Lars Letter
Dear Lars,
If nothing else what is happening to me is that I am finally standing up for myself and finally sharing with you how I have felt over time, how I have felt as things have occurred between us.
A lot of how I have related to you is that I have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to be supportive of you, trying to encourage you the best I could, trying to be positive to you – which has included not saying anything to you of any great degree when you did things to me that I feel were very inconsiderate and unfeeling, that just hurt me when you treated me badly.
I feel I have literally lurched from one train wreck with you to the next – month after month, starting in January 2020. But I always came back and I always would settle down, put aside my hurt and disappointment and try to reconcile things with you, I would be patient, kind, and Lars – that is who I want to be with you. I don’t want to be mean to you. I have no desire to say angry things with you – I thought that you meant well enough in your very inner core, the part that I would get glimpses of from time to time.
But as the walls these last three months have come tumbling down between you and I – my walls that were there to protect you and to protect me – it’s all tumbling out now. More and more I’m sharing with you me, me unvarnished, the way that I felt and feel.
For example, I would never have thrown men into your face the way you have thrown the women in my face. Never. There has never been a month go by, to this month, that you have not paraded some woman or more around in front of me. Be it dropping their name, be it telling me about them, be it doing something with them, including even this, just ignoring my posts on Facebook, even my profile pictures, and posting on these other women’s pages “Likes” and telling them how beautiful and pretty they are – while rarely throwing me a “Like”, the woman you have had a relationship with, the parade of woman that has gone on all this time, every single month, to just one week plus ago.
When you and I talked tonight you clearly forgot the other thing that happened at the Swedish Club the day of the bazaar. One, you decided to go there after talking to me about my being there that day – you went not to see me but to go see your women friends. After you took your victory lap inside you proceeded to snag another woman, Sonja, and paraded her around in front of me – your arm around her and then holding her hand all the way to her car.
Afterwards when we talked on the phone you gave me your lecture again about how you should not have any obligations to do anything other than what you wanted. I am so over that whole line of thinking that you do – that whole no relationship, no obligations, no expectations – that’s you gaslighting me in the worst way – we have a relationship – it’s abuse of the first degree, and it’s you wanting me to agree to you treating me any way you feel like it and thinking that I have no right to say anything to you about it and that you don’t have to engage in any reciprocity – you give me zero in return.
Think about this – You paraded Sonja in front of me the same as you did with the gal from the Volvo dealership in September – you got mad at me when I shared with you not that I objected to you having lunch with her, but when I asked you to have lunch with me – I’m sure you have forgotten what you said – but I never will – you cruelly said to me that you would rather have lunch with her even though you cared nothing about her because to have lunch with me would acknowledge our relationship. What a crappy thing to say – and just think – you said that to me your if nothing else friend of 36 years!
I shouldn’t know any other woman’s name, other than Yara’s, that has any hint of your name being linked to them in some way other than purely as a friendship. Jan, Monika, Nina, and all the other women in your crowd at the Swedish Club for example – okay I’m not saying no women friends, I have no problem with that – but you make it a point to wink and nod and make out to me like you are having something to do with all of them.
I still think that you had something going on with Judy, I think you’re doing things with other women, flirting around with them, at least giving them the impression you are after them and then you kind of slip them into a conversation with me and there it is, it makes me think that you are trying to hurt me.
I realize the reality of you – this is what I think – I think you do and would flirt around, I think you would maybe even get into a situation where you’re going to try to have sex with them, and you might play around for a little bit, but two realities would hit – one would be the literal sexual challenge, then the other would be they would get “sticky” with you – they would want more from you. And then you would start the distancing, the withdrawing, the “I’m so busy, the work is so demanding”, and off you would go withdrawing from them.
In the alternative – I’ve thought about that as being one of your motivations, why you hit up women and promote “friendships” with them.
But there is this other thing also you have started doing – you insist you want to be alone. I don’t believe you. I don’t believe a word of it. I feel you’re telling yourself that because you can’t either figure out a way to act or do something different – yes, egads, change, or you can’t figure out how to stop being what I feel is so self centered, or you can’t stop worrying that if you put all your eggs in one girl’s basket you’re going to get hurt!
All these women – even if every one of them is a flirtation – it’s I think all about you wanting to feel desirable, wanting women to look up to you, and spreading the risk around – no one woman will be able to take you down, no one woman if she finds out you are not great, it’s no big loss b/c you’ve got another one lined up, another one convinced you’re interested in her, another one being groomed by you in case you need some new blood in the lineup. That’s what I think is possibly going on. More importantly though – that whole setup is just all about you using women.
And my response is – come in out of the cold Lars you can always like women, have lots of women friends, all I’ve asked is for you to not jeopardize our relationship and confuse it with behavior that really doesn’t work for me – and to not take time away from you and I by playing games with someone else.
You have all you could want with me, I can entertain you, care for you in every way – including even were you to be in your dotage, but setting that aside for now you have someone – me – who is the whole package – I love you unreservedly, in other words I love you foibles and all – I’ve only asked you for honesty, reciprocity, fidelity, and kindness and affection.
I told you in February of 2021 and since then, I will never hurt you. I told you I would always love you. I live my words Lars – I live what I tell you – if you do not value yourself enough to want to embrace that kind of a person and have them in your life and prefer just continuing with this thing of indiscriminately using women, including Yara, you are unworthy – that makes me sad.
In regards to the matter of others in our lives, to me in some ways Yara does not count, she is in a category of her own. She is not what I am talking about.
But I would never have done this thing to you, about the other women that you have done to me – and this isn’t an academic discussion on my part. Do you think there has never been a time that men have not wanted me? Do you think there has never been a time that some man has not approached me and made their interest in me known to me? Do you think that all this time no man has ever said something like this to me, that they want me, that they find me desirable?
This is part of my decision making process now that I’m going to share with you – for my own sake and because of this – I’m going to honor at least what I think we have – and that is that we have a relationship where we talk about things, and over time that we can talk about things even if it is difficult things.
Thinking things through further though, I just realized that he latter has not been I felt true for me all this last couple of years – please get the distinction I’m making – “There is nothing that I have not told you” – my correction/clarification. What I have not told you is like how “I really felt” – and just having uttered that I realize this – I accused you just the other day of keeping information from me – I accused you of lying to me by ommission, all of which is true – but I have told you essentially the half truth about how I felt about things you have done to me and to our relationship – which to this moment – I am devastated Lars – I have shed buckets of tears because of being so disappointed that you would treat me so callously – I’m the woman you told for 33 years how much you wanted me, you told me how special I was, you would be tongue tied I could tell the words did not roll off of your tongue that easily – even last year and this year when you told me you loved me, I knew none of that came easy for you.
And yet your penchant for seeking the attention from other women, your penchant for seeking some form of validation from other women, and then your penchant for keeping this distance between us because of your selfishness – it just has been killer for my heart.
I don’t feel what I have been keeping from you is the same at all compared to what you have been keeping from me. I kept the things from you that I did because I wanted you to feel positive about yourself. I felt that others had been mean to you, that others ran you down, I felt that you had a bad opinion of yourself and I didn’t want to add to that.
So I would by and large write you a big letter – I would try to be thoughtful, I would try to work through things with you and I just held back and never said to you until the last maybe three months the other part of how I felt when things you did were so hard to absorb. And I don’t know if it would have made any difference – many a time I wrote you letters and said – treat me nice. Be kind to me. Be affectionate. And then some new thing would happen, some new affront by you to me, that I would end up swallowing just to keep the peace between you and I.
I’m scattered in my writing here I know – but the only way I’m going to survive is to get it all out – to tell you the person who I tell all my secrets to – think of that – the person who I tell my secrets to is the man that just is so – no – emotionally unavailable – well I’m sick of that also! Make yourself available – you’ve done it before with me – you were making progress and then you’ve just recoiled and withdrawn so far in that I can barely reach you. And that I blame Yara for!! She has slammed you so hard this year that it is just devastating me, it’s devastating for you – I feel your memory and health problems are in no small part due to the terrible way that she has been treating you not just for the last two years – for years!
Here is what I am considering – I am of two minds about what to do for my involvement with you – I said I’d like to work it out with you – that is true. On the other hand – there is the whole matter of how you have treated me from January 2020 to the present – approximately October 15th. I feel terrible to have to make hard choices that go against the thing I want to do with you – be kind, understanding, and considerate of you.