Now, thanks to Jennifer, I am honing in to where I want to be in terms of tone for this missive. Human has a point — that this person really is out of line — and so does my IRL friend here in Brazil, who said:
–What is he trying to do, dominate you? and
–You can’t be friends with men you’ve dated, because if they were actually your friends, you would still be dating them!
Jennifer has two general points: one, that one must take toxic persons seriously, because even small amounts of toxicity are dangerous, and two, that a good way to keep people at bay is to keep things light.
Keeping all of these things in mind I can now better articulate what I’d like to say to S, although I have not figured out when I want to say it or in what format (speech, writing, in response to the next communication from him, as an ice breaker from me, or whatever), and I do not think it necessary to decide now.
But let us rehearse, nonetheless.
Dear S,
This is just to say I am back, and that getting back was easy, so no worries.
As far as I am concerned our friendship is as it was before, which is to say it is Platonic.
I hope we can get along less muddily this year.
I am very happy that we can share quality time together, but I am really not planning to have sex with you, or to share either rooms or beds.
I hope we can get along together and have some good times doing other things.
I am just not interested in that kind of a good time.
I thought I had made that clear. Evidently I did not.
Anyway, I hope we will not have to negotiate about this any more. There is so much more to talk about.
I have all kinds of things to say about Brazil, of course. I’m curious to know how your Christmas was, how the family is, whether you’ve taken the boat out, all sorts of things like that.
Best,
Z
This is the twelfth day of which I have devoted large parts to figuring out how to handle this person. It is my strong suspicion that he has been taking care of his life during this time and not wasted time thinking about me at all.
*
I am quite sad that I have allowed my worry about this man: my feelings of anger and guilt, my resentment that we cannot just be friends and neighbors, my outraged suspicion that the practical favors he presses upon me are ultimately conditioned by his hopes of coercing other services from me, and my feelings of shame and fear about it all, to ruin this voyage to the extent that I have.
On the other hand, as I said initially, I am grateful that this set of circumstances arose, so that I saw that there was indeed something behind S’ generous offer. I am also very glad I sidestepped the situation. Because I could have been talked into going to that motel, half guilt tripped, half frightened, half tired. Had that happened, things would have worsened later, because further assumptions would have been made.
I am so glad I did not tell myself what I used to regarding my more serious X. I used to tell myself:
I allowed this to start, and now I have to continue because this is a suffering person, and he is friends with a dean who can do me harm. We all do things we would rather not sometimes. This will only a few hours. I will be home soon. I will see my cat and my pretty rooms, and everything will be all right again. And I will go to the sauna later and get the rest of the experience out of my pores. It will not matter at all. No, it will not matter. It will not have to matter.
*
Twelve days have gone and I regret them. I wish it had not taken me this long to resolve this issue. And yet. Whether or not it is true I must I tell myself, so as not to feel guilty that I did not spend these days better, that they have been twelve necessary days and well invested.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Much better letter!
Now, the key thing is to emotionally detach from the contents of the letter. He takes them or leaves them on their own terms, but they have left your hands for good. All the emotions that you ever had are in that letter, and then gone from you.
Excellent.
And yes, good point. Actually, I’m over it now.
I’m not at all pleased with what I’ve done to myself over him in the past week and a half, but as I say, it’s better than doing the same more slowly and insidiously, over the course of the next few months (which could have happened).
P.S. I am excited! I went back and read the e-mail I had sent him on this! It is quite direct and civilized!
It was when, knowing he was off line for a week, I called him that I came across, or felt I was, as more incoherent.
The mail I *already sent* already reiterated that I am not up for sex.
It was not quite as detached as what we came up with last night, but it was pretty good.
The error was, I was still thinking we had to negotiate, and still thinking he had the most control. I hadn’t figured out I could write a legalistic e-mail and take the car away from him.
I had also not figured out I could just reject him, did not have to also soothe him.
This is a lesson on how certain kind of people can give you the impression that you haven’t communicated effectively when you have. You had already written the email effectively and correctly, and yet you doubted yourself, and felt that it may not have conveyed your point or that there was something else to add.
Perhaps — since I am often under the same impression myself regarding my own communication — this has to do with having had a borderline parent. My own felt that communication obfuscated issues because it introduced a level of complexity to a reality that he wanted to see as very simple, stable and unchanging. I was to be the essentialised woman, covering all female roles (including mother, hysterical maiden, and so on) and he was to be the essentialised male — no deeper or more specific identities apart from this. So you communicate, and it produces complex nuances in relation to this simple paradigm — and he wants to erase it all, all of the communication, and return reality in his mind to its original simplified form. It’s as if you hadn’t said anything at all.
I don’t think it’s borderline that does it, it’s abuse; these borderlines can be really abusive (although they’re confusing because they can also go into non abusive mode).
It’s a classic abuse move to say it was your fault for not communicating clearly enough. So then you can try harder and harder (I did that with my mean X, the Britisher), and go insane with yourself, splitting hairs and looking for the mot juste.
What I realized about my borderline parent, though, is that zie would just cast about for ways to get me to react. I had been programmed to try to heal hir, so I’d go to the content of what zie said. I didn’t realize zie wasn’t committed to the content at all — if zie had not succeeded at upsetting my rationality with one content set, zie would simply try another, and forget zie had proposed the first content set at all.
Anyway, the above dynamic underlines my worst fears:
1. That I have written a thesis, but somehow haven’t. It might turn out to be blank pages, or something of that sort.
2. That having written it, it will be as if I hadn’t. I will be on the job market as a “girl” again, despite the fact of having an intellect.
–so I am still battling my parent’s disorder!
Yes, it is certainly an abuse move to claim insufficient communication, when it has often been more than ample. But I do wonder whether people with a tendency to proclaim this have been damaged in some way. Could it also pertain to classic mind-body dualism? If one does not observe the person as they are, but switches off some of one’s perceptions pertaining to the physical/material expression of that person, it could be much easier to forget what that person has to say, as it all becomes much more abstract and ungrounded in the realm of the material.
Worst fears: but those are my worst fears as well — I thought they were more universal, do you think they’re just from having a borderline parent?
Claims of insufficient communication, people having been damaged, well I suppose they are but again, it’s so common. Abusive men say it to women all the time in relationships, but it’s also a typical boss thing to do. Then, if you try to be clearer, they don’t like that either.
I think some of them really do see what’s going on, they’re just exerting power. My mean X would actually talk about tactics he’d use for verbal abuse of people, he was quite conscious of it — although he’s also damaged and all, switches off perceptions and all.
I think that society itself is borderline in a lot of instances. Gender essentialism, I believe, is indicative of a mild borderline disorder, since if people were to truly observe reality with their own eyes, unmediated by mystical beliefs (magical thinking) they would not observe gender essentialism taking place in the real (practical) world, except where it was coercively enforced. But people don’t want to grow up. They prefer their mystical beliefs and essentialism to actual, adult communution.
Yes, there is that. But these borderline people so stand out in their zinginess. At one point I wondered whether my mean X were borderline, too — but he had so many possibilities going, it was hard to tell.
Someone told me my current X might have some really mild form of autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. Again it is hard to tell — it could just be Catholicism, misogyny, and an engineering degree.
I was wondering if they do stand out, actually. They stand out to you, and me, that is for sure. Not so convinced they stand out to other people, though, although perhaps they do, which would be a very good sign that society at large is not as pathological as I had thought.
Anyway, overall, my perspective may be different since I seem to have drawn so much of society’s fire. I reflect today, (and quite dispassionately), on how I was the kind of “other” that drew society’s fire in a big way. In other words, their projections (and projecting is part of borderline pathology). See my latest blog entry for the outline of an epistemological minefield.
Well, perhaps they do only stand out to some of us. But I think it’s a fair number.
I think they stand out more in a leftwing context than in a right wing one — the second is where everybody is walking in lockstep and under the sway of magical leaders. In that kind of a situation, they camouflage better.
Definitely!