I am watching my girlfriend's life unravel!

[I Don't Believe This]

No I don't mind. I was getting ready to come here this afternoon anyway.

It has been a difficult week. We had dinner at my house on Wednesday - Bowls of Cereal - and she was having a lot of anxiety. All of our plans together are definitely on hold as I expected.

I offered to leave Montana when my lease is up at the end of June and give her some space. But I couldn't contain my emotions and the exchange was tearful. She left suddenly. 

Then yesterday a child at school told her son that she and his dad were going to die and go to hell. With everything going on her son turned into an emotional wreck. I didn't see her yesterday but she sent me a few texts about his bad day.

It was today that she told me that she thought I was dumping her. I begged for her to come see me at lunch and she did. I was able to explain that I only want to leave if she thinks it is what is best for her. I was able to explain that I am having difficulty of my own through this and if she needs some space I want to give it to her. The problem is her son and I get along very well. When he comes to play with me on the weekends I am his happy day amidst a lot of instability.

So, if I stay I could be hurting her and our chances at a relationship. If I go and don't manage her son's expectations for my return I could be hurting him. In addition my absence will be noticed because I am fun time.

I have until next Thursday to either get a new place to stay or buy a plane ticket. I asked her as gently as I could to give me some help with that decision before then. 

She has a funeral to attend tomorrow. I may see her and her son tonight and Sunday. I may not. I don't know. I really don't know anything.

This funeral is her fifth since April 15th. Her baby sister, grandma, aunt and ex-husband are all terminal with 3 to 12 months still remaining. By the end of this year or mid next year she will have lost a total of 9 people in her life. 

She told me she has therapy today and she is going to talk to her therapist about me. I don't know what that means with regard to our relationship.

[I Don't Believe This]

I did want to share something I sent her today. After she told me that she thought I dumped her I was a bit desperate. This violates all of what I have been trying to avoid by being emotional and not pushing anything of the future. But after she thought I had just outright dumped her I needed to reply. Less than two months ago we had rings picked out and were preparing to be married. 

I asked her to read this and then come see me at lunch. (I wrote it fast and directly from my heart. It repeats a little)

I sometimes struggle with words when I get emotional. Pain makes it hard for me to say what I am thinking and feeling. I said somethings Wednesday night that are true but out of some context and surrounded with a lot of pain. 

I have had a lot of time over the last couple of months to think about love, chemistry and commitment. 

The initial rush of chemistry we experienced, the beautiful weeks of romantic bliss that enticed us to say I love you that was not love. It was chemistry. It was beautiful. It was magical and it revealed to both of us that soulmates are real and we are soulmates. I still believe this and if you don't go back and look at the things we felt for one another. 

But Love - real committed love - is a choice. It is something we decide upon and I decided to give myself to you completely. I gave you my heart. I gave you my trust, and I committed fully to you. I chose to love you. And I still do. Also I believe that you gave of yourself to me. Otherwise I would not have made the choices I did.

We connected on a real level beneath the romance. We grilled each other for compatibility. Endless questions and we know what we want in a partner. I know you are my partner and I am your partner. 

I chose to uproot my life and take the greatest risk I could ever take to be here with you. To be here to love you. I chose to be here because I want to love you. I want to commit to you. I want to marry you and be with you for the remainder of my life.

I enjoy playing with your son because I choose to care for him and to love him. I want to be here when he needs me after his dad is gone. I want to adopt him and support him with you as he gets older. Watch us play and look for the feelings I have for him. They are there.

I am here because I choose to be and I love you because I want to love you. The chemistry gave me the initial draw to you, but everything else that followed told me that this is right. We belong together and in that belonging we built a dream together. I choose to be here and I choose to hold onto that dream with hope for US.

Life has thrown you some unlucky and tragic circumstances. In your grief and loss your ability to emotionally connect is destroyed. We don't have to be unlucky in love. These events have destroyed our chemistry and passion. But it does not have to destroy love. No matter how this scars you. No matter how this changes you I will still love you because I want and choose to love you.

We may need to take some time and rediscover our chemistry. We may struggle through this but that is what real love is. Real love is the mutual struggle against adversity. That is what will bond us together as a couple that will make it to the end of our lives. This mutual struggle will give us the committed love and marriage we have both been looking for.

Imagine for a moment that this ordeal in your life happened two years later. We had a happy courtship, got married and then tragedy. What would be different?

You would still be in pain. You would still be unable to connect with me emotionally. We would still need to struggle through the inevitable changes. Nothing would be different except for the marriage.

You may not be able to remember it right now but we committed to each other. I committed myself to you and you committed yourself to me. Our intent has always been marriage and what has changed. The circumstances that swirl around us are horrible but I still love you and hope that you can choose to continue to love me - even though you cannot feel love for me right now.

This is what relationships are. Relationships are hard and real love takes work, especially through such difficult times. People experience loss, tragedy and change and if we work together and choose to love each other WE can survive this event. I say WE because there is you, me and us. Individually we will both eventually get through this, but we have to choose to love each other.

This tragedy isn't over. It is ongoing. After it is done, there will be more. Life always has some s*** to throw our way. When the next pile of s*** hits our fan maybe it will be me who is struggling and we have to work through changes in my life.

I want to marry you

I am already, in my own heart, committed to you for the rest of my life. I want to make it official.

This commitment is not how I felt about you when we met. It is a measure of my willingness and desire to love you no matter what life throws at us. It is a measure of my understanding that you will change and that we will both need to work to rediscover one another.

I want to be there for your son. I choose to love him as much as I choose to love you.

I want to make our shared dreams come true. 

I am trying hard to be the man you need me to be, not what I expect I should be. I am trying to listen to what you need and take the actions necessary to get through this ordeal. No matter how much they hurt me.

It is much easier for me to be a man and friend for for your son because children are easy for me. I want to continue being here for him. Watch us play. Watch how we hug and hold. I adore him, and I know he adores me.

These two things. My love for you and my caring for your son  is why I am struggling so with a decision to leave. I think that maybe you need some time with out me here but it will hurt your son if I leave. I don't want to leave. But I may need to leave - for you - so you can heal and find your love for me again. If I have to leave it will hurt me dearly. Just thinking about it is like having my heart pulled from my chest. But that pain is worth it for you.

[kayc]

I think you conveyed yourself very well, now we will see how she responds.  You are in a very difficult place because of the living so far away and having to make a decision about it and not being able to talk to her about it for fear of applying pressure when she is already in such a fragile state.  I cannot imagine losing nine people in this time period!  Most struggle with one close loss.  You do well to take your cues from her, but you will have to decide whether to rent another place there this week, and you haven't long to find one, or whether to go back to your state.  I hope you can figure something out.  Can you rent a motel room by the week if you can't find something quick enough?

I hope with you for all to work out.

[I Don't Believe This]

I have a rental lined up if needed. They know the decision is coming next week when I hit an time limit on airfare prices.

We got some burritos and ate dinner in a park tonight and went walking through an outdoor mall. She and I didn't talk anything beyond small talk. She knows I have to make this decision and I would like to know her opinion on what she feels is best. She also knows the decision is a week away.

Like usual I played with her son. Taught him active physical stuff like climbing chain link fences... because we don't need gates!... and how to imitate chimpanzees... because we are all monkeys inside.

[ChinUp54]

Your love for her is so clear and you expressed yourself quite well. You are so right about love being a choice. I've always believed what's meant to happen wil, happen. Wishing you both the best and that she asks you to stay.

[I Don't Believe This]

Love is a choice is the lesson I have learned through this so far.

I have read all the stories on this forum. This forum is where people land when they are searching for why they were dumped by a partner due to grief. The population is self selected towards the pool of failed relationships. So I also searched beyond this.

It is unfortunate the difference between chemistry and real committed love. I have read some essays that talk about how chemistry is the evolutionary trick our brains play on us to try and hold people together long enough to develop real love. The stories I have found where relationships have survived this are the stories where both people in the grief event have made a strong enough commitment to consciously make a decision to keep on loving someone no matter how difficult things get. 

It may be true that my girlfriend never really made it past the initial romance and chemistry. In which case as her feelings are crushed under this grief, so to the love she thought she had for me. I hope that in the next days she can decide to hold on.

It is also true some people are not really ever capable of committed love. When a challenge like this tests the relationship you find out for certain whether the person you are with is actually capable of committed love or not.

So on one hand I guess there is a blessing underneath all this turmoil we are going through. If we make it we will know 100% that we are capable of real, deep love for each other. If we do not make it, regardless of where I am and what my feelings are, my girlfriend was never able to match them. Maybe she would have if we had more time to bond into a couple before tragedy struck.

I work with the DOD and digging into the research on grief, how it affects the mind, how it affects decision making it is much like what a combat soldier feels in a stressful situation. Imagine running off the boats onto the Normandy landing. You are scared, confused, people are being shot around you. What keeps the soldier going under this sort of mental chaos. The Plan is what keeps the soldier driving forward. I have to run straight, past the breakwater to the sand berm where there is cover. That is the plan. It is a thought and action structure to push the soldier regardless of the fear and chaos.

Using that as an analogy, committed love gives a couple a plan. It may be difficult to follow when someone is confused by grief and suffering loss but the plan keeps things moving forward. A good committed love provides a comfortable structure of thoughts, beliefs and actions for a person with grief to exist within. Work is easy because it is repetitious and requires little emotional investment. Friends are easy because they are predicable, established and require little emotional investment. New love is neither predictable or structured yet so it is uncomfortable. It needs to progress to the point of stable and reliable.

For those who have lost their loves this level of stability was never really established. Even if the relationship had been years in the development, long distance can create a false sense of closeness. You long for the person from far away and when you are together the chemistry and romance kicks in. If you never actually lived together, if you never actually spent solid weeks together you are not stable you are not committed, no matter how much verbal commitment has been expressed it isn't real yet.

So most of the stories on this forum are losses of this type. Loss of a false commitment.

 

I am keeping my hope. I still think my girlfriend and I have a chance to pull through this. And it may only be because of her son and the simple fact I give him some safety and some stability. 

[kayc]

That all makes sense in most cases...but in my case, with my (late) husband, I guess we were the exception.  Our love grew through faith and writing letters and long distance.  We shared everything with each other, told each other everything, he was my best friend...and I his.  He never would have let me down no matter what could happen in life.  I saw him as the true measure of love...and everyone else fell short.  He was the standard by which all else was measured.  I was lucky, pure and simple, we both were.  But our commitment was real.

[I Don't Believe This]

You were lucky. Regardless of how this level of commitment is reached it is what is required to get through this. Some may achive this through mutual faith, others may achieve it in thier own manner.

I think the pattern I see over and over is people equate passion and chemistry for love. Love = Commitment. Passion and Chemistry = Connection. The initial connection is important to create the start of the relationship, but the commitment is where real love lies.

 

[kayc]

You are so right!  It is being able to count on each other through thick and thin.  It is genuinely caring about the other person's best interests, sometimes at a cost to yourself.  It is giving 100%.  It is knowing that everyone has bad breath days and sometimes people lose jobs and get bad news, but you go through it together and get through it.

Since our relationship started out with sharing from the heart instead of chemistry, maybe that's what made the difference.  The chemistry was definitely there, but I believe it couldn't help but be because of how we treated each other and felt about each other.  I only know that when he held me, it was the best place in the whole world to be.

[I Don't Believe This]

We had a couple hours alone yesterday. Her son had been acting out and she decided to leave him with dad instead of come play with me. We had a nice lunch for a couple hours.

All small talk.

However we were able to clear up a big miscommunication that blew up Saturday evening.

She talks about her son a lot and I of course talk about mine. Her son has a lot similar traits with my own - ADHD in particular.

Sometimes she will describe an issue with her son and I reply, "I went through something similar with my boys and this is how I handled it. (fill in story here).

In other cases, as I have gotten to know her son better, I am noticing his quirks and sometimes I talk about what I am learning about her son.

Saturday night she blew up at me for being critical of her mommying, trying to tell her how she should be raising him and telling her stuff she already knows about him like she is unaware of his personality.

I now know that her feelings on this have been ongoing for a while but with the current extra stress she lashed out at me.

I have never been or intended to be critical of her or how she raises her son. I have only ever been trying to share my experiences as a parent. And as I learn her son's personality, the things that are old news to her are new discoveries for me which I was merely trying to communicate. 

I think we worked through it, but it is indicative of everything in our relationship under this additional stress. I am constantly on my guard worried that I will say the wrong thing at the wrong moment.

After lunch with her she was heading to a girls day with a friend. I decided to push myself on the hiking trails near the house I am living in. Marched 17 miles up and down mountains in 7 non-stop hours. Lots of pain today. 

[kayc]

I am sorry.  I hope you were able to explain where you're coming from as well as you did here and that she heard you. 17 miles is quite a bit, that's the furthest I've walked in one day and I was hit with shin splints from it because it was on concrete instead of the soft trails I am used to.  Be gentle with your body so it'll have time to recuperate.

[I Don't Believe This]

My gilrfriend is starting to return to some of the rituals we had before her father was injured. She calls me on her drive to and from work each day and engages in a little small talk about her day.

Unfortunately she is sick - again. Just before her dad fell she spent most of the month of March with a chronic sinus infection. It was bad enough that an eardrum burst and surgery was required to prevent loss of hearing. Since the ordeal with her family began I have watched her waver in and out of illness and now the infection is back.

I can tell that stress is impacting her immune system.

She has gone to the doctor. She is on antibiotics - again - which will leave her vomiting because they do.

Tomorrow, one of my sons arrives to stay in Montana with me for a few weeks. My girlfriend is going to go with me to meet him at the airport. However I would not hold it against her if she is too sick. She says she is looking forward to meeting my son. Maybe she still wants to check him for damage and see what sort of dad I am.

It will be nice to have my son here and take him marching through the hills. His presence will help distract me from turmoil caused by this string of events.

[kayc]

Unfortunately, illness is one of those byproducts of grief, a lot of us have experienced physical symptoms as a result of the stress of grieving.  I hope she has a quick recovery this time and doesn't have to go through surgery again.

It will be great to have your son here!  I'm sure she already knows what kind of dad you are by how you are with her son, but it can't hurt to see you with your son.   Enjoy those hikes and I hope you are less sore today!

[I Don't Believe This]

My son arrived. It's nice to have him here. My girlfriend did not meet him at the airport with me. She had a low blood sugar event two hours before his flight arrived.

She called this morning in tears. Her aunt passed early today. This was known to be coming but much sooner than expected. She is broken and still has to endure the upcoming loss of grandma, baby sister, and ex husband.

I don't know how much more she can take. 

[MartyT]

You cannot know how much more your lady can take ~ All you can do is to continue standing beside her, supporting her as you've been doing all along. I just hope that in the process, you are paying attention to your own needs as well. Don't forget that you are"taking" all of this, too, even if indirectly. I hope that spending some quality time with your son will give you some of the respite that you need and deserve, too. 

[kayc]

I reiterate what Marty has said.  I have Diabetes and my blood sugar can drop rather quickly, so I understand what that is like, it could be the news affected it as stress very much affects blood sugar in spikes or drops.  I am glad your son is there with you and I hope the two of you can get out and do something fun tomorrow.

[I Don't Believe This]

I am at a new low in this process. We were supposed to have lunch to discuss a decision I have to make. After this morning's call I knew that wasn't going to happen.

We were going to discuss whether or not I should leave Montana or stay. My time limit for the end of June decision has arrived. Our last month has been difficult but we have remained in daily contact and I have built such a good relationship with her son.

I am now left to make the stay or go decision without knowing her input and I am filled with uncertainty. Uncertainty is an unfamiliar feeling for me.

[MartyT]

My friend, I can only share with you the words of a very wise man, whose empowering words I've never forgotten. He said them to me many years ago, when I was struggling with (what was for me and my family at the time) a major, life-changing decision. He said, "There are no right or wrong decisions here. Whatever you decide, it will be the 'right' decision for you, because once you make the decision, you will do everything in your power to make it be the 'right' decision." You seem to me to be the kind of man who will do just that ~ and I wish you all the best, in whatever you decide.  ♥

[kayc]

Perhaps she will be available tomorrow to talk, but otherwise, I guess you'll have to go with your gut instinct.  I know nothing has been easy this month, you're in my thoughts.  I'm sure you'll make the right decision for you.

[I Don't Believe This]

I still have not decided if I am leaving or staying in Montana. However my girlfriend and I are having a discussion tomorrow about going no contact to semi-no contact with each other for a fixed period of time.

I have a boarding room arranged that would be an uncomfortable but an inexpensive option to stay in Montana. I will decide on whether I stay or go based on what we set for the length of the break, periodicity of check in, if any and so on.

I will also be making arrangements for one last play session with her son so I can tell him a story about why he won't see me for a while.

[kayc]

Oh geez.  Has she said why she wants a break?  I'm sorry, not a good sign.  This is going to be very hard for you, my heart goes out to you.  You'll not only be missing her, but her son, as well as worrying about how he is.

[I Don't Believe This]

I offered her the break. She texted me about being overwhelmed with this latest loss and I suggested that I give her space. I specifically mentioned that I am not breaking up with her, but I thought it might be best for her that I give her some room.

This is why I say semi-no contact. I want to leave the door open for a once a week or every second week check in and conversation.

She is lower than I have ever seen her. Events in her life have led her to living in fear almost all the time. She carries weapons because she is afraid of assault. (concealed firearms). She worries about money because she is afraid of not being able to provide for her son. She suffers from weekly to daily anxiety and nightmares about losing her son. And now as her support structure crumbles she is falling apart. All I see when she lets her guard down and really communicates with me is how much fear she is going through.

On top of this her doctors have removed her Prozac prescription. She is going to go through Prozac withdrawls for the next month while they start her on something new. Her aunt died the day after they took the Prozac away.

I don't want to do this but I am looking at the bigger picture of just giving a little room to process and keeping my fingers crossed for her.

[I Don't Believe This]

I leave Montana June 30th. We are not going total no contact. We will have a once a week phone call to check in with each other. I will not be texting her unless I am responding to her.

[kayc]

Good luck with these new arrangements.

[MartyT]

I so hope and pray that this works out for both of you, my friend. You sound like a very special man, and your lady would be blessed to have you as her own.  ♥