Last night Eric and I talked for two hours on the phone. He was in KL still jetlagging. There are some highlights that I want to journal about.

1. He told me that when we had our last hug in my car, he felt a sensation in his head. He said it felt like an electric current instead of from head to toe, it was from left to right. It felt so good that it made him wanna do it again. He asked me if I felt any physical sensation when we were hugging, I said of course but it feels a bit different each time. In that hug my physical sensation felt more like I was melting.

2. So I told him if he wants to do it again he should come to Hokkaido. He said he doesn’t want to incinerate his marriage. I said I don’t think anything sexual would happen. I said that before we first met up in June, he also said that we should meet when the timing is right. And when we did meet, nothing happened. He said that’s because he made sure nothing could happen. He said that when we took the Ferris wheel it was already somewhat dangerous because so many people would make out in the Ferris wheel. I said but we took the Ferris wheel to see the lightening and to look at the buildings in the neighborhood. He said, “sure we took the Ferris wheel to do an aerial survey.” He also said that my trip in Hokkaido is for myself so if he was here then I wouldn’t be able to think about a lot of things.

3. We talked about relationships, therapies, neurodivergence and life. He said when he was back home in MN, his mom’s short term memory is declining very quickly. It makes him realize we all go into decline eventually and nothing is permanent. You’d never know when you’re gonna die the next day so the best thing you can do is to cherish the beauty in every present moment. I said we finally have something to agree on. When I heard this, there’s some confusion in me. If I were the beauty in his life, would he cherish me? Or would he just keep me in the friend zone and keep me far away still?

4. From our recent conversations and our meet up, I still feel that he was keeping me in the friend zone. I cried at the end of our last meetup on Sunday. I told him the more you talk the more I wanna cry. He asked me why I was crying. I said I don’t know when we’d see each other again and he’s so funny. He held my hand and said, I’m sorry that there are things that happened in your life that made you think I’d abandon you, even after all the things I’ve told you. He also said the City of Rain is really close to M. It’s probably the closest city to M and it’s much closer than the City of Palace (where his wife is from). Or we can meet in a third country. 

5. We talked about emotional attunement in relationships. He thinks there’s no perfect emotional attunement and I agree. He thinks perfect attunement would require at least one person to change their priorities in life and that’s self erasure, and I agree. But I said I think it also depends on the inner work of the two people, whether the two people are growing their inner selves together. He gave an example from Gottman’s book—the husband wants to go bowling with his friends tonight but the wife is really mad about a broken faucet at home. The husband went bowling anyway and said he’d fix it when he comes back, but the wife just isn’t happy that it wasn’t fixed right away. I said in this case, first they can simply hire a repairman to do that. If money can solve the problem then just do it. If they don’t have the money, the wife needs to do some inner work. Why does it trigger her so much that the broken faucet has to be fixed right away? Is there some unresolved trauma that causes her emotional flashback?

6. I said in my marriage I was willing to give up my social life, my career to make things feel safe for my husband because my priority was to make it work. Erik said that’s why I feel so much resentment now that he didn’t do the same for me. I said no, it wasn’t exactly that. Our relationship was still alive before I conceived the second child. All the abandonment started to happen after I got pregnant with the second one. There have been times when I was verbally attacked by strangers for racism, sexism. Even though he was there, he did nothing said nothing and even nothing afterwards. That’s when I felt truly abandoned.

7. He said that’s the part he couldn’t accept. He said if someone mistreats his wife, he’d get so confrontational that his wife would get angry for how confrontational he’d get. This is the part that triggers me most emotionally. In my whole life, no one, not a single man has ever stood up for me once when I’ve been mistreated. It makes me feel that his wife is so lucky and I just don’t deserve that in my destiny. It also makes me feel that he’s gonna stay with wife forever and what he and i have is gonna die. Hearing this makes me feel that I am so unimportant to everyone.