[jimrich]

Baile, please do not feel attacked, picked on or examined but this is what I see in you post...........

Originally Posted by Baile

Obviously one can only speak form their experience, I'm not sure there is one generic "man's perspective." I was always a sensitive male, I've been all about honoring the female since the age of about 7, it honestly started that early for me. But my unconscious life still had to play out.

Exactly what is "my unconscious life"? IMO, you are speaking of your unremembered or even unresolved past from early childhood.

I hurt people in my 20's, that was a pretty unconscious time for me.

For me, that period of my life was mostly about bad childhood programing that unwittingly and unconsciously emerged and hurt others.

I started getting it together in my 30's. It was in my 40's that my fully-conscious self came into being.

Cool! I'm still waiting to become fully conscious. Congratulations!

In one relationship I didn't love the person, and was too cowardly to get out of it for several reasons.

Same here. I stayed because I was afraid to be alone or take charge of my own life so I tried to live like her house pet!

So that was one reason I hurt the person: I wasn't thoughtful and considerate because I didn't love them.

For me, it wasn't a lack of love but more a lack of self esteem and courage which I often believed was love and loyalty but not really!

In the other long relationship I had, I cared for the person, but they were always putting stuff on me: what I was doing and who I was, wasn't enough.

My 1st, failed marriage was kind of like that too. I was her little, codependent door mat. I'm surprised your "fully-conscious self" allowed you to take it.

And I'm going to tell you how extreme and ridiculous that got: by the end of the relationship, I was the one working, and paying the mortgage and all the bills, and doing all the cooking and housework, and STILL she left on a moment's notice without telling me a thing. I came home and her bags were packed, she was moving to another city and had already rented a place!

Whew, that sounds like a Codependent trap where you were the Dependent one and she (the other Codependent) used you as long as possible and then LEFT YOU. That's pretty much how Codependency works and one or both Codependents usually gets hurt.

And I'm not a bad person, I'm happy in life. There was just nothing I could do to please her apparently.

Codependent's can NEVER be pleased because they all carry early childhood, emotional damages that leave both of them extremely needy and desperate USERS.

I will say this though: the burden of never being enough, yet still having to do and be everything, had turned to resentment. And that resentment manifested as lack of interest in being close to the person. In that case I was hurt more than just disinterested. But the result was the same.

Codependency hurts everyone caught up in it. I had to learn some very harsh lessons about Codependency in my 1st marriage but my now marriage is OK, thanks to therapy.