You know, for all that I put a smiley face in my last post. It's really not a joke. I love my STBXAH because I haven't found a way to simply like him yet, and hating him would hurt too much.
I've been thinking about Stung's 3 box theory, and reading FireSprite's beautiful list of her RAH's qualities.
For a good many years now, since I started realizing my marriage was failing, I been struggling with how much of my STBXAH's personality is legit, and how much is a con game. Adding to that is the fact that has some seriously messed up parents, whom he's increasingly patterning himself after as he gets older.
I no longer know which qualities go into box 1, and which go into box 2. Both regarding his good qualities and his bad qualities. I don't know which are intrinsic and which are learned. All this in a man that I've known for a quarter of a century.
Yes, our marriage is ending, and I'm cool with that, but it still freaks me out. It's not ok with me, nor do I think it should be, that I can't pin down with certainty his intrinsically lovable qualities. I struggle with this, not so much as an x-wife, but as a human being.
I refuse to believe that my love (whatever that meant) was wasted on a con-man, or a Body-Snatcher Pod Person, who was incapable of valuing the love I gave him. I don't think that was the case, but I'm still parceling through the why's, and how's, and what's of it all. There are days when I remember only great things about him, like how he could spend hours in the floor playing barbies with our daughter, or how he seemed to get oddly turned on by my goofy sense of humor, or how he figured out that the best way to calm me down after an argument was with tawdry gossip from his job. Other days all I can remember are his lies. The lines are blurred, and I don't want the lines to stay blurred. A year from now, five years from now, whenever, I want to be able to say. "That was my husband. We aren't married any more, and that's ok. I still love him. He's a good person." I'm just still trying to figure out if that's true. Is he a good person? Was he? Is my love based in reality?