Toss in your SO and kids going through your stuff and finding evidence of an LO. The last thing you want is to call into question the time you spent together.

Legacies can be a bitch.

I destroyed every piece of evidence of my LE/EA with LO #4. I have a few things from my 5 years with LO #2 but they’re so innocuous that no one is likely to connect them to LO #2. When it came to things like Xmas and birthday gifts, LO #2 positively agonized over them.

I even shredded the ticket stub from the Rat Pack Concert on March 16, 1988. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNcoNNl2Hls It was the last real date I had with LO #2. I started dating my wife 3 weeks before the concert. I’d asked LO #2 to go before I met my wife and, after 2 dates with my wife, saw no reason to dump LO #2 for her. However, my wife brought it up after we were married.

I could imagine her going through my things after I’m gone and finding the ticket stub. She wouldn’t need to see that.

Die with an LE on the books and your SO may always love you but the memories might be somewhat tarnished.

My uncle wasn’t a perfect man – he struggled with alcoholism for years, and he held some political views that most of us in the family found objectionable. But he lived his life with integrity – he was honest even in his struggles (sometimes almost to a fault), and he lived his life true to himself and true to the people who mattered to him, included his beloved partner (who in turn devotedly cared for him during the difficult last years of his life).

It made me imagine my own memorial service someday. Will my kids and grandkids and nieces and nephews all speak of me with love and respect? Will my SO be there hoping for reunion in the next life, with us having loved each other until the end of this life? Or will I throw all of that away chasing the high of being with my LO?

Limerent Emeritus sent me to this post a couple weeks ago when I was really struggling, and it’s become one of my favorites that I’ve re-read multiple times. I can’t trust my heart right now and I really can’t trust my mind either. So this post offers a simple but effective framework – don’t do what you want to do, don’t do what feels good, don’t do what you can rationalize away in your limerent brain, but simply commit to doing the thing you know is right and consistent with living with integrity, even if it hurts like hell at the time – the long term rewards will be worth the short term pain

Infidelity loomed large with LO #2. At the time we were dating, I think it drove her world view. I’ve posted about it. [Infidelity was pretty big in LO #4’s life, too, but I don’t know enough about her to know how deep it ran.]

LO #2 contacted me after 3 months NC after my successor allegedly cheated on her and she was looking for a shoulder to cry on. I was less than sympathetic. In one of our discussions, I told her that I never cheated on her. She replied,

“I know. I don’t think you’re capable of it.”

That can be taken several ways. It could be taken as a tribute to my integrity. Or, it was her subtle way of telling me that I wasn’t capable of cheating on her because I didn’t have the balls to cheat on her.

I have no idea which one it was. It’s another one of those inconsequential but annoying little questions life seems to throw at you. You never get an answer, not that an answer matters, but the question never goes away.

Yep

” This is the best I’ve come up with so far:

Making decisions on the basis of whether they will help you embody your ideals.” – “Overcoming limerence for good”

Don’t underestimate this.

In another post, I talked about a woman who showed up at my door at 11PM and asked to spend the night with me. At the time, I was still together with LO #2 on paper although she’d declined my marriage proposal and was living across the county. I declined the woman’s offer. While the woman was there, we talked about her cat. The next day I ran into her at the gym. I asked if her cat was glad to see her. She said, “I don’t know. I haven’t been home, yet.” I don’t know where or with whom she spent the night, but it wasn’t with me.

The woman and her BF eventually reconciled, married, and later divorced. I heard from a mutual acquaintance that she’d inquired about me after her divorce. But, that’s not the point.

A few months after she showed up at my door. We were at a wedding of some mutual friends. LO #2 and I were still together on paper. One of the bride’s maids was heavily flirting with me. The woman’s BF quoted the song, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” The woman slapped him on the arm and said, “Leave him alone. Some people have integrity.”

After I’d said goodbye to LO #4, she made a FB post that referenced integrity. She alluded to our situation but I don’t know if she was specifically thinking about me. I’d like to think she was.

If I can drive my legacy for those people not in my intimate circle, I want them to think of me as an “OK guy.” Integrity is part of that.