Sometimes you are faced with too much honesty

Still tired after staying up till 1am talking to D online. So easy for time to pass when we are chatting.

Our discussion was....difficult. D wanted to talk to me about his history with women. This came up because we were talking about trust, seeing as we are working on creating a long distance relationship that is going to last. D started to spill on what had happened to him in the past, and what he had done himself. He is no innocent, not like me with my two partners, lol. But he has been used and abused and kicked while he was down, then gotten back up and taken it again. And he has done his fair share of hurting. But through it all he was saying that he had not felt good about it, that he had been hurting and saw this as a way of getting his own back.

Ultimately he said that he has dealt with his past. That in me he believes he has found his soul mate. That he does not question my honesty in any way, even though others might because of my living situation when D and I met. He spilled his guts to the ground in what he told me, he wanted to tell me so much more than I wanted to hear and I had to make him stop. I could not hear it all. I have my own insecurities to deal with and his desire to share was making me uncomfortable, I told him this and he settled down. I appreciate his eagerness to be completely honest, even if it made me uncomfortable.

I have to say that having a primarily online relationship is not a bad thing when it comes to being honest. You can type what you want to say and edit it if needed, you can think about your reply without having the other person scrutinising your body language. You can read something and react to it, but the other person does not see your reaction, and so you are faced with the decision of how you are going to handle the information.

In my case, when it got too much, I said Stop, and he did. If D and I had been having this conversation in person I think he would have held back alot more because he would have seen my discomfort. Now I have had the chance to process what he has told me, I have chewed it over, so to speak. I can look at it and say, 'well, does this change how I think of him? Can I live with this information, will it affect me? How do I plan to handle my own emotions during times when we fight, will I bring this up and use it against him?' What I would like is to forget what he told me. Too late now, lol.

But I can take the point of view that his past choices are exactly that, in the past, and that what is ahead of us is something more than what is behind.