Life for me is like babysitting a drunken toddler. On one hand it’s a toddler, something familiar that I know how to deal with, but on the other hand it’s drunk, screaming, and climbing the curtains showing me just how little control I have of it or the situation. *Please note no toddlers were harmed in the making of this metaphor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Case in point when I was young I wanted to be a paleontologist. I was going to be career oriented. Nothing else mattered – I had the college I wanted to go to picked out at age ten. But then at 12 I started having health problems and although I tried to tenaciously hold onto the dream I knew it was dead by the time I had to quit school due to those same health problems at 16. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What was left? Marriage? The idea of just settling down and letting a man take care of me<\/em> made every feminist nerve in my body scream. And yet I didn’t really have any other options. I’d tried different things over the years but they all failed spectacularly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So at 25 I gave into pressure when someone showed interest in me. I knew in the pit of my gut something was off about him and I loathed the fact his pursuing me had ended my closest friendship (with his ex wife.) But he was relentless spending all day everyday sending me e-mails, messages, and phone calls hungry for every last little detail about me. It was more than flattering it was downright intoxicating. I’d been love-bombed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was with him for five years and in addition to love bombing me he further sealed the deal with trauma bonding. We’d been through it all, nothing could kill our relationship! I was lovesick for him like a teenage Juliet. I would have taken a bullet for him or at least given him one of my kidneys. I spent many sleepless nights wondering what would happen if he died – would I follow from a broken heart? I felt like I would. My feelings for him were intense. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n During the breakup he was every bit as malicious as he’d once been loving which morphed him into a grotesque super villian. He rat-fucked my entire life so hard that by the end of it I was left with nothing of the life I had built – no home, no farm, no lover, even the vast majority of our shared contacts sided with him. I was left in such devastation that five years later I’m still not on my feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s been a LONG road to recovery and most of it I have spent alone. They say behind every fiercely independent woman there is a history of great trauma. It’s not a lie. I do everything <\/em>for myself and by myself which is probably precisely the reason I haven’t gotten as far as I should have. And I was lonely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stayed single because I didn’t trust myself to love again. If I felt that same intensity and infatuation I’m pretty sure I would have fled to the hills fearing losing myself again. This was not to mention I had such severe trust issues I couldn’t see myself truly sharing my life with someone, anyone, ever again. But humans are not meant to be alone. And believe me when you have as many health issues as I do you’re really <\/em>alone. Like a monk taking a vow of silence on top of a mountain alone. It had to break. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And so last December I started talking to someone new. They were lively and fun, had a great sense of humor, a number of common interests, and the highest emotional intelligence of anyone I’ve ever met. They were super <\/em>respectful of me almost to a fault. And so I gave it a shot. After months of talking online we finally met and I had a great time. Ever since it’s been pure chaos trying to schedule visits between my shit health, the pandemic, and the fact it’s a two and a half hour drive (one way) every time I visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We’ve had some great adventures and he’s really helped me be more social because WOW does he have a lot of friends. Game nights, TV viewings, D&D campaigns, road trips, it never ends. This has stimulated my excessive need for novelty and I love it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n So what’s the problem you ask? The problem is when we’re not doing something crazy, when we’re home with just each other relaxing or doing normal at-home couple things. I feel like an absolute shit in saying it but I’m halfway between numb and bored. I have grown very fond of him, care very much for him, and deffinately love him on a friend level but romantically? I just don’t know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I never got butterflies in my stomach. I never felt nervous. I never went through that first initial phase of a relationship that’s all touchy and lovey dovey and makes everyone around us roll their eyes. And now I deffinately don’t feel the same intensity as I did with my narcissistic ex, although that’s probably good. I feel… comfortable, which is a plus… but beyond that I just don’t know. I’m having a hard time telling if I’m in love or just love him on some lesser level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’m demisexual – only feeling sexual attraction to those I already know intimately as a friend which further complicates matters because maybe I just got off on the wrong foot skipping the friend step. Either way this relationship has been riddled with guilt because I have always felt he loves me more than I him. But it might not be that – this might just be what normal love without a shit ton of trauma bonding feels like. Tame, docile, boring. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n I have no answers. So for now I just keep living…<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What does love feel like without lovebombing and trauma bonding? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1184,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,3,4,19,378,24,43,44,625,600,434,429,321,322,233,131,425,143,144,430,632,423,426,424,287,265,175,631,194,583,443,582,366,439,214,216],"class_list":["post-1182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abuse","tag-abusive-relationship","tag-acceptance","tag-bad-relationship","tag-becoming-whole","tag-being-happy","tag-chronic-health-issues","tag-chronic-health-problems","tag-chronic-illess-in-a-relationship","tag-chronic-illness-and-isolation","tag-crazy-ex","tag-dealing-with-a-narcissist","tag-emotional-intensity","tag-figuring-things-out","tag-life-experiance","tag-life-in-my-thirties","tag-living-with-a-narcissist","tag-loss","tag-love","tag-love-bombing","tag-love-life","tag-narcissist","tag-narcissistic-abuse","tag-narcissistic-personality-disorder","tag-new-life","tag-personal-relationships","tag-psychological-effects","tag-response-to-trauma","tag-single","tag-surviving-a-narcissistic-relationship","tag-surviving-abuse","tag-surviving-narcisstic-abuse","tag-toxic-relationships","tag-trauma-bonding","tag-twisted","tag-when-life-doesnt-go-as-planned","wpcat-1-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/10\/Screenshot_20201031-160816_One-UI-Home.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paOpxN-j4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1182\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/the-boneless-chicken-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}