Rekindling an old flame?

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I've been living in Northern Nevada since 2009.
Last November, the relationship I've had with my partner here ended, in a highly traumatic, painful way.

Since then, I've largely been very "stuck", despite some spurious attempts to find a new path in life.

Last night, I spoke on the phone with an ex in upstate New York, with the initial intention being to catch up on what's been happening in our lives since the last time we spoke in January of this year.
The call lasted nearly six hours, ending at 3AM, her time.

We were together for a year, in 2006. She's been through a LOT in the intervening years (as have I). We are about 7 months apart in age.

When we first resumed talking on the phone in early 2021, shortly after my ASD diagnosis, it was just as if we had broken off in the middle of a long conversation way back when we parted in January 2007, then simply resumed the conversation, seamlessly.
She is by far the easiest person to talk to that I've ever known. Neither of us seems to feel the need to have our "filters" turned up high, so we just allow our stream of consciousness to flow with minimal translation, and that seems to be our communication style.

Our in-person "reunion" in January of this year, while I was visiting friends in the Northeast US was even better. We spent 24+ hours in pretty much non-stop conversation, catching up on the winding and rocky roads that we had each traveled in the 16 years since we last laid eyes upon each other.

She got an ADHD diagnosis about ten years ago, which places her in the "neurodivergent" realm, like me, and I'm 95% sure that she's also autistic. She is not yet ready to accept that, and I'm not willing to "push" her towards it. She'll find her own way there, if she chooses to find that information useful. For her own part, she seems to be motivating me to take a second look at (thus far) undiagnosed ADHD symptoms in myself.

Before our telephone conversation yesterday, she had talked to her friend about an idea she had about me.
To make a long story short, at the end of the six hour call, she made the offer to me for me move in with her. I've been thinking of little else since then, and am very strongly considering it, difficult though the move will be.

I didn't ask her to make me this offer, but getting back together with her has been on my mind (though in a very remote, theoretical way) since we spoke on the phone back in early 2021, and these thoughts were greatly magnified when I visited her in January of this year.

We are both VERY much different, more "grown-up" people than we were back in 2006.
To start with, we both are much more aware of just how we're broken, and how to avoid becoming even more so by modulating our lives.

At the time we met, we were both 37 or so, and aside from a very brief (two months?) attempt to live on her own away from home (with a friend as a housemate), she had never lived anywhere else.

For a few years, she lived with the man she left me for, and married, and had her son with him.
They divorced after 6 years or so, after a very emotionally abusive marriage.
She then returned to her childhood home, where she's been since, and will likely remain.
She and her ex husband still have joint custody of their son, but she has discussed seeking sole custody.

After her marriage failed, she had a VERY rocky 10-year relationship with a boyfriend.
I met him while I was there in January, about two weeks after their latest "breakup", and after hearing tales of his time with her, and witnessing his behavior in person, I realized just what an awful decade she had just been through.

She has the emotional resilience of someone who's lived a very tough life, and a SEEMINGLY coarse demeanor formed by her upbringing.
But her outward persona, developed in response to a lifetime of trauma doesn't conceal her brilliance, at least to me.

As of a very recent bit of insight, I'm virtually certain at this point that I'm not capable of living on my own, at least not any time soon. I sink too far into myself for this to be an option for me.

She is quite capable of providing companionship, understanding and moral support for me, and I hope to return the favor in spades, along with whatever level of general help around the house and property that I am able to maintain.

I've taken a very solid start at educating her about my many issues, and what to look out for, and how to best understand what may seem like something entirely different on the outside than what I'm experiencing internally.
For her, I intend to write up a literal "Operator's Manual" for my PDA brain, so that she has a set of guidelines to get maximum performance with the fewest errors from my aging and highly defective gray matter.

This is intended to be a "housemates with benefits" relationship, at least until we can prove to be capable of something more. Moving the relationship up in stages is the only safe option for us, as neither will likely be willing to dive head first into the deep end at once, after having been mired in our individual brands of trouble during the entire time we've been apart.

As a fun clue to the sort of relationship I have with her, her Match.com profile in 2006 said, among other things, that she was looking for a boyfriend that was willing to pick up roadkill for her and sever the heads, as she deeply desired a skull collection to add to her existing more general "dead things" collection that she kept on her bed headboard (She was too squeamish to decapitate them herself).

I imagined being pulled over by the New York State Police, and having them search my vehicle, only to find a large feed sack full of the severed heads of the roadkill I came across, then having to explain to the nice officer:

"Yes, sir, they're mine! I bringing them to my girlfriend as a gift!"


Any thoughts or comments are welcome!

Congrats!

Is she the one whose house burnt down?

Thanks!

Her house was damaged in the recent fire, but not destroyed. A neighbor spotted the situation, and put out the fire with a garden hose before the fire department arrived.







Her 15-year-old son with ADHD didn't fully register her instructions on how to handle using the stovetop pot of cooking oil to deep fry some cheese sticks, which led to the fire.

She wasn't home at the time, but her boyfriend was (he was living in an old motorhome in the yard, ironically enough). The boyfriend ended up behaving VERY badly after the fire, leading to the first responders on scene reporting the situation to Child Protective Services. They reported that "an autistic boy" was in a dangerous situation, which required further investigation (this all ended OK).

The boyfriend, who is a severe alcoholic and cocaine abuser, is no longer living on the property, but continues to send her messages alternating between manipulatively begging for forgiveness and being very insulting and rude. In fact at the end of our long telephone call, she noticed his latest batch of insulting manipulation in her Facebook Messenger account. He does not yet have all of his stuff off of her property, so she apparently has not yet decided to cut off all ties with him.

I will be flying from Reno, Nevada to Orlando, Florida on October 9th, to visit family there.
I'll then fly from Orlando to New York to see her, plus perhaps other friends in New York, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, depending on what my capabilities are at the time, and how she's doing, and how we interact.

How this will all play out from then will depend on many yet-unknown variables. I still have the option, I hope, of continuing to store my "stuff" here in Nevada, on a piece of land that my ex here has told me is mine to use for life, but I will want to remove all of my stuff as soon as I can, and return the use of the property to her.

The upcoming weeks and months are going to be very stressful for me (and my gal in New York, no doubt!). How much mental benefit I'll get from the possibility of settling into a new situation that may end up being a good one for me is unknown. A clue can be gained from the way I felt during my visit to New York in January, when her drunken ex burst into the house on multiple occasions while I was there, offering escalating levels of accusations and acrimony to her about my presence. She was amazingly self-controlled in dealing with him, and he backed down each time, but at the end of my visit, she told me that she was no longer certain how his escalating behavior would manifest. He has said things to her that amounted to thinly-veiled threats of destroying my rental car, or maybe even going beyond that, so I was advised to leave, and did so, hastily, after getting her assurance that she didn't feel that she would be in danger, once I left.

But during all this craziness (the sort of situations that I have never before found myself in), I felt quite "Zen" about it all, and did not feel like I was about to have a meltdown, or even anything more than my concern for her safety (and mine). Right now, and for much of the time since the phone call, I've been very anxious, but I ascribe this mainly to the anticipation of the unknown events that will unfold in the coming weeks, and the desperation and sense of finality that I was feeling before our phone call.

She ended up letting her boyfriend creep back into her life, after I left in January, largely because as a single mother living alone with her son in a large and rickety old house, she had need of his help to keep up with the intermittent failures and maintenance that are inevitable in such a living situation.

So, she "took one for the team", and continued to tolerate his massive substance abuse and verbal abuse, and gratify his VERY one-sided sexual desires, in exchange for his occasional botched attempts to keep the home and property livable, in between his multiple-day booze and coke-fueled benders.

Later, his extreme behaviour in the aftermath of the fire led her to issue the ultimatum for him to leave, but it was clear to me from our long telephone conversation that she would inevitably let him weasel himself back into her life, if only so she wouldn't be alone, and would have at least SOME help.

I hope my presence can help us both to have a better life, but I also harbor fears of causing the opposite to occur. Wish me luck, I'm REALLY going to need it!

Vaya con Dios. There's no going back from this.

Good luck, GadgetGuru.

The situation you describe sounds like a complicated & dangerous one. Hopefully you will come out of it at the other end unscathed, and with a better position in life than where you are at, currently.

I was in her situation almost to a tee when my babies were little and I was caught up with an abusive addict. I kind of wanted a saviour to step in and do home maintenance or whatever was needed to keep me sane. My advice is that you need to get that crazymaker out of the story, whether it's a restraining order or whether she changes her name and leaves the state to live near you. The prices are going to be a lot higher where she is, too.

I would be realistic that you're both open to a codependent relationship so long as you are both safe, and her son won't be caught in the middle of two men acting as his mother's puppets. That can be really troubling for a kid, psychologically.

His needs have to come before everyone else's, at this stage.

Can you elaborate? Do you mean that you think this is a self-dooming path I'm considering?

Thanks!

^ Haha, that's a funny image.

The idea that I might be able to "save" her is probably skewing my attitude towards this situation. Any chance of my own personal redemption is to be strictly secondary to my desire to see her face soften and light up as it does when she receives even the most superficial compliment, or hears a tantalizing new idea that she latches onto with her characteristically intense fervor.

But my having a way with words that she finds so appealing is not enough. In the Hierarchy of Needs, me being what she early-on described as a "wordsmith" is only an upper-level need. All of the base levels of need for both of us must be shored up and maintained before I can help build a sustainable mental palace of peace and joy for us, on top.

I believe that inertia and fear of being alone has prevented her from severing ties with him, thus far. She knows me well enough, still, to know that there's no certainty that I will be able to fill all of her needs and wants.

I know from experience that if I'm doing well for a while, she'll come to believe that how I perform in all the roles needed will seem like my innate nature, and that will become her image of my "norm". This can be disastrous if she doesn't understand what an "off day" feels like to me, and how best to cope with this. I have thus far established only a limited set of thoughts on how best to get myself through such downturns, and even less how to make someone else understand this, and help me get through it to a better frame of mind, and a return to that "all things to all people" presentation that I can sometimes manage...

I haven't discussed the idea of her leaving the area, beyond a quick probe. My guess is that she is so attached to the only place where she's ever even felt occasionally safe, that leaving is beyond consideration.
She believes the property is worth something like $500,000 to a Million, and I think she may be right, given the special qualities of this particular large, lake-front parcel (The existing house would almost certainly be demolished, if the land was sold).

She could sell it, and buy a modest house in the town I live in now in Nevada, and have perhaps well over a half million dollars in the bank, even after paying off the large home equity loan her parents took out on the family place in New York, many years ago. This is a VERY cheap place to live, and has lots of other benefits, too, for someone who can appreciate them and tolerate the downsides. It seems that the current population of only 200 here in this town indicates that few can see the appeal of a life lived here.

But she has lifelong social and emotional ties to where she lives. It took me many years to consider this totally alien environment to be home, as I now do. To make such a move at this stage in her life seems fraught with dangers.

I consider my move from upstate New York to Nevada in 2009 to have been one that saved my life. My life here became instantly SO different from what I had lived in the East. And the vastly wider array of experiences I've had here in the last 14 years has expanded my ability to comprehend this maddening world and the way I perceive it.
But for her, I can't impose my "The West Is The Best" attitude at all.

Absolutely! This is my biggest concern for her, and although I believe I can help, her top priorities must always remain with her son.
I met her son only very briefly when I was there in January, so my mental model of him is largely based on what his mother has told me of him. Seeing how well we might connect would be a high priority, early on, as if he sees me as a threat or just another potential disappointment to his mother, then I can't justify imposing my presence on the situation.

I did not say it is doomed. I do know that if it goes wrong you are sh-t out of luck. And she's had the last two go wrong. I guess I believe that the fact that she made this offer without even previewing with you is something of a red flag.

Shhh, you sweet, sensitive man. Take a slow deep breath - close your eyes and let the breath out slowly. Keep doing this, think of how the air feels as it fills your lungs. Unclench your jaw. Notice how your chest feels as you breathe out. Relax your hands and imagine the anxiety flowing out of you through your fingers.

Now, you’re overthinking this and forgetting my ADHD brain tends to blurt out ideas without thinking through the ramifications. I certainly never intended to cause you anxiety. In my mind you wanted to move back east but didn’t want to be alone, we get along great and I have room. Wallah! No brainer, you move in with me. I failed to mention that it will probably be at least a year before I get the space cleared out and livable. I didn’t think about the planning and packing and cost to you. I didn’t think about how you might feel like you would be putting all your eggs into my basket and essentially at my mercy in regards to your stability and autonomy.

Having been in 2 relationships in which I was always “less than “ and never good enough has turned me into a pleaser. Even to my own detriment I was always trying to placate and please. I don’t feel that with you. Like you said in one of your posts, you and I can be ourselves with each other. No judgement or condescension and I see you as an equal. So, I still think it’s a good idea but not something that has to happen at speed. we can take the time to get reacquainted and see how it goes.

Ladies, gentlemen, and those who otherwise identify, let me introduce you to the remarkable human being that is the subject of this discussion! She is truly a marvel of understanding and kinship in a topsy-turvy world.

Before I write more, I'm going to go and try to meditate for a while. I have not done so for well over a year.
Meditation is very difficult for me, but I've had very positive results on rare occasions, and I can't think of a better starting point than her first words to me on this forum!

If she'd like to peruse my older posts (click on my username, then the "Search User's Posts" link), I think she may find some interesting tidbits to consider...

A photo from her family homestead in upstate New York, back in 2006.

Well, I managed to drag myself far enough out of the hole I dug into in Nevada, and am now with family in Florida.
I'll be flying to upstate New York on Sunday, and we'll see how it goes from there!

Good luck, Darron.