u/Guilty-Target5970

Discard after nearly a dozen years of us. Worse activation I've witnessed of him, so much so to the extent I recognized that the way he was was indicative of a problem as he was so far from himself that I couldn't just categorize it as upset or frustration or anything lesser than an actual issue. This is the beginning of the eighth week since discard which has included the greatest most intimate closeness I have felt with him for a very long time as well as a three hour conversation at his place that was the worst three hours of my life, simply trying to understand why it is and what it is and how it is that he would choose to separate us now. Then we were getting closer and he began to soften and open up and then a couple things transpired and now we've been no contact for around a week and a half. I'm dying simply just wanting to know what's going on in his mind. I mean this came out of nowhere and it has been 11 years almost 12...I can compose conjecture 101 different ways to explain and understand why he would be choosing to avoid me, but on the other hand, I'm just shocked and astonished that he has no curiosity.

I nearly want to suggest a texting dynamic that I could be a response board that swears will not erupt or press too heavily of emotional response.., like basically ask him if he'd be interested if I were essentially an AI of myself. He could explore and pick my brain without the fear of being attacked or otherwise...

The pain of being completely shut out from the man I love who proposed just a year ago is unbearable. I'm very worried about him. I feel as though he needs me. And the more I understand about this the more I can see how when I express the fullness of my heart and pain and confusion, it regresses him and I would be OK to reel that back to support him and to at least be able to talk and figure things out and be clearer for the both of us.

Can anyone offer suggestions of if it would even be OK to reach out and offers something and if so, what that could be and/or function as?

Thank you in advance,
C

I need to share my story with someone(s) genuinely educated on this. My family and friends are unwilling to fully hold and acknowledge what is happening with my relationship. My avoidant was nearly on the brink of return when I made the mistake of entrusting a close relative to be able to hold it as I was hoping to create a safety net once I shared this all with him. He's currently unaware of the full of dexterity of this and of clearly paired structural dissociation with amnesia. The last day I spoke with him in person I made the conscious choice not to interrupt or add any of my personal thoughts or prompt him whatsoever. In those 30 minutes he somehow, by the universe's humor in coincidence, had literally outlined what took me 30 days of 5-12 hours of intensive analysis work through research and studying and including multiple subscribed AI services to stumble upon; the findings being the conditions / disorders.

For my sake of memory and his own, whenever we (or I suppose he) would break up and reconnect, I would record our conversations and thank God I did so because now that I can compare my findings along with his unintended admission, I can very clearly see he's in a stage of active erasure I fear may establish permanency before we have the opportunity to genuinely level and have a conversation.

And our relationship has been no casual or surface-level connection. It has been life-changing, deeply passionate, and intrinsically entwined. I know my fiancé, and he is not at all himself these past two months since selecting separation.

I'm feverishly desperate to find someone with professional credentials to corroborate my experience and to prove to me that I am not crazy and I've found something very real and very wrong with the man I love. And to help guide me in best action / inaction moving forward. My ultimate goal is not reconciliation, it is to help him see what he is actively erasing. I am scared for him and whomever he finds in the future if this goes unaddressed. And I'm terrified if I let go, that I'll be taking from him what he has made very clear is his favorite in the world...which was me, not too many months prior to this shift.

Is there anyone here capable and willing to help me?

- Thank you, in advance.
<3

"I know this is incredibly painful, and I’m not pretending it isn’t. This has been heartbreaking for me too.

But I need you to understand that me stepping away does not mean our relationship meant nothing to me or that I see it as ruined or worthless. I will always care about what we shared and the life we built together.

At the same time, I can’t keep emotionally processing this at the level we have been. It’s too overwhelming for me, and I need space to heal and regulate myself.

I’m not trying to erase you or make you the villain. I just need this separation to be real."

"I just need this separation to be real." What does he mean by that? There wasn't any surrounding context, so he must be referring to the break up...but like...we've been co-designing it's dynamic, and just a few days ago he was on my bed saying he wants to keep hanging out and for us to find a way to do so while feeling good for both of us. So I'm confused.

Help!!

I imagine how my next fight for you could go. Waging battle against, "I already gave you so many chances. I already brought things to you so many times in so many ways." Yet you hadn't, truly. Your apprehension to rock the boat caused you to capsize the ship. Indirect suggestions, casual referencing, sprinkling hints intermingled in zero-risk typical, relaxed conversation...and I presume you may be counting these as your so many times in so many ways. And it's appeared before, "I guess I could have been more forward, more clear, more obvious."

Yes. You could have. You absolutely should have. You needed to.
If there are changes or shifts you need, or desperately desire to the degree their coming to fruition is of such degradation to the very foundation of the family we've formed and founded in forever...

You sit me down. You make it VERY clear. You ensure there is no possible way in fucking hell I have a microscopic inkling of a way to say, "I didn't know it was that serious. I was unaware that was...a, a for real, like, thing."
You firmly, clearly communicate that need.
Not at the tail of one of your boils.
Not in zero-risk. Not relaxed. Not casual. Not veiled. Not sprinkled. TELL ME. MAKE CERTAIN I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU ARE HOLDING THAT MY ACTION OR INACTION COULD LEAD TO YOU ENDING US.

And the 'many ways' that exist are the many ways you've already formed a false sense of 'done' with it. Because of what I've outlined above. Because of the many many times you turned it over in your own mind.

Your beautiful, precious mind. The same mind that is subject to redirection and rescripting due to your joystick voices, and avoiding having to fight that to avoid your "ricocheting in my own skin."
Because you've built a body of accessing these 'reasons' to break us that feel so real, but the reality is you did not access them with me. You outsourced. To yourself, with your mother, my mother, possibly your friends, perhaps in notes and letters as I am, now.
But not with me.
And you're seeing this, again.

It's leaking in small, glittering moments. "I guess I could been more clear."
Yes, you really could have. And now you have me shattered, searching through over a decade of our out-of-this-world love, begging begging begging just to understand. Just to have you look at these pieces and tell me, "Yes, this fit there, and this is why I broke it."

But your guilt keeps your sweet, honest, adorably fragile truth of your heart guarded and sectioned off. It's a terribly tragic turbulence you tuck away from me, and yourself. And your gatekeeper is so viscerally aware of my screaming at the edge of the drawbridge to just...let it down. Listen to me. Hear me. REMEMBER ME. See the ring on my finger. Reconnect to US. Stop fighting these illusionary walls built with nothing beyond, "residual trauma and defense mechanisms," - to use your exact words.

Trust me to guide you toward and walk with you through, "I don't even know why I am doing this." - Again, your own words.

"This hurts so much. It's not like the love is gone. I don't even know why I'm doing this."

I wish this weren't such a mess. And I understand how from every angle, you can see it's of your doing. So every possible way I can shed light on, causes a painful response, triggers your guilt, your shame, enlivens the emotional spark your plug has removed to protect you from overwhelm, while also functioning to wall off your connection to me.

And so you run. You hide. You build walls. You have "A fluff of bullshit," built around the man I'm still in love with, my sweet boy, fetal position, gripping his pillow, cornered in his own purgatory. He's the voice begging to know, "Even why (yourself) did this." And this is why as you're going through this most recent shutdown, the moments I do have you softened - the frames of fleeting flashes where I can feel you found - are so very vital.

They're the only chances I have for the man I love to hear me.
And that is the battle, the war I'm having to wage. And I know it's terrible to look at. And of course my hands are not clean of shortcomings and mistakes and hurting you...but the withstanding obstacle is the break itself. Genuine, mutual work can begin after.

But you have to talk with ME. Not yourself, the voices, our mothers, your friends, or me in passive forms. Actually me. Because, "The alternative is [you] leaving." My actions have never been performative. Your lens is skewed by taking anything it can to justify the unjustifiable (as far as I'm been made aware) ending of us. And I'm the only one who can guide you through clearing it, so long as I can find a frame of fleeting flash to find you.

This is hell. This breaks my heart over and over and over. And the way you've shaped, looking at it from the outside...makes it so much worse. I look like a desperate freak begging for a man who has purposefully put up keep out signs between us with boarded walls and red tape. Which you have. But not for the 'reasons' that wisp as vapors around the surface.

Nobody can see the flashes. Nobody can see unless I tell them. And it still sounds silly, looking at it. I sound like a crazy person. I feel like a crazy person.

I AM desperate. Because I am the only one with a clear view of my sweet boy stuck there. I didn't even need the times a wall had crumbled and he's reached out in broken tears and longing voice and grief and his own desperation to return. To understand. To ask the joystick voices to let go of their overriding you so he can get through the rubble and back to me.

Thank God I'm doing the work to make sense of the rubble; clearing a path of return as best I can alone. Thank God I'm standing right outside the purgatory. Where the burn is hottest and the terrain most jagged. But anything to make this transition easiest for you. That's love. THIS IS "SHOWING UP AS THE PARTNER YOU NEED" THAT YOU CONTINUE TO REFERENCE WITHOUT DEFINITION. So I've made my own definition and I committed. You are worth it.

---

Beyond metaphors, away from all the layers that compound this dynamic to exist..

Look at what I'm up against. Stop and remember I am your fiancee and that MEANS something. You felt enough to put this ring on my finger. It's me. I'm right here. And you can hear me. You can see me and hear me and feel me and understand that I am still so deeply entrenched in the rubble and maze of walls.

And you simply want me to push the eject button.
Fuck no. Absofuckinglutely not.
I agreed to this union, I wear this ring. I fucking love and adore you. That's why I stay. That's why I keep showing you the rubble as gently as I can in precarious caution not to trigger the alarms, in hopes to reach you. Look at the reality of this and trust that I SEE YOU, I SEE THIS, I SEE THAT YOU HAVE DONE THIS, AND I STILL WANT YOU. FUCK, I NEED YOU. If at the very least, to come across the rubble, and meet me on the other side of the drawbridge so we can TRULY talk. So I can talk to the you, inside. My sweet boy. Not the joystick voices.

I am giving commitment despite having no roadmap from you. I am giving incredible effort; while yours is to protect you from yourself, mine is to save you from yourself. And your watchtowers are not simple to get by. And they've been reinforced by you through our own mothers...and by its very construction when you look at it without knowing it for what it is.

And that's the nail to the coffin I'm yanking at with every damn tool I can find.

I'm not going to stop fighting, even if I have to fight with precisely balanced gentility towing the line between triggering deeper recession and showing you my open hands, offering guidance toward your return. I'm not going to give up just because it looks to everyone including the autopilot of yourself unless otherwise directed towards the reality I still exist outside the restructuring you've built - that you're actively hurting about this, not simply getting over it as a completed ending. I can't give up and let it go when I've heard you, and when I've seen how in pain the hidden depth - the truth of you is about all of this.

I, impossibly, cannot move until I see you standing in your full truth, the man I know you to be, and you allow us to truly, actually, while fully in yourself, talk. That is ALL this needs.

So in your journey to, "Be on my own and find myself," I do desperately pray you do find, and RETURN to yourself. So at the very least you see the man that through it all, TRULY sees you. And is still here. Confused as hell, scared as shit, bloodied by the jagged terrain and barbed wires. Pushed away by you, then a week later drawn in by you to the best night and morning we've shared in a very long time. Then two weeks later forcibly shoved further away than you've ever.

And now, still here.

Still in the mess, holding it all. Waiting for the moments where I can feel it's you I'm speaking with. Each time seems to bring you further toward yourself and to clear some of the mess.

It has just been so hard. And I mean...look at it. Babe really just level with me and loooook attt ittttt.

Bottom line. This is unfair. You know why. Return to yourself so you may return to this, with me. We need to clean this mess. I'm not asking that you be mine as I thought you were before this breakdown. I'm mature enough to hold the possibility of otherwise. However, this is not in any condition whatsoever that I know the truth of you could turn away from with any shred of integrity. Which is clearly why you are torn.

So get it together, Georgia. Get that peach in gear. Clean this shit up with me. I'm sick of crying. I'm sick of piecing the puzzle together alone, and of how my absolute everything is at this puzzle while you're getting high cities away and enjoying concerts we should be attending together and having friends watch OUR kittens while you're gone. Wake up. Get your cute chunky fingers on this puzzle and put it together WITH me. Then you decide whether this ring on my finger stays.
I'm exhausted. But actively living as though this reality isn't very much an active blacking out of the truth...ignoring is not absolving, and you know it. Get over here u lil squink and LET'S TALK, da furk?!?!

⁃	the guy you feel wasn't choosing you VERY FUCKING OBVIOUSLY choosing you despite literally the odds stacked against him. Tian. Home. Zaboofernoodlekinsiecakes. Your person. 

We needn't speak much to understand each other. Perhaps it isn't an indication of weakness, rather a nod to our ability to communicate above the spoken. And perhaps coming to this after nearly a dozen years, is testament to our cosmic connection. Perhaps this is the perfect time to learn how to speak. To exist on Earth as well as we naturally pair in the stars. To pull the moon from our skies, observing it together, feeling over each crater, jagged edge, stunning reflection of light. Until our hands meet and we can toss Miss Ting back up above till next time.

I want to learn you, really, deeply. The intricacies of your mechanics. It's been sensational simply swaying with our vibe. Now we've the opportunity for something new. Something closer, more Earthly, grounded.

Is this what you tell me you've been reaching for? I suppose I just had to grab some myself before I could join you.

Can we see each other?

💌

It will all be worth it. There's not a single desire more alive within me since this most recent misfortune of the joystick in your mind than to hear you say it. Not even for my sake. I've searched every day and night for the venom. And you came to me this week and shared an identical frame of yourself that I was terrified to show you that I've found as well.

How insanely coincidental we've both found your antidote while separated? You speak of space, being on your own, and living for yourself. And look...when we did this, we both on our own found the one thing that was keeping us apart and that proves there was never a "real" reason to ever be apart. The funniest part is, you're terrified to tell me, as well! Listen, zoofykins...If you lost your legs, it would be my honor to push ya around in your fancy wheelchair. Help you into bed. Lick your lil stubbins. (Lmao) You're still you. I still love you, legless or not!

So you imagine, disclosing this finding could at all change my feelings for you for the worst? When it's the one thing I've found in nearly a dozen years that completely explains everything? All of the blank parts that I've subconsciously buried have been able to resurface, sprout wings, and fly off into the disappearing sunset. All I want is for you to watch our sunrise.

Zoof, you know how deep we go. To the degree I’m brought to tears by that one ethereal gaze we know how to share. I am not blind to the soul of you. From Heaven to Earth, there you were. And right now, from Heaven to Hell, I feel where you have had to go.

My struggle is not with the decision itself, nor with any path you felt you had to take to survive. What has me bound is that the maps you’re showing me feel like resignation letters for an employer, not for the honor of the greatness we are. They’re bodiless, lifeless formalities entirely stripped of any mark of us. I know you, and I know that what you’re showing me right now isn’t the full truth of your heart. Something has fogged you over, and I can see it pulling you away from yourself.

I witness this shift in you. I don’t believe it’s something you’re choosing. I believe the weight of everything - the years, the caregiving, the pressure to hold it all together - has finally exceeded what your system can carry, and something in you had to fracture just to keep you standing. When that happens, the pieces of you that hold our love and our history get walled off. This is why you feel so strongly that you have to “find yourself” because the version of you that knows me, that knows us, is behind a door you can’t find right now. You look at me and you recognize who I am, but something in you draws a blank where there used to be warmth, and I think it’s doing that to protect you from a feeling too big to hold. I see my sweet boy in there, knees up to his chest in the corner, squeezing his pillow while these hurt, shielding pieces take the wheel.

I can only imagine how frightening it must feel to look at the love of your life and feel only a foggy confusion where there used to be foundation. When your sense of safety shifts like a Richter scale roller coaster of unpredictability, I understand why you’d want to jump off.

Each day since your walls reemerged, my system has been in constant, painful overdrive; cheeks flushed hot, stomach dropping, and nausea that makes me want to crawl out of my own skin. I am exerting monumental effort maintaining a semblance of function while my internal world is being pulled apart. I have survived the shaky “fuck you’s,” the risk of calling you back nine times in a row, balling my eyes out hunched over my phone hyperventilating and shaking and feeling as though I could fully lose you at any moment, the reality-shattering heartbreak breaker switch to being treated like a rotting burden by the man I’ve loved for nearly a dozen years. But it's all water off a duck's back when the focus is you finding your way back to the stable, stunning man I know is still in there. Nothing else calls to me compared to your wellbeing and our return to solid ground.

I am waiting for the real you - the one who would be flabbergasted to see how that breakup text was written. That text was an escape hatch, a way to leave me with nothing to hold so you could run from the overwhelm. I remember the phone call. The nine rings. And the middle of your breakdown when you finally said the truth: “This hurts so bad. It’s not like the love is gone. It’s still there.” I remember you saying, “Even I don’t know why I’m doing this.” That wasn’t a rejection of me. That was a cry for safety from a man whose own heart is telling him one thing while something deeper forces him to do another.

I’ve kept everything. Every sweet moment, every return, every time we found each other again. A part of me always knew to hold onto these little you-shaped crumbs for a moment exactly like this. I am going to be here, right on time, holding the light so you can see the path back home. And once you can see clearly again, whatever you decide will be real - and that’s all I’ve ever asked for.