Hi, Scarlett - I can pick up with you if you like. I totally agree with you about the amount of wisdom and caring in Heather! All the staff here learn a lot from Heather - speaking just for myself, I'd say bucketloads, really - so I hope some of what you like so much gets filtered down
As with any of us here, if you'd like different input at any point, that's absolutely fine. If you'd like to know a bit more about Heather and their career, there's
http://www.scarleteen.com/the_scarletee ... volunteers , and then there's
http://www.scarleteen.com/about_scarleteen which is more about the place as a whole, but Heather is the founder, so.
Btw, I am also upset about the political situation, even though I'm insulated (by my location) from the domestic implications. My biggest of thoughts are with all of you - and likely will be for a long time - who are upset and don't have that insulation.
I think there's a lot of very smart and helpful stuff in your reflections. One thing I'd observe is that your interactions with this guy seem very much to have all been on his terms: he pops back into your life when he feels like it, when it suits him, for what he wants. I don't hold with the notion that relationships automatically involve sacrifice, but they
do involve negotiating and giving. Receiving something - kinds of communication that work for us, respect and compassion, a relationship structure that also suits us,
something - is a thing we all deserve in any kind of relationship, and I'm not hearing that from him at all. That's pretty selfish and disrespectful in my book, and you deserve better.
Someone hopping in and out, rarely and unpredictably, can also function as a big hook to keep us hanging on. There's
just enough of a tiny sign, just often enough, that there might be something for us with this person that we end up more determined and more committed to keep trying and maybe someday we'll get the result we were hoping for. It's a hard thing to break out, and a hard thing to let go of definitively. But truly, when something and someone has been the same way for a good period of time, there's no reason to think it'll ever be different.
You asked in your first post about moving on and moving forward - I have a few thoughts that might help. When someone's been in your head and your daydreams for a long time, part of moving away from that is actually habit-breaking. When someone, and maybe-someday-being-with-that-someone, has been in our head so much, some of that is because of habit. So, one thing that can really help is to create some new dreams. Take some time to think about and create some dreams: what do you want in your life, just for you? When you're wanting to think about good possible things in the future, what are those for you? For this, I'd suggest you just think about you, rather than you-and-a-someone, to help you get used to focusing on yourself and your own happiness. Then, when this guy pops up in your thoughts - and he will for a while, and that's okay - you can say to yourself something like, huh, okay, but no, that's an old dream that wasn't working out and wasn't being good for me, let's swap it out for a newer better dream. And swap it out in your head for one of the things you've decided you'd rather think about.
With time, you should find that you end up thinking about him less, and that it gets easier to not think about him. It's okay if it's hard for a while! Letting go of something we've wished for is a hard thing to do. Too, I don't think you're on the older end of this learning curve, at all: there are plenty of people, of all ages, who have a mighty hard time letting go of their wish about who someone else is and how that someone else would behave.
No matter what kinds of sex someone has had before, if they're new to sex with you, they won't know what
you like. So, you always have something new and significant to bring, and your wishes and interactions will always be equal to theirs. Too often, I think, sex is seen as a skill: that's actually pretty inaccurate, and instead, it's a shared, co-operative activity. Someone can learn things about what they tend to like as an individual in partnered sex, and take that into future interactions with future partners, sure; but they'll know absolutely squat about the kind of partnered sex you both might create together!
I'd also pick up on the thing you said about being afraid of things not working out, of "investing time in something meaningless". Can you talk a bit more about what those things look like to you, and what's frightening about them?
. At this point I'm just kind of hoping the wheels of government turn very slowly and he isn't able to achieve most of what is on his insane agenda, followed by a replacement in 4 years haha