Update: So after much waffling and wavering and terrified hostility I have ended things with Mark, only now to find out that he doesn’t hate me, but loves me dearly, wants to spend the rest of his life with me, wants to grow old with me…In about twenty years.  It doesn’t exactly seem fair to feel like it is expected of me to forgive him for his nasty angry past and move forward as though nothing had happened, because he “didn’t mean it.”  It still hurt me nonetheless.  Intentions never are the things by which people are judged.  You have to evaluate their actions and the results of those actions.  I want to be his friend, but it’s so hard.  I look at him as a friend and I have no problem, I feel light and free. I look at him, and if I can put it all behind me I feel like I am standing with my best friend, laughing and smiling and feeling fantastic. However, in a short while I start to seethe with resentment and anger as I recall his words that have scarred my heart in the places I once cherished so well.   I start to remember the way he treated my love for him so flippantly, as he walked over my spirit and cut down my soul to help him to get to where he is now. And he thinks now he’s there I should feel sorry and help him to feel okay with what he has done.  And the worst part of all is that I want to. How pathetic is that?  I miss him and I see old couples on the street holding hands and playing with grandchildren and I see him with me there, eighty and wrinkled and deeply in love.  But how can he ever respect me?  How can he ever truly love me, if I have such a low amount of respect for myself, to want to be with a man who has no comprehension of the pain he has caused me -- or if he has, no sense of responsibility and repentance for his actions?  He excuses himself from all past wrong-doing, because he is sorry now and it was only his intention to get through his own pain, not to hurt others around him…which frankly is exactly the point.  If you don’t specifically intend to make people feel good, you oft times make them feel inconsequential to your life, which in the face of deep love can make a person feel pain comparable to nothing else.  I’m completely confused and wafting through phases of anger and elation, grief and clarity, fear and courage.  I feel like a walking cliché from a bad college girl band.  Isn’t it Ironic?  I hate him, I love him, I wish I never knew him and I am happy that I have had him, but I am uncomfortable in my skin and I wish I knew the answer to figure out how I got here.  Did I fall in love with a man that didn’t truly exist because I was afraid to see that he might not be all I was hoping for? All along, did I deny the essential truth?  He wanted me, and he conquered me, and I never was someone he respected as anything but a conquest.  I still feel that is all I amount to in his eyes, but perhaps that’s all men ever really feel for women.  Perhaps I’ll die alone in an apartment in New York City with my dogs and my books and my stories if I ever expect to mean more. In any case a friend is there for the benefit of the other person, not for their own agenda, and I need a friend right now.  I wonder if I have even that in him anymore.