Of the many things that have become clearer in the last 6 months, one is that Aaron and I have no community whatsoever outside of the kids. To some extent, my friends are supportive of him, but they're all shut-ins, and Aaron doesn't feel very comfortable around any of them anyway. Although the bonkers-jealous aspect of that has to GO, it's hard to blame him entirely for his discomfort - witches weird people out, and not even academics like academics much so it's hard to even call that a community anyways. My extended family used to be big fans of his, but that is obviously strained now, their grim sense of our relationship being wrong looming in such things as their quiet about holidays and their passive aggression (my dad pointedly inviting me and the boys ONLY to Florida this year, that kind of crap). But at least they're not disingenuous. For Aaron's part, his family were never supportive/fans of me / our relationship whatsoever. He still fields that with them, such as taking their calls when he's driving home from work so that I won't hear the drone of condemnation, the psychologically corrosive nature of which I fear and resent but they are not my people obviously, and besides, it's their voices in his head that's hard. Altogether, we have the kids as our tribe, and that's it, probably one of the reasons why we so badly wanted one more kid.  And given what else has become much clearer in myself and between us, well, what draws us to each other in our sexually-informed identities and outsider sensibilities means that we are just not enough alike other people to have a community much. We make other people uncomfortable, or they make us uncomfortable (?), and now that my extended family is in the mix of losses, even I feel the weight of that despite being long ago alienated from "belonging" and having actually come to embrace the degree to which I personally make people uncomfortable in my own right.  He has been half-sunk by the mis-fitting factor for some time, how we don't fit the hetero script and how HE doesn't ever and hasn't ever fit it and will never do so finally. At least academics are all to some degree and in some ways off-putting so that I can disappear in front of the drapes in my professional life (I'm not that odd in that world where misfits tend to pool). But he loses his job, too, in our reconciliation and in the process very publicly has rejected the more suitable mate choice that his mistress would have been. But you can't love who you don't love. You can't want who you don't want. And it didn't work several times over now - he kept trying to not love me in favor of younger women with fatter ovaries that his mother liked better the entire time I've known him pretty much, including this last mistress debacle.  But you cannot be who you are not in whom you do not love.  Even if you want to want to. And he really did want to want to not want me and not have to be with me. A lot.  And that hurts. A lot.  But I can also empathize some. It is rather lonely and confusing to be lamented.

Welp, our configuration of relation is on the rise, web-md has a support site for it now (sans the sexuality aspects except as a 'problem' - HA), so who knows, maybe we will be okay and someday too it just won't be a thing, and one of us will meet someone else at work or somewhere who is in a relationship like this, and we will make friends with them and their friends and laugh at mutually familiar things, like how he takes turns on the xbox with the kids and like how I say 'album' not cd but how we meet in the middles like both knowing who Bob Saget is because the sitcom that he watched as a kid and I hated as an adult (except maybe to ogle Uncle Jesse a little) makes Saget's filthy inappropriateness funny to us both..