✨ What I Felt Then
At the time, I was frustrated because the push-pull was not new.
Jerry had been doing some version of it for months. He would move close, then pull away. He would create intensity, then avoid clarity. He would make the connection feel real, then become vague or hard to reach when I tried to understand what was happening between us.
I was not asking him to define us perfectly. I was not asking him to be my boyfriend.
I was not asking him for promises he could not make. I wanted communication.
That was what felt so frustrating. The ask did not feel unreasonable to me. I thought two adults could care about each other, want each other, be honest about uncertainty, and still talk clearly enough not to hurt each other unnecessarily.
I also believed him when he said he was overwhelmed.
That does not mean I was blind. It means I was compassionate, and I had context. I knew about the divorce, the custody issues, the criminal charges, the recovery language, the parenting stress, and the shame he seemed to carry.
I knew Jerry loved his children. I knew being a father mattered to him. I knew how hard it had been for him to lose ordinary access to them, to go through supervised visits, and to have to rebuild that part of his life.
That was real.
And because it was real, I gave weight to the rest of what he told me. When he said he was overwhelmed, I believed him. When he said he shut down, I believed that too. His life looked genuinely heavy from the outside, and I did not want to punish him for struggling.
I also believed he wanted his life to mean something. When I asked if he was afraid of death, he told me he was not afraid of death. He was afraid of not living a meaningful life. I believed that answer. I wanted to believe the best about him.
I was someone who said what I meant and meant what I said. Because I felt close to him, I thought I could take him at his word too. So when he said he got overwhelmed and shut down, I took that seriously.
But I also needed him not to play games with me.
Both things were true.
I could have compassion for what he was carrying and still need him to communicate.
🧩 What Was Actually Happening
What was actually happening was that Jerry kept benefiting from intimacy while avoiding the conversation that intimacy required.
He could move close sexually.
He could be tender.
He could say he missed me.
He could talk about therapy, overwhelm, and shutting down.
He could say, “That’s fair.”
But none of that became consistent communication.
The push-pull was the pattern. He created closeness, then retreated from clarity. He accepted my emotional availability, my sexual availability, my patience, and my compassion, but when I asked what he wanted or what we were doing, he turned vague.
And because I had real reasons to believe he was overwhelmed, I kept trying to interpret him generously.
Some of that generosity was reasonable. People do get overwhelmed. People do shut down. Divorce, custody, criminal charges, sobriety, shame, parenting stress, and financial pressure are real. I knew that.
But Jerry’s explanations did not lead to repair. They became part of the pattern.
He could name the problem without changing it. He could describe the shutdown while still shutting down. He could sound self-aware while continuing to leave me guessing.
There was also something revealing in the way he answered me.
When I said I needed him not to play games with me, he did not say, “I’m not playing games.”
He said, “I don’t want to play games.”
At the time, that sounded close enough. It sounded like reassurance. It sounded like he was telling me his intentions were not cruel or manipulative.
But intention was not the issue. The issue was the effect of his behavior.
Whether he wanted to play games or not, the push-pull still left me guessing. He still moved close and pulled away. He still accepted intimacy while avoiding clarity. He still let me carry the uncertainty.
Looking back through his texts, what stands out is how carefully he avoided direct statements he could later be held to. Some of what he said may have been untrue. I still do not know. But the larger pattern was avoidance more than obvious lying. He left things unsaid. He answered around the harder questions. He used feelings, overwhelm, uncertainty, and intention in place of clear information.
That is part of why it was so hard to identify in the moment.
He let me build my understanding around the visible pressures while he continued hiding the rest. Now the patterns are clearer:
🎯 Calibration of Intimacy –
Jerry moved close enough to keep me emotionally and sexually engaged, then pulled back when I asked for communication. The intensity was available. The tenderness was available. The sexual access was available. The conversation was not.
🎯 Performative Vulnerability – Jerry talked about therapy, overwhelm, shutting down, and feeling like he did not make sense. Those things may have been true, but they did not become accountability. He used the language of self-awareness without doing the work of repair.
🎯 Information Control – Jerry’s control did not usually look like direct lies. At this point, it mostly looked like avoidance, omission, ambiguity, and careful wording. He did not clarify what he wanted, what he was doing, or what role I actually occupied in his life. He did not volunteer the larger context. He answered in ways that sounded emotionally honest without giving me the information I needed. He let me believe the problem was overwhelm, timing, and uncertainty while carefully omitting as much as he could.
🎯 Boundary Erosion by Degrees – The erosion here was relational as much as sexual. My ask kept shrinking. I was not asking for commitment. I was not asking for exclusivity. I was asking for communication, honesty, and not being played with.
🎯 Tailored Performance – Jerry knew how to answer me in the registers that worked: therapy language, wounded honesty, sexual dominance, music, tenderness, and desire. He could give me just enough of each to keep me engaged without giving me the clarity I was asking for.
🎯 Rapid Intimacy – Because the connection already felt deep, the lack of clarity felt like something to work through rather than a reason to stop. The early emotional, intellectual, sexual, and spiritual closeness made the push-pull harder to recognize as a pattern.
✅ What I Know Now
I know now that self-awareness is not accountability.
Saying “I shut down” is not repair.
Saying “that’s fair” is not follow-through.
Saying “I don’t want to play games” means very little if the behavior still creates confusion, distance, and hurt.
I also hear his wording differently now.
“I don’t want to play games” was not the same as “I’m not playing games.”
One speaks to desire or self-image. The other would have required him to account for his behavior.
He did not do that.
I mistook Jerry’s ability to describe the problem for a willingness to change it.
I also know now that not lying directly is not the same thing as being honest.
Someone can avoid direct lies and still control the truth.
Someone can choose careful wording, leave out essential context, answer only part of the question, and let another person build trust around an incomplete reality.
That was part of what made Jerry so hard to see clearly. He did not have to make many direct claims. He only had to omit enough, avoid enough, and let me keep interpreting him through the most compassionate explanation available.
My compassion was useful to him. I gave him the benefit of the doubt because that is how I try to move through the world. I believed him when he talked about his kids, his struggles, his shame, his recovery, his divorce, his fear of not living a meaningful life. I believed him because I meant what I said, and I assumed he did too.
My mistake was not compassion. My mistake was offering compassion to someone who understood how to use it without becoming accountable to it.
Jerry kept me at arm’s length because he knew what full honesty would cost him.
If I had known the whole truth, I would not have continued seeing him.
He knew that. He also knew he could not meet my standards. I had good boundaries. I had a meaningful life. I had built something real. I had family, friendships, spiritual community, a fulfilling career and purpose. I had created a life rooted in actual care for other people and I had a very clear sense of what I would and would not accept from someone who wanted access to me.
That put him in a particular position.
He wanted access to me, but he could not afford transparency.
He wanted my compassion, my body, my attention, my belief in him, and the way I made him feel about himself. But he also knew the fuller truth would change my choices.
So he kept the connection close enough to benefit from it and distant enough to control it.
He could have my compassion without becoming accountable to it.
He could have my body without giving me the whole context.
He could have my belief in him without meeting the standards that belief deserved.
At times I heard envy in his voice when I talked about my life and the people in it.
Jerry talked about meaning. He talked about wanting his life to matter. He had spent years in ministry, and at the time, I believed that reflected something true about him. I believed it meant he was trying to live with purpose.
Now I think ministry may have been one of the places where Jerry tried to prove something to himself.
That his life had meaning. That he had a role. That he mattered. That the story he told himself about who he was could still hold.
I treated him like someone capable of meaning. I believed there was a decent man underneath the damage. I took his longing for a meaningful life seriously because I had a meaningful life of my own.
I think he wanted to be near that.
Not enough to be honest.
Not enough to stop using omission.
Not enough to protect me from the truth he was withholding.
But enough to keep coming back for the way my belief in him made him feel.
What I know now is that love and accountability are not separate things.
Jerry could love his children and still model avoidance. He could care deeply about being a father and still fail to show what honesty, repair, respect, and accountability look like when he hurt someone.
The frustration I felt was not neediness. It was pattern recognition.
He had been pushing close and pulling away for months. I was not asking for too much. I was responding to a pattern he had created.
➡️ What Comes Next
After this, Violet tries again to make communication possible.
She asks for a phone call. She tries to keep the door open without making the conversation feel like a confrontation. She is still trying to be fair to him, and to herself.
But Jerry goes quiet again.
And this time, the silence says more than he does.