Lol, Speedwagon.

I can relate, this blog post is one of my favourites.
Not much time to write, but I want to remind you that if you start to engage with her again, it will be the same frustrating pattern- you do all the initiating work and she‘ll be passive, and at some point this will frustrate you on top of guilty conscience etc that you will try to disengage again etcezc
Maybe better to stay off that roundabout.

Distractions are key, but I can tell you with certainty the last thing I ever want to do is a Windows reboot…lol. limerence may actually be preferable to that.

Strategies to resist temptation:

1. My resolve is not as strong as I think it is and I will get sucked back in…
2. …then I will feel like crap
3. And will have to re-start the hard LC slog all over again
4. I have my pride to consider
5. I dont want to appear needy
6. I dont want to appear nuts
7. I have my pride to consider!

And most importantly
8. Its the wrong thing to do (dishonest to my SO)

Best wishes Speedy, I hear you on this post today. What we both need is to channel Limerent Emeritus (and maybe do a windows reboot or something as a distraction)

After a few months now of being actively personally disengaged from LO, I have worked through the worst of the grief. I am in a stable, non-relationship with LO. Our only interactions are work related, and though the interactions can feel warm at times, with some banter and joking around, and smiles and laughing, they never stray into personal sharing. I make sure not to go there. In fact our personal talk is so dead right now I couldn’t tell you what LO has done for the last about 8 weekends and probably her the same with me. I sometimes wonder if she is avoiding knowing about me as much as I am about her. Neither of us ask anything personal of the other or offer up anything personal about ourselves. It’s actually a little weird.

That all to say, I have felt better in last few weeks than I have in a long time and it’s getting to the point now where the little voice in my head is saying that starting up some personal interactions might be nice. She probably misses it and is hoping I initiate. A connection with her might be welcome. I can handle it now. Well, no, no I cannot. It will just open up turmoil and distress again that I don’t want to deal with. I can see how flimsy my stable emotional state is right now and I want to do everything in my control to maintain it and strengthen it more which means not rocking the boat.

This blog entry is a great reminder about the pitfalls of limerence recovery and the long road to final recovery if such a thing exists.

“He could keep to a bad resolution forever, but he couldn’t keep to a good one a month.” – Mark Twain, “Letters from the Earth”

I went to bed the night before with the best of intentions. Since there was no really legitimate reason to send the email aside from a bad habit I have of taking a whack at a hornet’s nest, and my “Magic 8-Ball” was on my desk at work, I decided I’d need a “sign.” A dream, handwriting on the wall, a burning bush, Angel of the Lord on the end of the bed, something. I can’t quite kick the numinous aspect of limerence. Why take personal responsibility when you can blame it on the Cosmos?

I woke up, Nada. I was reading the comics and drinking coffee. The horoscopes are on the page with the comics. This was my horoscope (no joke):

“You are likely to speak your mind. The recipient of your thoughts could be quite touched. You are not so often so direct yet sensitive. You words will be remembered for quite some time.”

So, I popped off an short email congratulating her on her anniversary. It got a reaction but no response. A few hours later, she posted the anniversary on her social media site and said she hadn’t remembered until a former member emailed and reminded her. I presume that was me.

In another blog, DrL says that if what you’re doing has an illicit feel to it, it’s a relapse. More than a week later, I don’t feel it was illicit at all. It feels more like the indifference of #2 above than the guilty pleasure of #3. It also has the feel of taking care of some “unfinished business,” although I didn’t think I had any of that left.

“Overall, you’ve got to ask yourself how important it is that you can be friends with an old LO. What are you proving to yourself? How much would they add to your life, really?”

LO #4 has a significant professional anniversary coming up on Saturday. Based on her response when I asked her to delete my account on her website, I was tempted to wish her a happy anniversary.

What am I proving to myself? She’s still a guilty pleasure. (That’s really crappy.) There’s some things going on in my life that I’d like a distraction from. Unlike last time, they’re not related to my marriage and my wife and I are being brought closer together by working on them.

But, after re-reading this, I’m pretty sure I won’t. There’s no upside to it. I’m not concerned she won’t respond, I’m concerned she will and I’ll be right back in the mine field it took me 9 months to get out of and undo 3 years of No Contact (2 early relapses not withstanding.)

I recently got invited to a neighborhood Dungeons & Dragons group. It may be geeky but it’s definitely better than thinking about LO #4.

I don’t want to imply that all LOs are Borderlines. In my case, I have 2 professional opinions that LO #2 had either BPD/NPD or both but that’s beyond the scope of this site.

One therapist I worked with pegged me as a co-dependent but another said I wasn’t co-dependent. The circumstances of my relationships with LOs #2 and #4 didn’t support co-dependence but limerence fit them both.

If you can see past the Narcissist/Borderline labels in Schreiber’s articles and replace them with Unsuitable Partners, you can still learn a lot about yourself from them.

It is possible that my LO is a Borderline, but I am not certain.

I did self-diagnose myself (via the almighty internet) as co-dependent before stumbling onto the term “limerent” earlier this year. Some characteristics of co-dependency do apply to my LO relationship.

Thanks for sharing, Landry. The “mid-life crisis” fits me as well.