My brother Tom (40M) and his wife Jill (33F) have lived overseas for several years and I don’t see them often. Their marriage has been rocky at times and so has my relationship with my brother due to mental health issues on all of our parts.
Last fall Jill came to my country to visit a friend and we met up for dinner. We had a long deep talk and bonded over our shared relationship with Tom and learned a lot about eachother. At the end I told her it was the first time I saw her as a sister and not as just my brother’s wife as we’d never really interacted alone before. Good vibes all around.
All good there or so I thought. Jill and I emailed back and forth a bit in the aftermath. Her emails got gradually longer and more expressive, and I didn’t always respond as I was dealing with some emotional challenges and didn’t have the bandwidth. But she told me I didn’t have to respond, she just liked communicating with me.
I was grateful to have this window into my brother’s life because I wanted to be closer to him. She confided their relationship was not sexual and more about mutual caretaking now - fine, whatever works. I just tried to meet her messages with kindness and validation and I know she appreciated it. Most of the time I just skimmed them and didn’t respond. Some of them got very deep into her emotional history and it was a lot, but I figured this was just how Jill relates and I didn’t want to discourage her (she is autistic). And she told me she loved me and cared about me which I thought was sweet.
Well, I should have been paying closer attention because she came back to my country and we set up a visit. She mentioned she’d be in the area and I told her to come for a few days and I’d take her hiking. Again I thought I would be deepening my sibling-like relationship with her and that it would help me get closer to Tom.
You can see where this is going. She told me two things: 1) I had a history of flirting and projecting sexual energy onto her (this may be true, it’s a pattern I have with women that I’m working on fixing, but it was not something I did consciously nor would act on with her). I was mortified and apologized profusely and said it would never happen again. she said she didn’t mind because… 2) she was completely head over heels in love with me. Desperately, fully, totally. Fuck!!
She said Tom knew and they both (wtf??) wanted me and her to be happy together because they weren’t really romantically connected anymore. She said it started when we had that night out last fall.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more shocked in my life. You could have knocked me out with a feather. On our night out in the fall I was very careful to be respectful of boundaries and I thought we had a beautiful sibling energy between us. If there was a sexual vibe I certainly wasn’t feeling it at the time but apparently she was!
I told her that I was flattered, but I wasn’t interested as I was trying to get back with my ex and committing to her, I saw Jill as a sister, and I wouldn’t want to be involved with my brother’s wife. And any attraction or sexual energy between us was not intentional and I didn’t want to act on it. And I wasn’t comfortable with her staying with me anymore so I was going to take her to a hotel (in fact I had already booked a room for on my phone when we took a break in the convo).
She told me it was my fault that she loved me because she was just responding to my advances and mirroring my energy. When I asked what advances she didn’t have any specific examples. She tried to persuade me that she knew what I needed and that she could heal my trauma and fix my mental health patterns, as opposed to my ex (whom I love dearly and will marry if things work out).
This really triggered me as I felt she was not listening to me and trying to manipulate me. I told her thanks but no thanks, and we needed to go to the hotel now.
On the way there she had a complete emotional breakdown in my car and was crying hysterically and threatened self-harm so I decided to bring her back to my place and watch over her. I cooked us dinner and played soft music and put her to bed in the guest room.
The next morning I drove her to the train station ending her trip a day early. Her last words to me were “my offer still stands”.
Now my brother Tom is telling me I created this whole situation as a way to get back at my mother for the emotional wounds from childhood, that I baited Jill into an affair just so I could play power games, deliberately ignoring her emails to destabilize her, and somehow lured her into a trap and coerced her into confessing her love for me so I could reject her and throw her out, and that all Jill’s actions were a natural result of my energetic behaviors.
I’m willing to examine myself for hidden behaviors but this feels Iike a major stretch to me. Jill is attractive but I DO NOT want to be with her and I was just excited to have a sister. I think maybe Jill was just not used to someone being nice to her and conflated that feeling with love and ran with it. And I told my brother I can’t be held responsible for her words and actions. Besides, she told me she was so happy she told me and felt lighter and relieved to have expressed it.
The way I see it, regardless of any feelings or energies between us (and it seems we had very different experiences of those), I kept things above board with my words and actions. She was the one who chose to make an overt move on me which would have broken up my relationship and persisted and argued with me when I turned her down. As far as I’m concerned I’m done with her and probably Tom too. But it makes me sad because I was looking forward to being closer to both of them.
Maybe I should have nipped this in the bud when her emails gradually got more intimate but honestly I NEVER thought she was harboring romantic feelings.
Am I losing my fucking mind here? Please set me straight if it feels like I am missing something from this situation. What, if anything, can be done to repair this?
TL;DR: visit with sister in law goes south when she confesses her love, now she and my brother blame me for creating the situation, is it really my fault?
Submitted April 08, 2023 at 11:56PM by Ok_Bear_7824 https://ift.tt/dr0ZXxL
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