Almost Divorce- A PJ primer

Posted: 2011/07/22 | Author: Lola | Filed under: Ramblings | Tags: BGP, Big Girl Panties, my personal catfish story, Relationships |4 Comments

I know it isn’t Thursday,  I didn’t get this done in enough time yesterday to do a double up.

As always if you want to start at the beginning that can be found here

It is about to seem like we are going to talk about all PJ all the time.   The writing of this adventure is always about 3+ weeks ahead of what you’re reading. Which means  that I have already had to start thinking about the PJ story and  am getting closer and closer to having to actually start writing the PJ portion of the story.   I am an emotional extravert with a very logical mind.  In order to process things they have to first make sense to me.  I don’t think there is sense to be made of this yet.   This is  the love story tucked chaotically inside both of my lives, the online one and the real one.   Yes, the love story with the tragic ending and the puzzle pieces that won’t all fit together.   Knowing the end already makes it difficult to decide what point of view to take the writing .  How to explain to you in the midst of all this chaos and the evil of his lies, that I actually fell in love with this monster.

We were planning a life together:

This was not a make believe life of such ridiculous fantasy as you might find on a flirty chat roll. This was, where will he go to school next and how far will I drive every other week/end to be with him in bursts of my weeks without the kids.   This was, “It’s ok if you don’t want to have another baby, I will just have to love your kids”. This was “I see this as more real to you Lola..I want us to be a team Lola..I can’t keep/stop dragging you back Lola..please give me time Lola.. I hate that I’m doing this to you Lola….. I  more than adore you doll… I will always adore you doll even if we don’t talk I need you to know that Lola…..and on and on and on….”.  I clung so desperately to the hope that this dream life with my dream guy was possible for me.  I wasn’t naive enough to assume it was automatically going to work out, but I just knew if given the chance that we could give a really good go at crafting the kind of life together we had been planning.   I felt I  knew him well enough to already know what fighting with him in person would be like, the buttons I would have to choose not to push,  how we would make -up.

It’s a complicated train wreck and there are a couple of things I feel I need to point out in advance of the coming details.   I cannot show you what he looks like. I have  pictures sent to me by him,  I believe that makes them mine.  But I will not post them, it’s a line I won’t cross.  If you are ever over I will gladly show you if you’re that curious.  Suffice it to say I thought he was beautiful in every possible esthetic, I was incredibility smitten from the literal moment I saw his cam image.   This kind of OMG I have to have THAT moment does not happen to me often, in real life or in chat.

In the pic are  the list of reasons why PJ adores me, verbatim minus a word omission in 1.

Online vs. Real:

When I  was living it I  felt like the relationship I had with PJ wasn’t actually  real because we had only interacted via computers and cameras. He never once called me on a phone, or texted me, or sat within the grasp of my touch.  Our interactions started  when I met him as PJGW  and LolaGW in a chat room.  We started under different rules and circumstances than where we ended up.  ONe could say that I changed the rules on him mid stream. It’s hard but it seems only fair that I have to own what I can of this, and part of that is seeking to consider the “he is only human” clause and think about things from his point of view.     I did not grow up being in chat rooms at 18, I did not have cam sex with my exes, these activities were not a part of my youth or young adulthood like he says they were in his.   I would get mad that things were not more real, want to know when he was going to be able to make them real.    About two months in and after The Husband has moved out  I am upset that all of our interactions still seem to stem from just the luck of finding each other online. Now to be fair we had a routine when things were going well, a sort of schedule that we kept to.  But I still see it as just chat born, chat based,  he  tells me he sees things differently than I do.  We are having an  G-chat conversation and I have just stated….

LOLAGW:  do you understand why I  don’t like the arrangement as it stands

PJGW: yes

but i see as more than you do

its not just  ‘chatname’

i spend my mornings with you

on here

on cam

i lay in bed with just you on here

i see your face i hear your voice

at night i watch you get ready to go asleep

i talk to you you talk to me

we wind down and go to bed

LOLAGW: all true

PJGW: together

I  go on to say yes, but all of these events stem from chat, he doesn’t ask to see me, he simply runs into me

PJGW: Fine how about this i want to tuck you in this evening at 11

This  spectrum of what is real and what is not, is a theme in our relationship aka my favorite thing to fight about right after why he hasn’t shown up to love me yet. . And until this week I always thought I was right. And then I was on Google + and saw this on Tom Anderson’s Google+ profile .  Tom Anderson is the founder of MySpace. He’s retired now.

“In 2004 or so, people were really afraid of “social networking.” Most had no interest in it, and a standard journalist question was “Aren’t sites like MySpace killing ‘real’ human interaction?” How is talking to someone via a given “technology” (hand-written letters, telegraph, phone, email, IM, social network) any less “real”? To me, that’s like saying your ears and your eyes aren’t “real.” For a deaf person a working “ear” is a pretty awesome piece of technology. It’s not how you reach out to another human being that matters — it’s whether a connection is made. It’s not the medium that determines the value of the interaction. If there is spark set off in the mind and soul of another, then that’s “real” human interaction. Now, with something like 25-50% of all new US relationships (dating) starting online, I think people are getting over this fear. Ok, gotta run, my friends are mad I’m spending too much time on G+”

Well that explains why it felt so real at the time.

The balance of power: we were going to be a team

We were going to be a team, PJ and I.   I was finally going to get to be in a relationship where the balance of power was equal.  Where one person was not the one with all the control and the other one is the bitch.   The balance of  power was one of the great issues in my marriage.  It has been an issue on some but not all of my previous relationships.   I’m a strong dominant person but I like, I want, I NEED a man who  has a big back bone and will not let me make him my bitch in 2 weeks.  I like an equal, I want to take turns being in control, getting my way, and taking one for the team.   I felt like The husband had never really grown to be my equal, I certainly didn’t respect him as the equal I do now.  PJ and I were going to be equals, we were were going to be a team.

I don’t know where the balance of power lies or if and  how it shifts in your relationships but I do know this.   Being the one with all the control is overwhelming and exhausting.    I often had these feelings of having so much on my shoulders that I just wanted to shut down and check out.  I was in charge of EVERYTHING.  I don’t mean my husband didn’t or couldn’t cook or clean or care for his kids or do his laundry etc.  He was always a great husband in that regard,  an upper echelon contributor.  But I was the SOLE person running our household, our lives and our future.  I am a working mother with a full time professional career,  I needed a  co -captain and I did not ever have one in my marriage. I had the upper hand from the very beginning and somehow it turned ugly along the way for both of us.  We had both I was taking too much control and he was taking advantage of me doing everything for us going on.

I shared the I need a strong man frustration with PJ, he was my safe place and my confidant from  almost the  minute I met him. So by the time actually divorcing became an option for me and opened a real door of possibility for PJ and I we had already had many many conversations about what kind of man I really wanted , what kind of relationship I wanted to have now that I had a choice to start a new one.   The next morning after the I see this as more real conversation we have this one.

LolaGW: wet face ( means I had been crying, my favorite past time after numbing my pain)

PJGW: Oh no love

can i spend some time with you tonight?

LOLAGW: Probably

PJGW: ok

i want to

i wanna sit outside under the same sky and talk with you

LOLAGW: According to this PJGW guy you just want to fuck me lol

but sky sounds nice

PJGW:  well i want that too

but i got to put in my time before I can do that

LOALGW: yep

i need to trust its real

PJGW: I know

we both got issues to work out tho

and were gonna work on them like a team

LOLAGW: Thats all i want to be

a team

PJGW: I know

now cheer up a lil doll

i dont like to see you hurt

or know you hurt

The other obstacles didn’t seem to bother my gut or head

It didn’t matter to me that he was 25.5 to my 39, My dad was 17 years older than my stepmom and The Husband is 4 years younger then me,  adult me  seems to like younger men. It didn’t bother me that he was in the dirt poor phase of his life, he had such intelligence and drive, he had goals and dreams and plans.   It bothered me that he was so screwed up mentally; Mommy issues, ex-issues,  grief issues, fear issues, but I thought he was working on that and also faith that the guy I met at first was the “real”   PJ, not the pathetic loser creepy boy he turned out to be.   Having a new relationship with him or anyone else was going to bring added drama bc I had kids and knowing I would have to craft a new normal anyway I figured I’d craft the new normal with the guy I wanted most.    PJ  convinced me that I knew how his true mind worked and what was really in his heart.   And I am usually very good at BOTH knowing how someones mind works and what is really in their heart.   And I especially have a knack for this with MEN, romantic or otherwise.

When he chose to vanish instead of offer ANY explanation at all or simply say “yep bitch, gotcha” , I knew he was  pointedly sending me a message that he wasn’t going to give me an answer, he was going to let me think whatever I wanted.  He was going to run, just like he’d foreshadowed all the months prior in the very beginning.  He wasn’t going to let me have closure, he was going to rob it as violently from me as he could as punishment for being the one to destroy the game, to END IT.   There comes a point in this story where I am beating him at his own game while still holding on to hope that it will all work out as I want.  Outside of the daily emotional rape and turmoil  he severs my heart once prior to the vanishing, and I get more calculating, smarter.  It becomes a puzzle to me before it’s even completely over and I start paying closer attention to what is going on.   Towards the end he really wasn’t getting much from me other than emotional support for his journey back to a healthy mental state and more and more doses of me  with BGP on and pointed directly at him.

Ambiguous loss is no less real:

I was a MUCH stronger individual by the time he vanished. When he vanished it was like the guy I loved was dead. The dreams I had for him for  us were also dead.  His identity had always been a sticky point in the story, and my gut always knew there was something not quite right but my gut wasn’t always in charge. Sometimes I felt like my  head, heart, gut and pussy were all warring inside of me.  The gut didn’t win much.   The loss of a dream is no less of a loss than the loss of a person or a relationship.    Ambiguous grief is very very real.  The SIL suggested many months ago that  I grieve this as a death, but until  recently I didn’t have enough time and distance and perspective to be able to do that. I didn’t really know HOW to do that for a fantasy gone awry.  I think I have it figured out now.  I just have to get it all out in writing and see if my hunch is right.

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