Just why

So Erik replied to my text with another essay:

Understanding and solving what i want and need in the area of attachment is a complex problem. I have confronted that part of myself and do understand it much better than I used to, but that doesn't make solving the problem easy.

#1: The fundamental orientation of my personality is to explore. I'm highly novelty-seeking, tolerant of unstructured situations, and I probably find experiences gained through exploration more rewarding and satisfying than the average person. 

#2: I have compensatory attachment seeking. when I was a child, we rescued a cat who was on the edge of starving to death. from then on, she always had plenty to eat and no reason to overindulge. Yet she immediately and repeatedly ate so much that she became fat to the point of her belly touching the floor. My parents paid for two surgeries to remove her belly fat, but each time, she just ate more until she reached her previous fatty size.  

That cat's relationship to food is a good analogy for my instinctual reaction when it comes to human and sexual connection. The main difference is that i am quite selective about whom i connect with, but if i find someone interesting, it requires a tremendous exertion of self-control to resist exploring further. the hunger is just so strong. 

#3: Emotional home. Like you, I've always been seeking an emotional home. but what actually is an emotional home? 

One definition of a secure attachment "emotional home" that makes sense to me is one that serves as both a "safe haven" and a "secure base". 

A safe haven is a person we can turn to and know that they care about our safety, will respond to our distress, help us co-regulate, and are a source of emotional and physical comfort.  And we will do the same for them.  Even if we can’t be there physically, we will do what we can to support them from a distance.  

When we’ve established a sense of safety , we can go out and engage with the world.  A secure base provides the platform from which we explore and take risks. Just like children who want to show off their latest drawings and cool tricks, adults also want to share our discoveries and achievements.  A secure base supports our personal growth, independent activities, and even our other relationships. They can also help us see where we may be inflating or limiting our belief in ourselves. 

Even to this day, despite all the dating and the numerous relationships, I've never had both a safe haven and secure base embodied in one person. There were a few times where I convinced myself I had it, but ultimately turned out not to be the case. Actually, I was settling for some fraction of it and filling in the gaps with my imagination. 

Society doesn't have room for someone like me with my #1 and #2, so it tries to squash me into its mold. without society's acceptance and adding my ADHD into the mix, it takes a special kind of person to accept me. and layering my selectivity atop the filter of those who could potentially accept me, what remains is so minimal.

#4: I have a huge burden of grief that I carry around. Not only do I have a stronger hunger for connection, but when I lose the connection, it hurts more and sticks with me longer than for most people. And the grief accumulates. losing one person does not erase the grief of losing the one before them; rather, it accumulates. The reluctance to potentially take on more grief is now the main thing that's strongly restraining the drive of #1 and #2.  

I'm not ashamed of this. I'm not ashamed of loving deeply. I group fears into three types: (A) fears of the unknown; (B) fear triggered by a single bad experience, which may not be likely to repeat; and (C) fears based on multiple similar bad experiences. A and B-type fears are often irrational to a degree and can be dealt with via well-managed exposure. But C fears are often entirely rational, and protective. And if they are to be pushed aside, there should be a good reason. 

Why do I know I shouldn't try to hook up with any friend whom I've had a sexual impulse for? Because I've lost multiple friends that way, and the path to losing them was messy and chaotic. I have a *lot* of sexual impulses.  

Conversely, platonic friendships are simply more stable than sexual relationships of any kind. There's far less competition from alternatives. There's usually less economic entanglement. There's far less pressure of all kinds. So if I love someone and I want to keep them in my life, unless I'm really really sure that it's going to work permanently as a romantic relationship, or I can somehow get confident that even if I have sex with that person, I can continue to be friends with them afterward, then I shouldn't have sex with them. 

Is my compensatory attachment hunger driving me to seek stronger and more emotionally-invested friendships than the average man? Yes. Do I get nourishment from those friendships that I might have otherwise gotten from other polyamorous relationships if I were still doing polyamory? Also yes. Not necessarily everything I would have gotten, but it goes a long way. 

Is there still going to be turnover in my friend group? Sure, some amount of turnover is unavoidable. But it's nowhere near the same amount of turnover as active polyamory. 

Do I still have a sexual hunger left unsatisfied in this type of arrangement? Yes, which is where swinging comes in. 

Is this grief-driven focus on friendships inauthentic or happening out of inertia? No, it is my active choice. 

I've found this guy's articles on various life topics useful for many years:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/marriage-decision.html

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner-part-2.html

#5. What did I want, and what do I want now?

I still want an emotional home. But what kind of person can actually be my safe haven and secure base? For starters, the person needs to be able to function as a safe haven and secure base for *anyone* at all. Most of my exes were too insecure to do that. And in the past, I was probably not stable enough either. The next hurdle is for them to accept me enough that the success of the relationship doesn't depend on me fundamentally changing or amputating part of myself. I don't mean that they won't have expectations or that the relationship shouldn't challenge me to be better at a certain relationship skill, but if the other person will end up endlessly resenting me, pulling away, or trying to control me due to my desire to explore, compensatory attachment hunger, or ADHD traits causing me to lack 'thoughtfulness' or organization, then it's not going to work. 

Acceptance for me needs to include the sexual component. My #1 love language is touch, but I spent most of my youth and teenage years touch-starved and sex-starved. Other kids hated me for being different, and I lacked the social skills to bridge that gap.  Plus, even though I'm heteroromantic, I'm also pansexual, but I grew up in an extremely homophobic time and place. After having absorbed all that hatred and suffered through that deprivation, there's just no way I can feel at home with someone who doesn't want, doesn't accept, or goes cold toward my sexuality.  

Then there are the usual things like agreeing on where to live, finances, careers, common interests, kids, and the items in the How to Pick Your Life Partner, Part 2 article. 

And if by now this is seeming fucking impossible and my expectations are unrealistic, then I can only agree.  But I can't give up on what I need any more than you can.

i'm sorry for what happened in 2013. i did genuinely desire you. but i can 100% guarantee you that i wasn't ready for marriage or family at any time in the 2010s decade. and even if i had felt ready, back then i didn't even have the limited level of maturity, stability, or perspective that i have now. there is no way i would have been capable of being your emotional home.

i shed tears while writing this. and somehow it also triggered feelings of grief from losing another friend, maybe bc of the powerlessness feeling

am i a good man? to people who reject non-monogamy, i cannot be. to people who reject non-normative sexuality, i cannot be. so i stay away from such people when possible. can i be a good man to somebody? yes, i believe so. but it's taken a lot to get to this point.

Me:

Thank you for your essay. These past exchanges are causing my depression to flare up. Here are some problems in your thesis:

1. You say that one can acquire safe haven (comfort in distress, co-regulation) remotely from just texting and phone calls, but in fact real co-regulation requires physical presence and this is well documented in science. Both my therapists are on Zoom and I’ve got ChatGPT via text and a writers club for word dump, so I don’t really need anymore remote language-based co-regulation. What I need are real arms holding me, waking up next to me, showing care before I need to speak up, touching me from just my facial expressions, my vibes. I want that emotional resonance where we could just sit with each other in silence and just get each other. Everytime when I’m standing on a peak or by the ocean looking at sunset, I wish you could be right by my side but I don’t have that. I wish we had kissed, whether in 2013 or 2025, because to me kissing is one of the most important regulations for me.

2. If touch is your love language, then you can’t possibly get co-regulation from me. The co-regulation you need must come from someone physically near you, i.e. your wife. I am at most some free alternative remote therapy. I am not your safe haven nor secure base. What am i to you really? Don’t give me another made-up theory or label. 

3. If we’re not each other’s safe haven nor secure base, then what are we? It sounds like you have a lot of friends and you have sexual attraction for many of them; it’s just that you’re not acting upon your impulses. I have no interest in being one of the many foods your fat cat eats, whether the cat is selective or not. The fat cat gets nourishment but I don’t. 

4. The bottom line is that you have defined love inconsistently. You told me what we had was not love, and when i told you I love to be on the receiving end of love, you asked me “why push me away?” And yet here you say that you love your friends and it is exactly because you love them you choose to let them remain your friends. What exactly do you mean by love? By your definition I’m not even a friend because what we have is not love.

5. Your choice from grief reluctance is understandable. I don’t know about your other “friends” but you’ll lose me eventually because I need my friends to be physically close to me. I need someone who can be my emergency contact. I’m also fine with friends coming and going in my life, or myself being in solitude for most of my life. I’m not afraid of being alone or lonely because in my whole life, too many people have taken nourishment from me without giving it back; I’m now happy to nourish myself instead of nourishing so many others hoping that one day they can nourish me back. I have a job where I have been nourishing almost 100 kids or more every day for over a decade and  when I’m not at work I have to continue to nourish two kids with really demanding needs. I can’t possibly keep living like this without being nourished. If a “friend” depletes me then I’m happy to walk away from them at this point of my life. I’m just very tired of giving endlessly.

6. You have nourished me at different stages of my life, and I genuinely appreciate that. But you don’t do that anymore, and I know for a fact as long as you’re married, we could never go back to those times where we could nourish each other, where you didn’t feel grounded if we hadn’t talked for a week. We could never hug each other for one minute again and actually we probably won’t see each other again for the rest of our lives. So if this attachment continues to exist, the fat cat always gets his hunger met from my emotional availability (and to be fair I have almost unlimited emotional bandwidth or I wouldn’t be such a damn good teacher today and raising two disabled kids while working full time), what do I get from the fat cat really?

7. I believe my emotional home can be embodied in one person, and I’m willing to spend the rest of my life keeping looking, waiting, no matter how statistically rare he is and even if he doesn’t show up in this life, I will have grief but no regret. Fragmentation doesn’t work for my nervous system; I can’t outsource safe haven to more than one person because in the end that just means they each understand only a fraction of me and I cannot live unseen anymore; as for my secure base, I already have it in myself. I don’t need anyone else to be my secure base. 

8. You missed my point about 2013. I was ready to have sex with you if you had come to Taipei, even if it was just one time, no relationship, no commitment, so saying that you weren’t ready for being my emotional home or that you weren’t ready for marriage or family doesn’t make any sense here. If your reasoning was that you didn’t do it because you were afraid of losing me, it still doesn’t make sense because you stopped talking to me completely anyway. If I hadn’t got the impulse to reach out to you in 2025, we should have never crossed paths in life again. Logic tells me that you didn’t feel grief from losing me back then, because I wasn’t that important to you and you had never reached out to me once in the past 12 years, and don’t tell me you didn’t have a way to find me because I was sitting right there in your Gmail. You need to be honest about this part of our story; I know you’re the master of ambiguity but to me, there’s no ambiguity for the 12 years of disappearance.

****

I don’t understand why I keep attracting these fucked up men in my life, and Angel is no exception. It feels almost like they’re all here to take from me. I’m not even looking for perfection but can’t there just be one man who’s at least somewhat compatible with my capacity—psychologically, emotionally, functionally, intellectually, socially?