Thank you, Anita 🙂 I value your words.

It was a very special relationship for a number of reasons. It had a ‘fairy-tale’ beginning, for one thing. I wrote a novel, loosely autobiographical, about the struggles of living with borderline personality disorder. I belonged to an online writers’ site at the time, and one day decided to post a short passage. This was on precisely the same day that a young French woman, who also wrote, and was trying to find English-speaking writers’ sites, logged onto the site for the first time. And mine was the first post she read. Having similar issues herself as those portrayed in the passage, she felt the post was speaking to her directly. She got in touch to find out more about the novel, and I mentioned I was having it published a few months from then. She asked her to let me know, so I did. She purchased a copy when it came out, then got in touch again… and we continued a long and intense correspondence – getting more and more intimate – over the next few months. Both being vulnerable people, and loners, and both having the same issues, we came to depend on one another more and more. Eventually, she came over to meet me. The connection was tremendous and overwhelming. Neither of us had known anything like it. Bear in mind, too – she was 27 at the time, and I was 55. But we adored each other. Within a month, she’d given up her job and home near Paris and came over here to live with me. She had no money, so living together (I had some savings at the time and could keep her) was the only option.

It was great for 6 or 8 months. But in that time, many tensions crept in because of our differences. I’m very neat and ordered (an aspect of my Asperger’s), and become anxious with disruption. She was untidy. She had moods which conflicted with mine. Sometimes she just wanted space and to be alone – which, although I understood it because I am the same – I nevertheless mistook for her shunning me. There are many, many other examples where our differences brought us to misunderstandings and clashes. In the end, after about 8 months of this, and with both of us getting more and more frustrated with the fact that our circumstances weren’t changing (we were both working, but not earning enough to be able to afford to move, and we both realised we needed much more space because of our needs), things started to go wrong. We fought more.

So… I started to drink more to cope with the anxiety this was producing, she started to shut off more from me, and we fought more and more. It got to the stage where we were two people simply sharing the same space. It was bad.

But…. I still loved her hugely. She, in all my years and relationships, will always remain the special love. And I knew that she loved me, even though I chose to ignore the fact that my behaviour was increasingly alienating her from me. And I just took her love for granted. I took her for granted. I just always expected the love to overcome everything. It’s a true measure of how out of touch and focus I was that I was blind to the inevitable. The more she detached from me as a protection, the more frustrated and irrational I became. Add drink to that, and there you are.

The rest is history. I still have very strong feelings for her. But she has none left for me. I damaged her too much. We’re both damaged by it, of course – but her more so, I feel. She’s suffered much trauma at the hands of others in her short life, but she came into this – given all the foregrounding we had before we actually met – with total trust for me, and all her defences down.

We both knew from the beginning that there were risks. We both knew there was a good possibility that we’d hurt one another. Neither of us really expected this, though.

The other thing is… when you’re in the very thick of it, it’s difficult to either see out or properly see what’s happening – and the pressure we were both feeling to make it work when it was failing finally destroyed it.

I’ll always regret losing her. But at least never regret – and nor will she, I think – that we tried. It had to happen. And maybe it was doomed from the start.

But it had to happen.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by Tom Seagrave.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by Tom Seagrave.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by Tom Seagrave.