Posting a little more about my situation here since it's still by way of introduction. Apologies for length. I try to be readable.
I'm married, with a ten-year-old son. My husband and I have been in an open relationship as long as we've been together (more than fifteen years, married for eleven). I met my dear friend almost four years ago and we became friends, and then intimate friends several months later.
Most aspects of my life, my family, my past, are good. I like my job. My husband is never jealous and very supportive. My son is bright and healthy. I have a great relationship with my parents, who live close enough that we can see them once or twice a month but not so close that they just drop in unannounced. I have suffered from cyclic depression due to PMS since I was a teenager, but for the most part I cope well. I also have had multiple chemical sensitivity for almost 20 years, but again, I am able to avoid most things that make me sick, my work environment is safe, and I am generally on the less reactive side, so I can drive on the freeway despite truck exhaust, go to the movies or to the mall despite people wearing perfume, and live my life without too many restrictions. I live in California, so there is no smoking allowed in bars, so I can go to one if I want to. Although I'm already a person with good empathy and imagination, I also have two chronic, incurable conditions that affect my life, and that have affected it seriously in the past. So I can relate in that sense.
My dear friend's life has been completely opposite to my mostly healthy childhood and positive relationships. His father is a Vietnam vet who likely suffered, maybe still suffers, from ptsd himself. He emotionally abused him, don't know about physically. His mother, who drank, emotionally and physically abused him and his younger sister. He acted out as a youth and ended up finishing high school at a boarding school for troubled kids. Then he enlisted in the Marines as soon as he turned 18. He was identified as a leader, and was trained as a sniper, and went through SEER school (although it was essentially an accident, but he passed). He served in Panama, but ultimately was dishonorably discharged for stealing the morphine that he used to numb himself from what was around him. He served a year in prison. So no veterans benefits for him.
He was with his common law wife for twelve years. She waited for him to get out of the military, and to get out of prison, and then they made a life together. He was full of rage, and full of adrenaline, and put himself into high stress, dangerous situations again and again. Over time, she learned a trade and gained confidence, and finally told him to leave.
Somewhere in there, toward the end of his marriage, he started studying Buddhism. He was devastated when the relationship ended, but slowly put himself back together. Buddhism probably helped. He also began to focus on learning to do the kinds of work that he enjoys and is good at, and I think that helped too. He forgave his parents and now has a relationship with both of them. (They are divorced; his mother is twenty years sober.) For the past ten years or so he's lived in a studio apartment attached to his mother's house, and he helps her out a lot, although their relationship is still somewhat prickly. He's taken several sets of Buddhist vows, is now a priest, and continues to study, although I'm not sure how regular his practice is.
It's easier to describe his life before me, from what he's told me, than it is to describe our life together. We've had quite a few ups and downs. He has been drinking actively as long as I have known him. He keeps to his personal rules of no drinking and driving, and he doesn't start drinking until evening. But he drinks every night. There was one period of almost a month, during the first six months we were together, when he stopped drinking. He was very sick and saw a doctor and was told that his liver function was below 50%. But then he went back to it. He smokes a lot of pot, and he's been on and off unprescribed Vicodin (currently off). He takes a variety of things to help him sleep occasionally (e.g. soma), nothing officially prescribed, and he doesn't share the details with me.
I've left him three times. The first time, a year and a half along, I realized that an ex girlfriend of his, who lives in Canada, was not so ex. They would often speak on the phone, and he told me he was planning to visit her. I would have had no problem with him being close to her, but he wouldn't share anything about that relationship with me, and as far as I could tell, she didn't know anything more about me and my relationship with him beyond my name, and the fact that he had done work on my house. The most important rule in open relationships is honesty. If you have multiple lovers but they all think they are the only one, you're lying, and you're cheating. I would not be party to cheating, so I left.
It was devastating to be without him. We had intermittent contact which was sometimes positive but more often painful. I made an effort to expand my circle of friends, and that helped.
We came back together after a few months. Things were very rocky at first. In fact, he did go on a trip out of state. He was planning to visit the ex but because of political events, he couldn't cross the border. He still hadn't told her the truth about me. A month later, she figured out his email password, saw emails from me confirming that he and I were lovers, and she dumped him.
The second time I left him was last summer. He was studying for his electrical contractor's license exam and was feeling a lot of stress, and either being unkind to me or pushing me away. I had helped him study for the first half of the exam, the legal portion, but this was not an area where I had expertise. After his exam was over (he passed), I finally threw up my hands when he wouldn't see me for the third or fourth time and told him I was done.
I wrote out a long letter over the following month, saying he couldn't keep me at arm's length and still expect me to give so much to him. I wasn't sure whether I'd send it, but I finally did, and we came back together. He had always resisted the terms boyfriend and girlfriend, and he had used the word love only a handful of times ever, but at this point he essentially gave in to the fact that yes, we are in a relationship. He had really missed me. We were more close than ever after that. He was open with more people about our relationship. Around the same time, his mother finally accepted the relationship, too. (I came out to her a little less than a year into it, and she gave him hell about seeing a married woman for the next couple of years. Since he lives in the back house and she lives in the main house, I would be very careful to avoid her when coming and going.)
Our most recent crisis occurred this winter. Because of chemical sensitivity, I am very sensitive to cigarettes. He is a smoker. I have had a policy for years not to date smokers, but somehow he sneaked in. He always smokes outside rather than in the house, and I would get upwind of him if we were out somewhere, but I was breathing his smoky breath every night I spent with him. I started to get very severe reactions -- sinus pain, nose running, chest tight. I was also having some general health problems, mainly a couple of huge infections that came on out of the blue.
He hates conflict. He hates talking about difficult emotional subjects. His first reaction to the idea that his smoking was making me sick was that we should separate. That wasn't acceptable to me, and I didn't think it was what he wanted, either. I got him a starter kit of e cigarettes.
He has always been good with my chemical sensitivity, but the way I asked him to do things like not wear cologne was very gentle and offhand. It was very difficult to be that way about cigarettes. He does not respond positively to ultimatums, but there was no way around the fact that he could NOT smoke regular cigarettes around me anymore. After an evening when he smoked only regular cigarettes, and then got up in the middle of the night and smoked another one, I was feeling very sick. I got up at 2 a.m., collected my things, and left. We didn't see each other again for almost three months. Over that time, I asked him over and over to either use just e cigarettes with me, or to quit smoking. He would not respond to the issue, although he told me over and over that he missed me. I told him HE had the power to fix the situation. I got mad. I sent him lots of information about quitting smoking, since he wasn't responding about e cigarettes so I figured he didn't like them. Finally I threw up my hands and said, I'll always be there for you, whenever it might be that you decide you're ready to quit and we can be together again. At that point he claimed that he'd told me a month before that he would use e cigarettes.
We've been back together for maybe six weeks. Things are feeling more normal. He is not challenging me any more about whether I'm going to just up and leave. However, in the past, the way I would address a difficult subject was by sending him email. An objective reader would probably not find much to take offense at in most of my letters, but he calls them abusive and I think he is just waiting for me to send him a tough email again.
There IS a serious issue we need to deal with: the fact that we can't talk about serious issues. Which is itself a serious issue, so we can't talk about it. He knows we need to talk, and we've sort of started to on several occasions, but there's a narrow window of time between his first drink or second drink, and the moment he's had too many to have a coherent conversation. I let him take the lead, I don't start the tough conversation, I let him do it. And it doesn't take long before he's had enough difficult stuff and we have to stop. When he needs to stop, he says so and I respect that and we change the subject. So I've got this conversation bottled up inside, and I just have to be patient, and when the opportunity presents, I have to be focused on what is most important to say. Because it seems to be too painful for him, I am not sending him my thoughts written down any more, although I am still writing for myself.
I recognized that he is an alcoholic fairly early on, and I went and found myself an Al-Anon meeting where I feel comfortable. I go a few times a year. For some reason, though, I didn't pay much attention to PTSD. He did identify himself as a sufferer, also probably early on. He has told me about two of the most traumatic experiences he had in the military. And he's up front about the general fact that he was abused as a child. He has scars across his back. There are big gaps in his memory of childhood, which bothers him. He has big problems trusting. He has hyper-vigilance. He carried a gun with him at all times for years; now he carries a legal folding knife, and the gun is next to his pillow. Now that I know what I'm looking at, I recognize that he gets triggered -- including sometimes when he can't reach me on the phone. He has terrible problems sleeping, and has frequent nightmares. His memory is good for some things, horrible for others. He no longer gets out of control with anger, but he can be very mean, especially when he's triggered.
He is so very, very important to me, but I have a lot of pain and frustration right now. So I am trying to deal with my own stuff at least. I have started seeing my hypnotherapist again. She is someone I started seeing a few years ago for help with coping with PMS depression and moods that affect my ability to work, but she was also comfortable with my personal relationship arrangements and she was very helpful when I was dealing with our first separation. Turns out, her husband has PTSD and substance abuse issues, I believe she has her own experience of surviving trauma, and she often works with trauma survivors. She has been very helpful.
So now I am newly focused on the issues he has, and that we have, that are related to PTSD. I'm reading a couple of books (the Relationship one, and I got the combat essays book also recommended here). I'm trying to learn. I'm trying to be strong, and to do things to encourage my strength. I'm trying to see him and interact with him through this new lens. His situation is, as they say, complex: child abuse survivor, combat vet, active alcoholic with a family history of alcoholism. He doesn't like doctors and doesn't like the idea of therapy (his parents sent him to therapy as a kid, which of course was no help for his home life). However, he has demonstrated a tremendous capacity to survive and to find positive ways to cope already, over all the years of his adulthood. He has heard me on quite a few occasions when I have asked big things of him, and he has acted. I'd like the process to be less painful, and I don't want to have to leave him in order to be heard.
