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Wow! So many of you are being spiteful against a man who has shown nothing but love, dedication, downright obsession in the OP, yet ya'll take a big ol' warm dump on him for being persistent ?
The man is trying to reconnect with a woman he fancied back in the days, he even offered her help as well ?
Give him credit for going out of his way and risking rejection and embarrassment.
We only have a finite amount of time in this universe, may as well "get it in" while you can.
People suggesting the OP to block him, "just move on girl!"..."he's a loser!"..."you can do better"...
Ummm, folks, we're OLD(er)! We don't have all the time in the world. Clock is ticking. Giddy up.
Knowing the story, I don't understand why you even bothered to start a thread deep in the night sharing with us this unfortunate experience.
One would think that as a mature woman you got wiser, and learned some new skills.
But not! While the whole situation bothers you, obviously, causing sleepless nights - sadly, it doesn't bothers you the way I would expected. Yes, you are still upset what happened years ago, but you are also excited and intrigued about his new inquiries.
Allowing him back to your life makes you a weak prey, and sends vibes that you didn't changed a bit - still the same lonely, desperate woman, that is willing to be used and abused again.
Yes, he probably needs you, but whatever that is, will be good for him, not for you.
One of your interests is: getting lost on the road less traveled. This is what's ( going on) with this attarction. He may be this "sense of adventure" for you. How did your life change after he left?
I take it, there was no communications as well. He may be sick or something, too. Some type of recovery? 12 step program? You said, he drank? What's the worst that can happen if you meet him now? There was no closure, correct?
I'm always rather amazed that someone would go to the trouble of reading my profile here. I consider it a compliment of sorts, so thank you, greenflute!
The "road less traveled" is the one Glenn used to take my heart back in the day. He is an audacious backcountry traveler and completely fearless. He quite literally drives beyond signs reading "Point of No Return" and he is the one who introduced me to the grandest adventure guide of all time - "The Colorado Atlas and Gazetteer" - a series of maps - 15' GPS grids of my beloved home state that shows every lost place a girl may wish to vanish off to by driving over some cliff. He was a kind of post graduate course in the art of getting lost in the mountains, and he had a very profound impact on the direction of my life.
Thanks to all the things he showed me in our shared adventures, I was able to turn my grief over him leaving into a kind of astonished joy when I decided that the best place to heal a broken heart was to drive out to watch the peak of the November Leonid meteor shower in Island in the Sky National Park. That meteor shower in that part of the world is still described in awe by star gazers all over the Internet. It looked as if the heavens had caught fire! I've never seen anything to equal it in my entire life, and it went on for 3 nights straight.
The whole thing is such an intricate story - I kept in touch with Glenn's two younger kids for years. I loved them in their own right and it was too much for me to discard them along with their Dad as if they were no more than yesterday's old news. But keeping in touch with them couldn't help but keep me in touch with Glenn. He was always there in the back-ground, and this is not the first time he's tried to reconnect - it's the first time I wasn't vigilant enough to fend him off before he could get to me again, and by this point I doubt that I'll ever find complete closure in regard to him. We complement one another in so many ways - right down to our mutual fear of allowing anyone to get too close. I have to admit to being a runaway in more than one committed relationship, myself.
Glenn does have medical issues at this point in his life, and I am a deeply compassionate person. I'll cry when I hear stories of children in Africa or Bangladesh facing famine, and if a friend IRL is in some sort of trouble, I'll help them out if I possibly can. I think that's why I let Glenn back in this time - it hurts to find out that he having medical issues like the ones he does, and my instinctual response is always one of empathy. The worst that could happen if I meet him now is catastrophe. I'm amazed that he can put me into my current state of mind with merely a few phone calls, but I shouldn't be. Happens every single time. Given his current situation, I don't see how he'd ever manage to show up on my doorsteps, but given that he's Glenn, I wouldn't put anything past him.
Right now, I long to just go hide up in the mountains for the entire spring and summer - I've done stuff like that before - beauty and solitude is a true balm for the soul. But I can't because the engine blew on my truck and it's such an expensive repair that I can't afford it, nor can I afford to buy a new vehicle, so I can't solve this one by running away myself. Oh, grrrrr! But I'll figure it out and calm down here eventually. I always have in the past and venting about this on the Internet is a help, so thank you and everyone else so very much for your replies!
@ Curmudgeon
Thank you so much for your second reply. You are right - we are only as old as we want to make ourselves be. I need to stop beating myself up with all this "well, at my vast old age" thinking.
Last edited by Colorado Rambler; 04-02-2017 at 03:29 PM..
Oh, Curmudgeon, I agree with everything you posted except for your last sentence! BTW, I really appreciate a man from my own generation chiming in on the conversation.
I do indeed need the insight of others because I seem to have somehow gone to war with myself. As they say, "The distance from the head to the heart is a 1,000 miles," and right now the distance from my head to my heart seems to be approaching infinity. I was far too cavalier in Glenn's regard when he showed back up on Facebook. It was all so long ago, and I felt that I'd come to accept the probability that I'll never re-marry, much less have a close connection with any man. Now I'm paying the price for my false sense of complacency. I discover that I really do want someone to stand beside me and I am so very, very tired of "traveling alone." Glenn knows me all too well, he's still the same silver tongued devil he always was - from that little catch in his voice to way he says all those beautiful words. I love poetry, and I write poems of my own, but Glenn can speak poems into my ear and I get lost under his spell yet one more time.
I feel so foolish; I feel so lost; I feel exactly the way I did the first night we ever met; I feel more than a little crazy and I'm desperately seeking that hard won emotional equilibrium that I had until I so foolishly threw it away by finally accepting Glenn's "friend" request. Indeed, there's no fool like an old fool! The input from others means a great deal to me right now, and I thank every single person who replied to this thread, especially you!
What?!? OP, this is alarming. He's a con artist. You know that from experience. Why would you let that back into your life? Clearly, you're feeling needy. For heaven's sake, go get some professional counseling, before he takes advantage of you again. Get a grip on yourself--and be firm about it!--and make yourself look up counselors on the internet, review the websites of ones that deal with relationships or mid-life or later-life loneliness, and call to make an appointment.
Just do it, OP. You can't be trusted with your own emotional and financial safety at this point. Get tough with yourself, and talk to a professional about this.
Clearly, you have a lot of issues and baggage. You never needed to accept his friend requests. Why you didn't just block him I don't understand. Then you gave him your phone number and address? Seriously?
What?!? OP, this is alarming. He's a con artist. You know that from experience. Why would you let that back into your life? Clearly, you're feeling needy. For heaven's sake, go get some professional counseling, before he takes advantage of you again. Get a grip on yourself--and be firm about it!--and make yourself look up counselors on the internet, review the websites of ones that deal with relationships or mid-life or later-life loneliness, and call to make an appointment.
Just do it, OP. You can't be trusted with your own emotional and financial safety at this point. Get tough with yourself, and talk to a professional about this.
^^^ Absolutely this. "Glenn" walked out on not only you but his children who definitely needed him at that point in their lives. Why would you ever trust a person like that again? He wasn't young and foolish but a grown man at the time.
I assume you have recovered financially in the past 20 years. If you let this guy back into your life, you could find yourself in a dire situation from which you cannot recover.
Can you get some counseling? Since you are not attached to someone it is probably not too unusual to think about a former love once in awhile, but you need help in figuring out why you are still drawn to someone who treated you so badly.
Personally I would think he wants something FROM you, whether that is medical care or whatever. Sending checks is disturbing and cashing them is only encouraging him. Get help and consider this a dangerous situation.
Hah! I'm going to keep any money he's stupid enough to send me. I never asked for it nor have I ever made him any promises. If he wants to "haunt" me with $100.00 checks, I'm snapping them up and calling it Karma!
Hell yeah!!!
Let him keep sending you $100 checks. When they stop, or when the first one bounces, THEN block him and kick him to the curb.
BTW, a tiger cannot change his stripes. It's an old cliche because it is true. Heed the warning.
DO NOT USE THE MONEY TO FLY HIM TO YOU. He'll start next with the love letters. Don't read them, just cash the checks.
He sounds evil. His behavior was absolutely terrible. He encourages people to become dependent upon him, then he leaves them in the lurch. If he were repentant, he would send a letter of abject apology and nothing else, except, as someone upthread mentioned, a check, because I'm sure he made your financial situation far worse that it needed to be. I think you need to do a lot of work on yourself to figure out why you are at all receptive to overtures from this serpent.
I, too, wonder what happened to the poor child he abandoned.
I'm being haunted by a man from my past - why would he do this?
I would bet this month's salary that "Glenn" is making the rounds of his former romantic conquests, hoping to latch onto one he can keep for a while until he chooses to leave again. If you were a fly on the wall watching him reach out to people on FB, what would you see?
I beg you to put aside your romantic notions for a long moment and consider what another, possibly even more humiliating rejection will do to your self-esteem.
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