The summed up version of the dream is: I basically "travelled to the past" and witnessed my husband being in love with another woman. This isn't just a woman that I made up in my head, but a woman that he was actually in love with at one point.
Rationally, I KNOW that my husband loves me. It's not even a question. He tells me all the time, but even then, he doesn't even really have to tell me, because the "evidence", so to speak, is really fucking clear. I can tell by the way he talks to me and the way he looks at me. It's just something that I can feel. So the fact that I get so fucked up over dreams like this makes me angry. He has a past. So do I. It's unfair of me to be so jealous and upset. He didn't even know me back then. Shit, I wasn't even legal back then. Fuck's sake, I was in a relationship when I met him... well, more like I was trapped in one and the sex life was practically non-existent... but he was VERY understanding and empathetic towards the situation I was in at the time because that's just the kind of person he is, but I know that it bothered him sometimes, and understandably so. Of course, it really bothered me, too, for a lot of reasons.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that, when we first met and before we fell in love, he told me that I reminded him of someone who was very special to him. At the time, he used the present tense. He said a couple other things regarding her talents, which also happened to be mine as well, and there's some weird fucking thought process in my head where I can't stop asking myself if she was better than me. Or if she was prettier than me, or thinner than me, or nicer than me, or less fucked up than me (which, she probably-most-definitely was that last one, because that's generally just a REALLY low bar). He said it took him a really long time to get over her, which, for some reason, really got to me. There's part of me that's afraid that, if in some alternate reality where we would no longer be together, he would get over me really quickly. He said that she was a genuinely good person, but he said that about me, too. There's that stupid part of me that's afraid that I'm a "replacement" - that the only reason that he loves me now is because I remind him of her.
I know that it's fucked up of me to think like this. When I get like this, I tell myself that he loves ME, but then of course, the shitty side of my mind counters that with, "Of course he does, but he loved her, too. YOU'RE NOT SPECIAL." Or I tell myself that he married ME, not her, but then the other side comes back and says, "Yeah, but what if he had the opportunity to marry her instead? Would he have done it?"
None of these are fair questions to ask and, if I did, it puts him in a really tight position. I've done it before and, as you can probably imagine, it's incredibly uncomfortable for him. I can't/don't want to talk to him about this because it hurts him, he's dealing with enough shit as it is, and it's unfair as fuck of me to be jealous over something that he had no control over. You can't just pick and choose who you fall in love with; it doesn't work like that. There are things that I've told him about my past that he could be jealous about, too, and he has been... BUT I DON'T WANT ANYONE TO BE JEALOUS. I WANT him to be able to tell me anything. I don't want my BPD, my stupid fucking self, to fuck that up.
And then there's the traumatized part of me that genuinely believed for most of my life that straight men are not truly capable of actually falling in love with women - but especially not with me - and that their attraction is purely based on using women for sex, and their "desire" to hurt them. Of course I know now that this isn't true, and that there is a massive problem in society regarding men expressing their emotions, toxic masculinity and so on (which is completely fucked up)... but for years, this was all I knew, and between the trauma and my experiences with men up until the point I met my husband, I really didn't have much of a reason to not believe that this - that men couldn't fall in love with women because of xyz - was actually the case. This always really fucked with me, especially when I was younger and starting to experience attraction, because, while I was attracted to men, even more than that, I was FUCKING TERRIFIED of them. I interpreted this profound fear of men as me being gay, and whenever I'd see a man and my stomach would flip, I'd be so mad at myself and just ignore it as much as I could. I mean, shit, I had a MUCH easier time accepting that I was completely gay (when I actually wasn't) than accepting that I was attracted to men (which I am). I'd see men who said that they were in love, and I'd see the way they looked at and talked about women that they were in love with, and I just could NOT wrap my head around it. It was like I'd seen a unicorn, and to have this deep-seated belief that I'd had since childhood be challenged scared the fuck out of me. I didn't know what the hell was going on.
And, again, while I know that straight men are VERY capable of experiencing emotions and falling in love with women and I realize that these beliefs are deeply rooted in trauma and do not represent the billions of men on this planet and all that, and the rational part of my brain knows without a single shadow of a doubt that my husband loves me (VERY much) and ONLY me, it would be dishonest of me to say that this whole "thing" (whatever the hell it is) doesn't nag at me sometimes, and that I don't still struggle with accepting the fact that a man actually loves ME; that there is a man who experienced love with another woman before me, and that he, a straight man, currently loves a woman.... me. It challenges the schema that I had for most of my life. In a lot of ways, it imprinted itself into my brain while it was still in the critical stages of development, and something like that doesn't just magically go away. I wish it would.
I know this is scattered because my brain gets scattered when I think about all of this. It's a lot more complicated than anything I can really describe. I have a knot in my throat but I'm not going to fucking cry about this. I'm being stupid.
For the record: Once again, I recognize that these are not rational thoughts, and that at the end of the day, my brain will concoct some fucked up thing to make me upset no matter what the actual reality is. My mind has NEVER been on my side. This is shit that is WAY better off just being kept to myself... or I guess in this case, on SS under a spoiler. I resent the fact that I struggle with any of this in the first place, and that the only way I can truly escape it is to just turn off my brain entirely and permanently.
I don't know. I just clearly needed to get some of it out of my system.
