"Intimacy issues"

[thestamp]

feeling quite down today and wondered if anyone was about to help me make sense of it...

am 6ish months out from split with h... amicable. he is quite controlling but i have managed to hold him at arm's length and keep it all civil. he is mostly a reasonable man, just from a shitty family and doesn't always realise that he's being ridiculous.

had to recently tell him to stop touching my bum while hugging me... he had a sulky go at me (really) for how i have "intimacy issues" due to childhood abuse (sexual), and should be fine with him touching me. the next day he agreed he was being silly. at the time i just sort of had chest pain about it and told him it was important to me that i took ownership of my body. which i know is right. he was being a knob.

anyway. i skyped with my mother today, my DC wanted to talk to her. she has form for being very disapproving of me. i didn't tell her about the split for many months because i knew she would be judgemental/dramatic. i was right, but that's another thread.

anyway, i made the terrible mistake of sharing with her, out of my own relief and gladness that things are moving forward, that h and i are going to go ahead with filing divorce paperwork in the next few months and she got a huge cats bum face on and started making jabs about how i "move awfully quickly". this is a man who accused me of cheating on him and had cut me off from my friends etc. and was starting to take it out on the dc in order to control me. i mean. ffs.

please note also that it is h who wants to move things along btw! he has met someone new!!!

then it devolved into how i ought to stick things out, how i am going to struggle to find someone new (which, who fucking cares even if that were true??), and how i am too "hard" (basically that i am not soft/vulnerable/forgiving enough so no decent man will want to be my partner).

i just... i hate hearing these stories told about me. i'm not wrong am i, it is actually ok to have boundaries???? i don't have to let people do whatever the fuck they like to me? why am i surrounded by people who dislike me so much? why does everyone want me to be a doormat? wtaf is wrong with people?

is it really so impossible for a woman who says no, who has standards for behaviour, etc., to find a partner in life? am i doomed to be alone...

i find myself feeling really shaken by the idea that these two people, who have spent the most time with me out of anyone in my life, both think i am too "hard" and not accommodating enough to be loved.

someone talk sense into me... encouraging anecdotes also welcome... just feel like too much space is being taken up in my head with this shit atm...

[TheWeeBabySeamus1]

You are absolutely in the right, and don't let them make you think you're not. Your body, your life - your choice over both. This doesn't make you hard, it just means that you have some sense of self worth and won't bend to their will. Good on you

[theansweris42]

You are right. It reads as if they are both unhappy with your personal boundaries & expectations because it means that fits have free rein over you. Stick with it.

[serialangstyposter]

Hey. Just wanted to say I'm sorry you're down today. You got me out of a dark moment last night. You were so caring when i needed it. Thank you.