And the problem grows, no matter what I do.

It was some years after Tom died that I finally put two and two together and realized he wasn't trying to introduce me to his wild lifestyle. 

He was trying to get me over my baggage most likely because he believed if he didn't address that before meeting me, I would balk at sleeping with him. He's dead. I can't actually ask to try to verify why he made the choices he made.

But Navarre helped me more than he did and handled things differently. 

I can't help but wonder if things could have gone better had Tom handled things differently. And I can't help but feel like to some degree, instead of getting me over my problems, he just introduced his problems into my life.

The reality is he finalized his divorce shortly after our relationship ended. They had been legally separated but still living together and seeing other people quietly for several years.

It was a hot mess and I'm confident I'm the reason it was finally resolved.

One of the friends he introduced me to gave me a sexual education but I gave him an emotional education and an education in how to have a relationship. He got quit sleeping around casually because of me and got married shortly after our relationship ended.

And I wonder if Tom felt like I wouldn't be able to accept him and his past if I weren't complicit in some sense, if I weren't "guilty" to some degree of the same things he was guilty of.

So rather than than just talk to me about his experiences, he dragged me into them and hoped that would add up to "acceptance."

Maybe he felt I was too clean or he couldn't be faithful or something like that. 

I initially tried to assess men for being conservative enough or whatever. I eventually concluded that even someone who has been alone a long time must give up something else to spend that 18 to 20 hours a week with me that it takes to establish and maintain intimacy and it will fail if he doesn't want to invest that time in me even if the competition for his attention is a hobby rather than another woman.

Two people either make that choice to invest themselves in the relationship or they don't. And often they don't, really.

A lot of relationships are really some kind of arrangement. He pays the bills. She cooks and cleans and services him.

Not a lot of relating may be happening. 

Tom essentially tried to manipulate me into being able to accept him rather than simply being good to me as evidence he would be good to me and wouldn't hurt me. I would have trusted him to not hurt me if had a track record of not hurting me.

I was getting involved with men online very long distance and the context for that is that I was deathly ill and had horrific insomnia and was up all night. So I was getting involved with men who were awake when I was awake and they were on the other side of the planet. 

Some of the men who chatted me up were substantially younger men from conservative Muslim countries who claimed they were virgins. So at one point I sort of tongue in cheek thought I could marry a much younger Muslim man as my only hope of getting someone low mileage because most people my age or older aren't in the same ballpark as I am and I'm medically handicapped and have zero plans to sleep around to close that gap.

But that seems like a pretty icky thing to plan to do. If I happened to really get along well with someone like that, maybe it would be not icky. But as a goal? Ewww.

The way to bet is I will remain alone because each passing day that I remain celibate for medical reasons I still get another day older and the experience gap between me and people my age gets steadily wider, not smaller.

Most likely even if I believed he wasn't a threat to my health and I could trust him to be faithful because I need that for medical reasons, most men would never really believe that I could actually accept them because I'm "too conservative" or "too prim and proper."

And no amount of saying "I never wanted this. It was just the lesser evil. It meant no longer being in constant PLEASE KILL ME NOW agony while clearly dying." will remedy that.

I ultimately left Tom having nothing to do with anything about him, really. I was still too sick to get with him and it wasn't reasonable to expect him to remain in limbo indefinitely while I tilted at windmills in a vain attempt to do the impossible and get well.

I hadn't been looking for a relationship to begin with. I certainly wasn't trying to string him along.

At some point, I decided that letting men chat me up amounted to stringing them along and nothing I said or did would change that, so I decided to not let men chat me up. Full stop.

Because men tended to want to marry me -- or claimed to -- and I don't know how to tell men "We can pass the time pleasantly, but I may never actually be well and I'm in absolutely no position whatsoever to plan a future together."