Reuniting on October 12, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

Help me oBG-Kenobi, you’re my only hope! Okay, a year ago I moved to New York City from California to begin graduate school. I left behind a guy there with who I had a very drawn out, sticky, co-dependent relationship for about 5 years. Here’s the background–we started dating senior year of high school. While we had similar interests, what kept us together was this unhealthy nurse-patient relationship with a constant cycle of fighting and breaking up to keep things interesting. He has a disease that’s making him slowly go blind–it’s sort of like a progressive tunnel-vision. And that was diagnosed when he was 13 (sometime around when he had just seen Top Gun and decided that he wanted to be an Air Force pilot) and then he was declared legally blind when he was 16, right after he’d signed up to get his driver’s permit. So far he hasn’t learned to cope–no disability training and his old room is filled with model fighter planes. Spooky.

But with sheer will and determination he’s pursued interests in athletics and music which you would have never thought possible. The down side is that he always plays himself as a victim and constantly alienates his friends with his “everyone is out to get me” attitude. I’m sure if he would ever consent to seeing a psychologist, a lot of this behavior wouldn’t come as a surprise. So my role in this relationship is that I’m the only one who really understands him and he was incredibly emotionally dependent on me. For me it was a “I needed to be needed” thing. The problem was that he has no ability to handle conflict–arguments escalated quickly, he could be so easily provoked it was laughable, but what wasn’t so funny was how quick he was to say cruel and terrible things to me when he was angry. My way of handling it was to be a peacemaker or avoid conflict entirely–for a long time I had no spine to fight back, and anyway, it was easy to anticipate what would anger him (ie everything). As a result, there were a lot of things I never told him because I knew how he’d react (like that he wasn’t the first person I slept with even though he thinks we were eachother’s first–could it get any worse??). So for 5 years we were on again, off again, each time I would forgive and hope/think that maybe he’d changed. Yes I had low self esteem in my relationships. We were together when I decided to go to New York for graduate school and he was considering coming out here after he finished an extra year of college. But by the time I was ready to leave I had a few epiphanies and realized that enough was enough and now was the time to start over. I told him that I was going to New York and I am on my own now. And that was *supposed* to be goodbye for good. It has been one year and I had not heard from him. The time and distance has allowed me to heal and understand the mistakes both he and I made. But now out of the blue I receive an e-mail from him–HE’S MOVED HERE!!!

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