Rose letter - November 2019
April 2017
My Dearest Catherine,
Thank you for making the huge decision to return to our partnership and try to create a family with me. Thank you for working to open up your heart again to me over the past 10 months, and for checking in regularly as my own own sexual energy has cooled over that long period of waiting and hoping things will work out for us. At first, I expected we could pick up where we had left off, and I have been so sad that we have essentially been starting our romantic relationship over, despite our huge love for each other.
Thank for you checking in with me every month, and sometimes weekly, to see if I am still feeling my love for you and still wanting to work toward creating family with you. I have always said yes, for my love has never diminished and I have remained steadfast in wanting to realize our dream of being family together, even as I have struggled to reignite my own dwindling passions in the face of your initial harshness and lingering lack of emotional and physical availability.
Recently, when you asked if I had moved to a place where I felt more like friends than romantic partners, I said “no”, but that answer expressed more my own desire than the reality of my body. This morning, I suggested we experiment with ways to wake up my sexual desire for you, and that too is an expression of my desire that things will work out for us. Both are expressions of the doubts I have been increasingly feeling about our relationship.
As I have said on many occasions now, my trust in our relationship is seriously shaken, so eroded and uncertain in fact that I feel like crying. I am scared for us. There is a clear line between my current crisis of faith and your violation of boundary around being a single father. I know you have backed away from those statements, but your insistence at the time that I be an equal co-parent even though you had deep doubts about staying together shook be to my core.
I can no longer consider raising a child with you as my life partner, not because you are unwilling in this moment, but because that does not feel like a real option. Only the possibility of that reality is available to me, and our discontentment with our relationship over time (either yours or mine or both of ours) in terms of our mutual commitment to our individual flexibility and how we spend our time, as well as our struggling sexual connection, all combine to shut my body down in the face of conceiving a child with you. And how can I argue with it. Much as I came to accept that your body could not open to me until your heart opened up again, I must accept my own body and where it has come to in the face of this loss of safety and shared vision. I do not like it. I did not want it. But refusing to look at it and accept it is folly.
What should we do in the face of it? One option is to give me more time. But you do not have more time. And the year I have allotted to come back together is quickly running out. More importantly, my body is not wanting more time. She is looking outward, and worlds that may yet be that feel more exciting and less scary to me. A year ago, I could not imagine a world without you that was less scary or more fulfilling. Now, my body has moved through the fear and let go the desire that you could not return for so long. Now my body is curious to move outward and explore. And I would offer to do that with you, but you have no desire for that level of commitment and shared exploration, so I will not even ask. Moreover, I could not trust any other answer than what I expect, for you are well known to me and I know your desires change easily.
In all the years of our intermittent togetherness, in which you broke up with me multiple times, I have never broken up with you, have only left you at your request, mostly stayed away from you at your request, and have mostly come back to you at your request. I have never broken up with you, as I have been operating from some cultural programming that says love never waivers or gives up on another, is always willing to return to the other, is steadfast even in the midst of doubts. It has caused me to question and surrender my own boundaries over the years, boundaries which inevitably have only reasserted themselves now. Finally, I have surrendered and entered completely into the work of co-creating family with you. And for reasons mostly related to feeling unsafe, on the occasions where both of us want to have sex at the same time, it feels anemic, lacking in vitality, and one or both of us usually regret it. You are my bestest snuggle buddy and most satisfying domestic partner ever, but we are having difficulty becoming romantic partners again despite everything we are putting into it. Now it is I who want to pull back and refrain from being sexual until I am in touch with myself and my heart can open up again. You do not have another 10 months for me to now do the work of coming back into heart-open connection with you. And so for the first time, out of love for you and respect for my own organic truth, I am breaking up with you. I stuck by Nicole for years longer than she or I wanted and she had to become cruel to dislodge me from her life. And while I could imagine sticking by you, I remain seriously concerned it is not what you want and I have even had to admit to myself it seems not to be what I am wanting.
This is not how I envisioned my life unfolding, not what I sought or wanted at all. And I am afraid, because loss of relationship is terrifying to me. I am not angry with you for taking so long to come in that our plans could not materialize. And I pray you will not be angry with me for honoring the evolving truth of my body, just as we honored the truth of your heart and body for all those many months. In the many months that you turned away from intimacy with me, my body adapted and turned away from you. Even as you have begun to open up to me, she has been wary and uneasy. Everytime we make love, you seem mostly concerned with whether I came inside you, rather than love for its own sake and the sake of each other. I no longer believe in my body that you want to be with me. I know you want to have a child. That is very clear. But we don’t seem to be together for any other purpose. I saw a child as part of a package called family… not the sole end in itself. And I only signed up for the whole package… which I no longer believe is really available. I am concerned that the intimacy we experience now feels anemic and that it will not get better, especially not with the stress and exhaustion of child-rearing. It’s not that I don’t just believe it in my head, because I can sometime fool my head into believing what I want. I no longer believe in my body, and my body will not be fooled by me. I am at a loss for what to do other than to follow her as she makes her own way to wherever she is taking me.
I am incredibly sad. And I am afraid to give up on what I have worked so hard to create. I have so wanted to make this work out for us. I have spent much effort, many thousands of dollars and even sought to bend my children (unsuccessfully) to my will. All the promises I have made I have sought to bring about with earnest and sustained effort. Even all those times you did not want me to touch you, I learned to restrain myself and even went so far as to produce sperm for you to put inside yourself. Even when my children would not come live with us, I worked day after day to prepare a place to entice them to eventually come. Even after giving up heart callings to make more time with you, it was not enough for you. I have failed in every regard, and I am not surprised that you are often not happy with me, and that deep down it feels like you still hesitate to be with me. We cannot create a family based on that, and we should not try. I’m realizing that with my head, what I have apparently begun to know viscerally in my body. How can we do otherwise now, but to follow where our wiser parts want to lead us…
I ask you to forgive me, though I do not know what you should forgive me for.
My Dearest Catherine,
Thank you for making the huge decision to return to our partnership and try to create a family with me. Thank you for working to open up your heart again to me over the past 10 months, and for checking in regularly as my own own sexual energy has cooled over that long period of waiting and hoping things will work out for us. At first, I expected we could pick up where we had left off, and I have been so sad that we have essentially been starting our romantic relationship over, despite our huge love for each other.
Thank for you checking in with me every month, and sometimes weekly, to see if I am still feeling my love for you and still wanting to work toward creating family with you. I have always said yes, for my love has never diminished and I have remained steadfast in wanting to realize our dream of being family together, even as I have struggled to reignite my own dwindling passions in the face of your initial harshness and lingering lack of emotional and physical availability.
Recently, when you asked if I had moved to a place where I felt more like friends than romantic partners, I said “no”, but that answer expressed more my own desire than the reality of my body. This morning, I suggested we experiment with ways to wake up my sexual desire for you, and that too is an expression of my desire that things will work out for us. Both are expressions of the doubts I have been increasingly feeling about our relationship.
As I have said on many occasions now, my trust in our relationship is seriously shaken, so eroded and uncertain in fact that I feel like crying. I am scared for us. There is a clear line between my current crisis of faith and your violation of boundary around being a single father. I know you have backed away from those statements, but your insistence at the time that I be an equal co-parent even though you had deep doubts about staying together shook be to my core.
I can no longer consider raising a child with you as my life partner, not because you are unwilling in this moment, but because that does not feel like a real option. Only the possibility of that reality is available to me, and our discontentment with our relationship over time (either yours or mine or both of ours) in terms of our mutual commitment to our individual flexibility and how we spend our time, as well as our struggling sexual connection, all combine to shut my body down in the face of conceiving a child with you. And how can I argue with it. Much as I came to accept that your body could not open to me until your heart opened up again, I must accept my own body and where it has come to in the face of this loss of safety and shared vision. I do not like it. I did not want it. But refusing to look at it and accept it is folly.
What should we do in the face of it? One option is to give me more time. But you do not have more time. And the year I have allotted to come back together is quickly running out. More importantly, my body is not wanting more time. She is looking outward, and worlds that may yet be that feel more exciting and less scary to me. A year ago, I could not imagine a world without you that was less scary or more fulfilling. Now, my body has moved through the fear and let go the desire that you could not return for so long. Now my body is curious to move outward and explore. And I would offer to do that with you, but you have no desire for that level of commitment and shared exploration, so I will not even ask. Moreover, I could not trust any other answer than what I expect, for you are well known to me and I know your desires change easily.
In all the years of our intermittent togetherness, in which you broke up with me multiple times, I have never broken up with you, have only left you at your request, mostly stayed away from you at your request, and have mostly come back to you at your request. I have never broken up with you, as I have been operating from some cultural programming that says love never waivers or gives up on another, is always willing to return to the other, is steadfast even in the midst of doubts. It has caused me to question and surrender my own boundaries over the years, boundaries which inevitably have only reasserted themselves now. Finally, I have surrendered and entered completely into the work of co-creating family with you. And for reasons mostly related to feeling unsafe, on the occasions where both of us want to have sex at the same time, it feels anemic, lacking in vitality, and one or both of us usually regret it. You are my bestest snuggle buddy and most satisfying domestic partner ever, but we are having difficulty becoming romantic partners again despite everything we are putting into it. Now it is I who want to pull back and refrain from being sexual until I am in touch with myself and my heart can open up again. You do not have another 10 months for me to now do the work of coming back into heart-open connection with you. And so for the first time, out of love for you and respect for my own organic truth, I am breaking up with you. I stuck by Nicole for years longer than she or I wanted and she had to become cruel to dislodge me from her life. And while I could imagine sticking by you, I remain seriously concerned it is not what you want and I have even had to admit to myself it seems not to be what I am wanting.
This is not how I envisioned my life unfolding, not what I sought or wanted at all. And I am afraid, because loss of relationship is terrifying to me. I am not angry with you for taking so long to come in that our plans could not materialize. And I pray you will not be angry with me for honoring the evolving truth of my body, just as we honored the truth of your heart and body for all those many months. In the many months that you turned away from intimacy with me, my body adapted and turned away from you. Even as you have begun to open up to me, she has been wary and uneasy. Everytime we make love, you seem mostly concerned with whether I came inside you, rather than love for its own sake and the sake of each other. I no longer believe in my body that you want to be with me. I know you want to have a child. That is very clear. But we don’t seem to be together for any other purpose. I saw a child as part of a package called family… not the sole end in itself. And I only signed up for the whole package… which I no longer believe is really available. I am concerned that the intimacy we experience now feels anemic and that it will not get better, especially not with the stress and exhaustion of child-rearing. It’s not that I don’t just believe it in my head, because I can sometime fool my head into believing what I want. I no longer believe in my body, and my body will not be fooled by me. I am at a loss for what to do other than to follow her as she makes her own way to wherever she is taking me.
I am incredibly sad. And I am afraid to give up on what I have worked so hard to create. I have so wanted to make this work out for us. I have spent much effort, many thousands of dollars and even sought to bend my children (unsuccessfully) to my will. All the promises I have made I have sought to bring about with earnest and sustained effort. Even all those times you did not want me to touch you, I learned to restrain myself and even went so far as to produce sperm for you to put inside yourself. Even when my children would not come live with us, I worked day after day to prepare a place to entice them to eventually come. Even after giving up heart callings to make more time with you, it was not enough for you. I have failed in every regard, and I am not surprised that you are often not happy with me, and that deep down it feels like you still hesitate to be with me. We cannot create a family based on that, and we should not try. I’m realizing that with my head, what I have apparently begun to know viscerally in my body. How can we do otherwise now, but to follow where our wiser parts want to lead us…
I ask you to forgive me, though I do not know what you should forgive me for.
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