Old 11-28-2009, 05:15 AM
  # 2 (permalink)  
kv816
Only stepping forward
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Alabama, USA
Posts: 330
Your RAH sounds a lot like my xabf. We had similar back and forths, ups and downs. I was guilty of the same....bringing up the past and throwing it back in his face. It served no purpose and I was only doing it to hurt him. Here I was hating the way he threw my past back at me yet I was doing it to him. Needless to say, I worked really hard to stop that (and hadn't done it for several months prior to our breakup).....but he didn't. He still threw what he thought my past was back at me (meaning, he took the truth and bent it a little to make me look like a really bad person). And the irony is HE'S the one who always complained about the past being brought back up.

I had a few emotional affairs in my second marriage; though I didn't realize they were emotional affairs until after we divorced. There was never any physical activity or connection between us. It never went that far and a few people I never even met face to face--it was just email. So I never felt like I was doing anything wrong.

Like I said, it wasn't until after we divorced that I realized what I had done was wrong. Someone told me to really look at what I was doing and the things that were being said. If I was writing this email and he came in the room, would I continue writing or would I change to another screen? Would I let him read my email? If I read the same email that he wrote to another woman, how would it make me feel? If he read it without my permission and I got angry, why would I be angry? Is it because he hacked my account? Or because he invaded my privacy? Or because I was doing something I knew he wouldn't like?

The fact was, all love and feelings for my H (at the time) were gone. A breakup was obvious, there were too many things wrong with us as a couple. But, despite how I felt about him, I should have validated his feelings. I didn't think he had any reason to not trust me or to spy on me or invade my privacy or so on and so forth. But with my secrecy about these emotional affairs he did.

When I met xabf I had a lot of friends online. 99% of them were friends from school....people I hung out with 20 years earlier but never talked to anymore face to face. Heck, most of them were across the country (including one who I played a game with online every single night for the last ten years). I had no problem giving him the passwords to all my accounts. I had nothing to hide and if I felt like I did need to hide something then I needed to reevaluate the relationship and why I felt I had to hide it. Then put the shoe on the other foot and validate his feelings.

In the end, he was way too clingy, paranoid, protective, obsessive. He even thought there was a relationship with even the girls I was talking to online. Anything to make ME be the bad person; make HIM a victim. It was his way of throwing my past back up into my face--even though it had happened years and years earlier, way before him, and never happened with him. But it's one of the many reasons I left and finally went no contact. In the end, I couldn't validate his feelings.
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