Journal 7/13/09

I am scared to death to tell P this: I cannot handle her relationship with M. She needs to stop seeing her. I am not okay with this. This outside relationship threatens me. I am scared to tell her because I feel that this requires her to make a choice: M or me. I am afraid that her choice will be M which would devastate me.

P will be upset and hurt. She will say that I gave my permission for this to occur. That is true. Unfortunately I have been lying to myself and to her about how I feel. She will say that she had the same problems 9 years ago. I will say that I see that she had problems 9 years ago. I will also say that I ended that relationship after 2 months and that neither of us looked outside of the relationship again.
We have not practiced what we preached: we preached embracing an open relationship but did not actually do that on a continuing basis. Each of us has had our time and chance. It does not work. This needs to end.
P will say that she is “in love” with M. My only response is that this is your emotion and your response. I cannot change that. I am sorry that you are this committed to M. I am sorry that you did not put a limit on your emotional connection to M. However, it does not change the fact that I am not okay with this relationship and it needs to stop.
What happens if I tell P this? She can attempt to reason and negotiate with me. Unfortunately I have been trying to negotiate with myself and my feelings for the last 4 months. You see how well that has worked out. I have become angry, intentionally hurtful (emotional and physical), destructive of myself/P/us, and overall my functioning has decreased in all areas of my life including work and personal friendships. There is little to no room for negotiation because I am not “there” at all: either earlier or now. Furthermore, I cannot discuss whether or not if this relationship had been a threesome as initially discussed would make a difference. This is not how the relationship worked out, we are not there now and that is not what happened. I can guess, based on my impressions of the evening we had together, that I might have been okay with occasionally adding M to our relationship, but I am not okay with what I see as losing P to M.
Options: P will choose M. This is a distinct possibility and the one that I immediately go to when thinking about my relationship with P. This is the manifestation of the borderline: I pick and embrace the most catastrophic end result and make that the reality. Perhaps the option that appears more likely is that P will be angry, but also that she will be recognize what she already knows but won’t admit: I am not okay with this and that she must stop seeing M for the good of our relationship and because she has stated over and over and over again that she is committed to us as a couple and does not want to see 13 years of relationship end. A final option is that P chooses me but harbors such intense anger and hurt that eventually it destroys the relationship. This is a possibility and one that needs to be considered. However, it is certainly reasonable that P will be both hurt and angry but will get over it or not, as she chooses to. I cannot choose what P feels or doesn’t feel. I cannot help the fact that my announcement will cause both her and M significant hurt. I can only speak the truth of what I see, feel, and need. I need to then let go. It is up to P to choose to deal with her feelings as she sees fit. Regardless of the outcome, I cannot return to something resembling “normal” and deal with myself, my issues, my failings, and my contribution to the decline in our relationship if I do not speak the truth, even if it hurts and causes a lot of immediate pain to both P and M. I am going to say this because it is the truth, not because I am trying to be manipulative.