lillamy

I am still asking myself that question. I'm in a relationship with a man (post alcoholic marriage) that I've known for all of my adult life and a good chunk of my childhood. I feel that since we had been friends for eons, we basically knew everything there was to know about each other.

What I've found out is that being in a relationship, even after being friends for a very long time, changes things. We have taken it extremely slowly -- we both came out of bad relationships and had some healing to do and a lot of insecurities and a lot of suspicions.

Continuing working on my recovery has been key. But just as important has been total and complete honesty. Love isn't enough. Attraction sure as hell isn't. Because we've both learned that "hiding" behavior that you talk about, we have to actively listen to ourselves and pay attention to those little signals that say "something is making me uncomfortable/scared/suspicious" and then take the time to figure out what that is, and talk about it.

For example -- we've talked about moving in together. Something about it didn't sit right with me, but I ignored that because I could see so many positives about living together. He felt the same way, and brought it up, and was terrified of doing it because he thought I'd think that he wasn't interested anymore. So we talked about it, and found that he felt like he still needed time between his wrecked marriage and a new live-in relationship to figure out how he was, as a person, separate from a relationship. I figured out that because he's building his own business and his income is very unpredictable, that made me terrified of merging our lives and finances. Which made me realize that yes, I have some control issues to work on -- but I also have scars from a marriage where I didn't have enough money to feed the kids but there was always money for expensive liquor and fancy parties for his friends. And I was able to say that -- you know, show those sides of me and say "I know this ain't pretty, but it is what it is, and we need to get it out on the table if we care about each other and want to try to build a future together."

What I've found the hardest is that... it's very tempting to dive head-first into a new relationship and lose yourself in it and use those overwhelming infatuation feelings as an excuse to say "Look, I'm not that screwed up, all I needed was LOVE".... and THAT is dangerous...