Feeling bad for A.  All this stuff he’s doing has been a reaction to my not wanting him…..

He’s been good to me.  He’s been there for me, especially in the last 3 months.  Before he left on this adventure, he looked me in the eye and told me he loved me.  “So much.”  He still tells me every day.

How do I reconcile this?  Am I being too hard?  Can I love as a friend a man who wants to do what he wants to do?  Even if he doesn’t want to do it to me?  Is he the man I thought he was?

I just sent him a text and said, “A, I love you and I’m so grateful for your presence in my life, especially in the last three months as I was falling apart.  I don’t know how to reconcile this, but I want you to know I’m trying.”

Because I can’t, don’t want, to hurt him.  Ever.  Yet, after what happened to me, I know that up front or not with women, there is a huge risk for someone to get hurt, just the way I was.

I asked him how he would have felt if I had gone from his bed to Scott’s, and back again. Even if he knew…..He didn’t answer.

Because if there is physical intimacy involved, there are emotions, usually.  And he also has those emotions, I’ve been with him, I know him.  It might be himself that gets hurt.  Someone always gets hurt, among typical people who are dating, considering intimacy.

Ok, there are people who are swingers, go to swing club meetings (? I don’t know what they’re called) with their significant other and screw anyone they want and go home together.  S was once a swinger.  But S is not typical, and I know why, and I won’t say why here because it’s a secret he asked me not to tell anyone.  He’s not typical.

A is much more typical, he was in a long term monogamous marriage and loved his wife dearly.  He has a hole she left when she died, and he can’t fill it with me, because I just can’t, and he’s looking to fill it otherwise.  I want to say to him, would she be proud of this decision not to be monogamous?  He described it as “learning to share better.”   I don’t think she would.

He says the new woman, from Friday night, was a little angry about it, but wants to date him anyway.  I’m guessing, because I’m a woman, that she thinks she will change his mind about going in the next month.

He doesn’t seem to understand how someone can get hurt if they know up front.  How can I love him as a friend, and at the same time, see him setting someone up, maybe even himself, to go through what I just went through?  I’m sure he went through a lot of pain last year when I came back from Florida and went back to Scott.  I’m sure he knows the pain of having someone you love in the bed of someone else.  Yet, he chooses a path that is fraught with that possibility.

Because he’s been there for me, because I trust him so much, I am thinking I should sit with him and this, and be there somehow, when it falls apart,  which inevitably it will.  And he will feel bad, really feel it.  He won’t be like S, feeling sorry for himself because he got caught and he’s now alone.  It will be A, grieving over someone being hurt by his actions.  And maybe if I’m beside him, for him to bounce it off of, he won’t let it get to that point.  Because he trusts me.

I guess it’s a boundary for me.  I don’t cross it.  Trust me, when S was asking me to “hop in the car, drive down here, we’ll go to the beach, or take a nap….”, I wanted to so much.  But I couldn’t cross that boundary.  No matter that my heart and body ached for him, I couldn’t go be with someone who was also with someone else.   No more than I could not tell her, when I found out the truth.

So, can I be friends with A?  Should I be?  He got my text, I have not heard from him though.  I’ll have to sleep on it.