As if lobotomized, I feel the manipulation coursing through my veins. My very being tainted with doubt and confusion. I feel halfway in and halfway out right now. I had a friend tell me that I’m enabling a person who’s taking advantage of me. He feels he will never make the changes deemed necessary to constitute a great life partner and father unless I leave him. I really don’t know what to do. I definitely feel distant from him at the moment. He leaves me with little security of the value and stability of our partnership and bond. As if a change in wind could just undo everything we’ve experienced in an instant. I don’t feel the desire to be intimate with him, because I don’t even know where his mind is in those moments. Am I just a faceless void to fill that momentary carnal urge? Or am I the experience that is suppose to surpass all others…

He told me he needs a break to heal himself from all the porn. To restore his vitality. Twenty days, till his birthday…I doubt that will last, because he already came at me last night like he wanted to initiate a sexual encounter. But I acted unfazed and disregarded his attempt, played dumb if you may. With his words from the night before etched into the front of my mind, how could I possibly have the desire to perform, be passionately in it, and thoroughly enjoy it? How could he expect me to forget so easily and fall right back in like I hadn’t just been completely treated like shit once again? Does he even know?Does he even desire me? Am I even desirable? Would he even tell me the truth if I asked him or would it depend on his mood…It is obvious this man is only diminishing my already struggling self confidence. So I ask myself, what am I doing? Is this all a manipulation? I remember when I met him, he was reading The Art of Seduction. I finally read it shortly after Jashar’s birth and was blindsided with disgust. There is no seduction in that book. Its purpose is to manipulate and control with a direct focal attack on women. Even more disturbing was the fact that every chapter read as an event in the rollercoaster that was the primary year of our relationship. I questioned him about it and of course he denied knowing what I was talking about. I don’t want to think this is an elaborate game of manipulation, whether he is doing it consciously or subconsciously….I want to believe his words and his promises and pray that everything he says he will be will be and everything he says will happen will happen. The punishment and penance that I have endured for the possibility that this fairy tale to flourish will not be in vein and the retribution that I so deserve will begin to come to light….

And if it doesn’t, how much more will I endure before I give in and embrace the stereotype knocking at my door of a single mom taken advantage  and abandoned by a man she loves who she thought loved her, because he feels the grass is greener in the unconquered and unknown. Or if I do eventually choose to leave, how long before he comes crying back after experiencing that unknown and realizing the grass in fact is not greener inside the unconquered, and I accept him back and the pattern begins again…

Can people change if prompted by the right person? Can a man be a man because of the love of a good woman? Or can some people, even with everything at their fingertips still remain pieces of shit…I believe the answer to all those questions is yes. I’m just still unsure about what prospective intuitive I am in fact dealing with.