch/early dinner
Man, I did’t even sit down before my order was ready. Yikes. I’m out and about shopping for odds and ends, basically finding an excuse for leaving the apartment after sequestoring myself for the past week or so (w/ one afternoon off on Saturday for my grandbaby’s baby shower… sigh). Following the good-bye kiss on the cheek I’ve spent a lot of time on my website, cleaning up things and updating my “Jacob’s Ladder” Blog [2018-06-28: Believe it or not, the link to that blog still works, though it was discontinued over 11-years ago, on 2007-06-26, the blog category “in bad faith” in this blog is it’s current descendent]. I guess it’s my way of dealing with the end of the relationship by immersing myself in this long-running narrative.

“When I said, ‘I love you’ on my birthday, why didn’t you respond in kind?”

“… I was afraid.”

I didn’t need to ask her what she was afraid of. I already knew that for the past year she didn’t feel like she could handle her feelings for me or my feelings for her while still living with her husband. So, even though she’d filed for divorce over a year ago, she had chosen to shut off those feelings and keep her heart closed to me and, in many ways, herself.
Relationship Autopsy
On Wednesday, August 3rd, 2005, at approximately 20:35 in Anaheim CA this relation was terminated and in the intervening 14-days no effort by either party has been made to resuscitate it.

Cause of termination: Female’s inability/unwillingness to return and/or receive the love/affection/attention/support offered and/or required by the male. This resulted in the male’s unwillingness to continue as “general utility friend.” Emotional termination resulted in the male as a result to prolonged exposure of profound “root” emotional attachment with vague, little or no response from the female coupled with an inconsistent expectation that the male would always be there at a moment’s notice whenever the female needed a friend to talk to, a shoulder to cry on or a lover to make her feel loved.

The life and death of this relationship might be understood by looking at four phases that it may have gone through:

Phase one: “Infatuation” lasted about ten months beginning with an innocent email correspondence beginning in Feb 2002, escapist friendship/flirtation for the first several months, resulting in an unexpected explosive overwhelming affair.

Phase Two: “Looking for Help” overlaps phase one by a few months after the male broke up with his then-girlfriend (not the female of the relationship under report) (August 2002) and the pressure became either ending the relationship and/or her looking for help to deal w/ the initial reason she had looked outside her marriage for love. She did secure counseling by the end of Aug and her husband began participating/getting his own counseling by the end of October. The male’s own “cry for help” came in Feb. 2003 when, after another seemly terminal set-back of the relationship, he reports having had an epiphany resulting in re-establishing of his identification with his former faith.

Phase Three: “Longing” began in November (5th) 2002 and lasted until approximately September 2004. This phase began after the female and her husband began getting counseling together and the female decided to give the marriage another chance, thus seeming to terminate the relationship. The female told her husband that she was in love with someone else and confessed to the affair. The male threatened to reveal the affair to the children and her family if she did not cease the relationship. She attempted to comply and the husband began essentially around-the-clock surveillance (following her into the bathroom and when she changed clothes, forbidding her from working late hours or weekends, taking away her cell phone or the phone at home, and requiring some verification such as receipts whenever she went shopping). But because of the imprinting the love had on the male and female neither really believed that it was over and after a few weeks the female began to communicate to the male through cryptic cell phone text messages (e.g., “12,” which meant “i love you babe,” the number of letters if the message were spelled out). This periodic one-way communication went on for a couple months.

Phone communication resumed after Christmas 2002 with the male believing that the female was going to act and end the marriage. Another communication break/relationship crisis occurred in February 2003 when the husband discovered the communication resumption and demanded the female to choose with the threat that if she were to divorce him he’d demand full custody of their two boys. The pressure was too much and she chose to break communication with the male. This happened three times during this phase, the first being the beginning of this phase in November 2002, second being February 2003, and a third in June 2003. Each time the female was not ready to choose and communication was essentially terminated. Within two to three weeks, however, some message was sent by the female to the male and hope was maintained.

This phase is called “Longing” because the overall theme of the messages was that of future hopes to be together or just to be together at that moment. When this phase began the female felt completely in the wrong and believed that she needed to do whatever it took to keep the marriage going (even though both she and her husband knew that she no longer loved him and that his form of love to her no longer reached her). The pressure was all the more on the female because she was the sole breadwinner of the family and had been for the past ten years. Over the months she slowly fought back against her husband’s mental abuse and came to believe that it was right for her to end a dead marriage and filed for divorce June 2004.

But because she wanted to keep the family home she was advised to stay in the home, even after filing for divorce. Her husband told her that he was going to break her and refused to move from the master bedroom, to find his own place or to find gainful employment. Her husband also made it her job to tell the children of her decision to divorce him.

Phase Four: “Friendship” Begun around June 2004 until relationship termination August 3rd, 2005. There had always been some growing tension between the female and male because of the length of time it seemed for anything to move forward with her divorce. This was particularly true around the winter holidays and their respective birthdays when being together was often impossible.

Because the husband refused to move out or to cooperate in any reasonable fashion without causing her some grief, the female felt forced to use all of her emotional energy to maintain the belief that it was right for her to end the marriage and at the same time keep everything as “normal” as possible for her two young sons. Consequently she felt unable to receive or return the love of her former lover and chose to relate to him mostly as a needed friend. The male understood this and chose to maintain his role to support her believing that it would only be a matter of time before things would move forward enough for her feel free enough to receive and reciprocate his love.

As the months passed she continued to grow in her immunity towards her soon-to-be ex-husband’s attempts to upset her or “break her” as he had promised to do to her. But while she was growing in her immunity towards her husband she showed no signs of accepting the male into her life in any greater capacity than as the voice on the phone during the last ten-minutes of her commute home. In fact, as the pressure increased for her in terms of her husband’s continued failure to cooperate and comply, she communicated even less with the male. Something had changed in their communication.

In phase one and two it had been continuous by phone, text-message, instant message/chat and email. In phase three communication was frequently broken, often for weeks. But the communication of all three phases shared one thing: this communication was continually filled with expressions of love and hope and longing. In phase four the messages of longing ceased. The words “I love you” continued, for the most part, but they seemed to take on the level of assumption, something taken for granted. It almost felt, to the male, like it was something more familial than the intimacy previously shared between the male and female. Instead of becoming closer to the male, following her filing for divorce, she seemed to be increasingly more distant.

She hinted at the reasons for this change when they had their last conversation. In phase one and two she was able to give herself completely and without reservation to the male because her worlds were completely compartmentalized and she maintained the fantasy that they would never be breach. In phase three her worlds were partially breached when she confessed everything to her husband. But his unwillingness to take responsibility for his part and his continued and increased abuse of her vulnerability worked to make her cherish the love she’d had with the male all the more. In many ways, her husband’s actions and reaction confirmed the reality of the love she’d discovered with the male. It was harder for her to maintain the balance, but communication tended to be so infrequent that it was somewhat “doable” to keep the hope alive even though she knew that her husband knew.

According to the male, the one thing that really changed in phase four, the reason that she chose to not allow herself to even think about the love that had gotten all of this started was the confrontation she had with her children when she had to tell them that she and her husband were going to get divorced. That breach hurt her so much because of how much it seemed to hurt her two boys that she determined that until the divorce was final she could have “friends” in her life, but would not permit herself to feel anything greater than that. Because her husband continued to pretend that everything was okay in front of their children and that whatever problem there might be was their mother’s making, she felt pressured to go along and minimize anything to the contrary.

Granted, none of this changed the fact that the female still had a need to feel loved and so, about once every three or four months, she would become more “accepting” of the male’s affection. That hadn’t really changed over any of the four phases (though there were often stretches of over four months when the male and female wouldn’t so much as see one another, much less share any real intimacy).

During all of this the life for the male continued to change and pressures in many ways increased with his employment and his decision to earn a doctorate degree. The female was supportive in the sense that she encouraged him to move forward and not “wait for her” as far as school or church things were concerned. But then about midway through phase three, just after another missed holiday, the female made it clear to the male that he could not expect her to be there for him because of her struggle with just getting to the filing stage. He partially accepted this, again believing that it would only be a matter of time. But then a couple of months turned into four and then six months and then more than a year. So after trying to hold on to hope for one thousand, two hundred and seventy-nine days (over three years) and seeming to get an ever decreasing slice of her time on the phone and even less of her heart, the male determined to confirm his beliefs about her status and if confirmed, to let go of something that was never really his in the first place.

Thus on August 3rd, 2005 this relationship was pronounced dead, though its ghost will no doubt color the thoughts of the male for some time to come. Alas, the body may well be dead but the spirit has an unfortunate tendency to linger whether welcomed or not. Hopefully once 21-days have passed the male will feel … well, will feel period and then perhaps he’ll be able to move on from there. JBB 08/18/05 04:15