Jen,

Thanks for writing such a well-thought out letter. I've inserted responses to the various things you've said.

Dean,

After talking with Bob on last Saturday night, it seemed the right thing to do was to contact you and try in some way to talk about how I feel about what's going on in our relationship.

I've been thinking and thinking about what to say to you but I become overcome with a profound sadness of what we've lost. No matter what, we did have a true, pure and beautiful love (or basis, spark, motivation of love) for each other. That is a precious thing — the most precious thing a person can have and experience. What else is there?

There are other good things in life besides romance. People also get their motivation to live from the pride of accomplishing something important for the world around them. That was what motivated Paul, and to some extent me too. But that doesn't demean the value of romance, or fun and pleasure for that matter. It's important to see life's various compartments or components as each having needs to be addressed. I've often thought in my years with you that you placed too much emphasis on romantic happiness — and saw too much tragic significance in temporary romantic setbacks. A tremendous help in the development of all these compartments is just to maintain a psychological focus, to be willing and able to talk about problems with people who care about you. This "creative" compartment is the most important in this sense. That's why I'm glad you opened up to Bob last Saturday.

Whether you're in love at any one moment or not, all of us live in a world of people who need us and whom we need in return. That arena of life is important too. I know it sounds cynical to say that "When you're not with the one you love, love the ones you're with," but there's a lot of good common sense in it. I've often told people that everyone always has a lover — as long as we define "lover" as whoever is most important to you at a particular time in your life. In this sense, of course, you and I are still each other's lover.

Right now I feel if I think too much about this, my survival is in jeopardy, and I'll fall off a precipice into utter despair unable to function. As it is I find myself crying in the subway, at work, etc., if I get started thinking about what's happened to us, or how to explain it or fix it or even what to say to you.

Then you need to stay away from me for now. Anything or anybody who can make you feel this helpless is not good for you. And if even thinking about it makes you crazy, then simply try to stop thinking about it and try to enjoy other aspects of your life. I'm not going anywhere. I'll be here when you need me and when that need grows strong enough for you to be open and honest with me.

I don't feel safe talking to you. I don't believe you can and want to hear what I've got to say. I think you've completely lost trust in me and find everything I say as a means to provoke and/or be sadistic towards you. I remember once you said that that letter Joy sent me was probably something she wanted to say for a long time about how she felt towards me and to get me out of her life. I think in that last telephone conversation we had when I said to you I didn't know you hated me so much you were saying things you wanted to say for a long time and was an indirect way of kicking me out of your life (another thing you wanted to do for awhile). I do feel you hate me, you distrust me, to you I only provoke anger and hatred. And also I think you wanted me out of your life for quite awhile. Any kind of trust, kindness, desire to understand each other and enjoyment with each other has been annihilated. I saw the same deterioration in your relationship with Bob Fink.

This is all coming out of your paranoia. When I want to kick people out of my life, I kick, and well before they have time to see it coming. What angers me is that for years I've asked to sit down with you and openly and honestly talk about our relationship on a regular basis. Every time you've agreed to do this it's been a wonderful experience for you. You get over your paranoia, I learn a little bit more about what you really think, and you learn a little bit more about what I really think. We get to know each other a little better Yet you repeatedly withdraw from these wonderful experiences, saying you don't trust me and that I'm only trying to hurt you. You'll have to explain to me why you need to think that when all the evidence is to the contrary.

Your chronic need to run in terror into the night is a great mystery to me, particular since over the last few years you've needed less provocation each time. But I don't say you do it to hurt me. I'd like to find out why you do it, as I hope you do, but I have no foredrawn conclusions. The only method I know to uncover the real truth is for you to talk it out with someone. (It's only the aftermath of your self-engendered crises, by the way, where you indulge in infantile sulks for days or weeks, that is clearly intended to get back at the other person.)

Everything I consciously do with relationships is an attempt to improve them — and to see that each partner is growing — even when I have to break them off for what hopefully may be only a temporary period. When I decided that being with Bob in person was bringing out defenses in him over which he had no control, I restricted him to email access. As a result our relationship has improved in the last two years. We are actually able to say simple but psychological things to one another that we were never before able to share. And I think our interest in one another is on a firmer, and certainly less violently symptomatic, basis.

If you want to know what's going on between two individuals you have to ask them each what they think and not go by what it looks like from afar. I'm sure you've heard plenty of stories of couples who became friends only after they got divorced, for example.

Dean, if relating to me causes you so much pain, it's better to just stop. You were in such despair when we talked that last time. I hate that I caused that in you. I'm sorry I haven't been strong enough to help you heal what's in you where you can't see how other people have problems and they are not trying to get at you. You really should try to heal yourself in some way Dean. Not for me but for you — for your own sake. I've failed you. It doesn't do any good for me either if what I have to offer you is so dreadful and causes such despair.

My despair was caused by the irrational and violent way you were treating me. If I can't say, "Hi, what happened?" to my best friend without her lashing out at me and running off into the night, then I have little reason to trust that that relationship is going to continue to serve my mental health. And when you called me two nights later and flippantly said, "Hi, you're like okay, right?" it provoked me to an anger I hadn't felt in years. You know perfectly well how ostracism makes me feel. For years I've explained to you that my only really sore point is the pain of being ignored. Yet you've used this switchblade against me three or four times in the last year alone. To pretend I'm not human and that my flesh doesn't bleed is to live in a dream world I don't even want to know about. So whenever you pretend that I'm not human I'm going to continue to raise my voice as loud as I can. I'm worth it.

But even when I'm at my angriest, I'm proud to admit that I never say things just to hurt people. I stick only to what I believe is true, even if it's likely to ruffle the other person's feelings. That's why I told you that that whole incident with you was the very first time the word "insane" had ever popped into my head to describe your behavior. Jennifer, if a such a little cloud in the sky as getting lost for 30 minutes can undermine your respect for others that much, then you must have a profound problem deep inside you that you're not yet facing. The problem is that I don't know what the problem is, precisely because you won't sit down with me and discuss what's really going on inside you. And that's why I suggested that, if you won't risk the possibility of my advice helping you, that you at least try to avail yourself of the social services that the adaptive world offers.

Some of these supports, including the new generation of psychiatric drugs, can apparently be quite helpful to people — as recent testimony by Bob Fink and Frank Aqueno attests. In the summer of 1966 I walked into Oliver Sacks' clinic in the Bronx and was very helped indeed by attending a clinically-supervised support group for about three weeks. I came out of it feeling very much more a part of the world than I had felt before. All I did was get a lot of sympathy from middle-aged housewives, who didn't take me for granted the way my parents did, yet this successfully ameliorated the root of my stress, which was my not feeling that I had any say in the adult world, that I had no community to call my own. It prepared me to be confident enough to start my first love affair that very October.

My argument with psychiatry is not that it doesn't help people, but that it doesn't know how to help very creative people with their very creative problems. But your problem has nothing to do with creativity. It pulls you away from your creativity, in fact, into a world of pure terror. Such a problem may well be amenable to drug treatment. I don't know, do you? I think you should at least investigate the possibility. You could always back out of it if it wasn't helping. Think of it as an experiment, that's all. Nobody living in the 20th century should be ashamed of having to see a doctor once in a while, even a shrink.

This time I can't bounce back. Every time you wouldn't talk to me for five weeks was extremely painful for me. I felt abandoned and worthless, uncertain, like the rug was pulled out from under me. I was still reeling from the five weeks you didn't talk to me in the summer. That time my chest actually hurt. No wonder you thought I wasn't relating to you. Looking back I see I was just surviving with you — my inner life was still in withdrawal from the pain of the separation. It's been like that since the time we had the first separation — I think the fall of 1996 — that we've really been close. Our relationship was never the same after that.

I can't bounce back this time. The pain I've experienced from the last go round has won. I don't believe life has to be this painful. For two intelligent people like us, we are really stupid, reckless, greedy, selfish and immature. We had something wonderful and beautiful and just threw it away and demolished it.

You do remind me sometimes of the rich indulged teenage girl who insists on setting fire to her room all the time. You are your own worst enemy. Unfortunately, this enemy can only be defeated by a champion who is also inside of you waiting to be unleashed. I think now's the time to give that persona a part in this play.

I think basically what our problem is is that with each other we became the six year old children were were — kids who were extremely hurt and needy — and we expected the other person to satisfy all that need. Of course, we would never have enough or be enough to satisfy that hurt. And we couldn't accept that in each other.

This is the problem with making romance the sole focus of your life. You're right — romance is very much a return to childhood. The rewards of the romantic compartment come entirely from having assured and guaranteed satisfactions all the time. Neither romance nor adventure tolerate problems or obstacles. When problems or obstacles emerge, people are called upon to switch into another mode of relating, which you might call mutually-parental or even adaptive. If there is no groundwork for such a switch then the results are invariable — tantrums, rage, sulking, vituperation. This is why some of the most glorious romances in history have ended up in drunken rages, demolished hotel rooms, and even murder. In your case it also explains why, whenever stress enters what you expect to be a romantic experience, you having nothing to fall back upon and fall to pieces in front of me. This is exactly why November 11 happened in the first place.

It's important to add that when it's inside my apartment that you collapse and get vindictive, I'm able to actually physically stop you from running out the door, and after about 15 minutes you calm down and pull yourself out of your tailspin. It's only when we're in the great outdoors that you run away and torture yourself for days or weeks, with me left holding the bag with a quizzical expression on my face because it feels like somebody's just kicked my stomach out. So, until you can address the root causes of this behavior, I'd say that our relationship should simply avoid spaces in which you can give in to your impulsive flight mechanism.

I've always been fond of the great fun we've had being romantic. But I've also remained aware of the transitory nature of the value of romance, its lack of "residue." In the back of my mind is always the idea that you don't exist in my life to satisfy any other need than my desire to be a force for right in the world. A permanent feature of my nature is that I'll always want to help you with your problems if you'll let me. If you don't want to continue a charade of pretending to be close without actually being so, then I suspect there's some real wisdom in your decision to stay away from me. But the alternative to the charade should not be to throw in the towel once again and to get all helpless. The alternative could be for you to get to know me, and for me to get to know you, by talking face to face the way even mere friends are supposed to be able to do. We ought to get together on a regular basis and learn more about what the other person is all about. This will take work — we'll hear things we don't like and will have to not over-react — but it will be worth it. It will be quite different in mood than a cozy Saturday evening cuddling in a warm bed watching Howard Stern and covered with pizza crumbs. But what could come out of it could be vastly more important for our future happiness and mental health.

There is no sense in continuing the pain or trying to resurrect a relationship that no longer has kindness, openness, interest or trust.

If you keep tell yourself such lies, sooner or later you'll start believing them.

My dad is very sick. He was medically stable for awhile with some repercussions from the stroke — couldn't move his right arm and lost some mental capability. He was eating well and everything — but we couldn't move him into a rehabilitation place because we were waiting for a bed. Then something happened with his teeth and he didn't eat anymore. All along he was very angry that he had to be in the hospital. Then he had a fever, pneumonia and an infection — and they even asked us if we wanted to put him on life support if need be. We said no because none of us thought my father would want to live that way. Now he is more stable, because he has no teeth and he is not healthy enough to get him another pair of dentures, they are feeding him from a tube — He recognizes us but I really don't know how much is there in his head. He can talk to us a little too.

I just hope I did the best I could for him. I haven't experienced many deaths and I guess in the long run this is not such a horrible one — but it would be better to just die in your sleep one night instead of having to spend months in the hospital. Maybe two or three months in the hospital at the end of your life isn't so bad either. I just let him know that I love him and appreciated everything he did for me.

I don't think there's any way for us to know whether another person's death is good or not, nor does it matter much. Some things are just given to us, and we either deal with them well or not. I'm sure that this experience with your Dad has taken a lot out of us and probably has a lot to do with why you haven't reached out to me before now. Maybe you should wait until it's all over before thinking about letting me into your life again. I'll leave that decision up to you.

Dean