The relationship between Maddie and myself has been pretty stable and strong in the years since my father passed away. I am still more than grateful for what she did for me that day, it actually makes me well up with even more love for her.

If that’s even possible.

We have a steady and honest friendship. We love each other, absolutely – but as has been the case for more than 40 years, there just never seems to be a time when we look each other in the eyes and kiss.

We never take that next step.

I think we are both scared to. I know that I am scared to. Neither of us want to wreck the amazing friendship we have.

Have we just come too far to ever get to that point?

I enjoy the time she and I spend together – our coffees and our lunches. Even the odd evening out here and there to catch a movie or some such. It’s a bond I don’t think will ever be broken.

As much as I do love her, I have spent the last few years trying to understand that love – am I just in love with the love I’ve always had for her, or is there something more?

The problem is, that the only answer I can form is that I don’t know.

I can’t ask her either – because of the not wanting to destroy the friendship thing. I’m caught between love………..and love.

I’ve been told by a lot of people in my life that sometimes I am just too nice to people. That women who aren’t 100% sure about me let go because they think I’m a nice guy, and that some other woman will snap me up so it’s okay to let me down if they aren’t sure.

I don’t know if that is wrong or right about me – but there is an element of it that makes sense.

If you have read right through this site, you’ll know that every woman who has come into my life – (including Maddie, to be completely fair) – has had a choice to make about me.

Every time that a woman has had to choose between me and someone else, the someone else has “won” every time. Sometime that “someone else” has been the choice of nobody at all.

But I never get chosen.

Jennifer? Despite everyone telling me that she liked me, she chose nobody.

Fiona? She chose to lead me on, while choosing the boyfriend she already had.

Shannon? Chose two other men over me, and denied she told me she loved me.

Amber? Chose her first love over me – though I always understood that one.

Sarah? Chose her abusive ex or nobody over me.

April? She chose to lead me on, and then stay with her soon-to-be husband.

The abusive no-name relationship? She chose me until she had milked me dry, then chose someone else.

Nadine? Chose someone new before ending it with me.

There’s definitely a pattern – when a choice needs to be made, that choice is never me. Even with Maddie, in the times we could have gotten together, she has chosen other men in her life.

The difference with Maddie is that she has always been open and respectful with my feelings – every time she’s known that she had to let me know about someone, she’s done it with grace and class.

But she’s never chosen me either.

I like to think I am a nice guy – so it would be easy to think it must be all me. I must be doing something wrong. If I am honest with myself, I am doing something wrong.

I always hold back, I always give them a reason to choose someone else.

I don’t know how to fix it, and I’m still alone.

All alone.

Maddie is with her new man, and she heads off in several months to her secondment overseas.

Once again I am left behind holding my heart in my hands. I am questioning how I feel.

Forty years of love for Maddie, and is my love now dying off? Would there ever be a chance again anyway?

I don’t want to stop, but I also want to be someone’s first choice…for the first time…

It is difficult for me to describe how Maddie made me feel by standing by my side and holding my hand at my father’s funeral.

The day was absolutely about him, and not about Maddie, but she made the most difficult and painful day of my life bearable. My father would have really liked Maddie – he would have appreciated her country upbringing and her kind heart.

That he never got to meet her is a shame – but obviously in looking back at all that I have written on this site, there are many reasons why that didn’t happen.

She didn’t have to come, but she did – just to look after me. It touched me when she asked, and it gave me great strength when I saw her drive into the cemetery that rainy day and park next to my car.

My son and I were still sitting in the car, keeping out of the rain. Maddie and my eyes caught each other, and she smiled a warm smile and I did my best to smile back through my pain.

We all stepped out, and I introduced Maddie to my son. Despite being autistic, he is actually good at meeting people, and he accepted her friendship at the first moment, and Maddie drew him in with her usual warmth.

It was actually the second time they had met, but he was only about two years old the first time, and had no memory of her. At this meeting he was 14, and Maddie later remarked that he was just how she remembered me at 14.

Just not as shy as I was.

As I introduced her to others, she just immediately connected with them and seemed immediately comfortable being around an entire group of people she didn’t know.

That was her superpower – drawing others into her space and making them feel welcome there, and she was very welcome in that time and in that place. She told everyone that she was there to support her friend.

Me.

Maddie is just magical like that – and though we weren’t together, she made me feel she was a partner in my pain. Her own father had died suddenly almost a decade earlier, and despite only meeting him once before at her 21st birthday party so many years before, I wanted to be there for her on her day of grief too.

They had a simple private family funeral with no guests beyond family, so I didn’t get the chance. Also, because it was so sudden, it would have been difficult to make it – but I did offer to come.

I like to think that she remembered my offer, and that that was why she asked to be at my side for my day of grief.

It was strange to feel so sad on that day, but uplifted by Maddie being there. She stood with me, but kept in the background of day, conscious of being a stranger at this gathering.

My mother and sisters asked later after she had left the wake, who Maddie was.

“You probably don’t remember me talking about her from my high school years, because it was so long ago, but she’s the one woman in my life who has always given a shit about me…and she wanted to be here and hold my hand…” was my answer.

Naturally, their next question was *who* Maddie was right now. It had been almost a decade since Nadine and I had broken up, and almost a decade since I had had someone serious in my life. I think they were all hoping I had found someone special again.

“Oh, she’s someone special, but we’re not like that. We’re way past that.”

I had always loved Maddie – but that was the day I really understood her. I always felt that I did, but even today, almost every time we interact she shows me more and more of herself, and more and more of who she is.

She is the guardian angel that someone sent into my life so long ago. Her spirit always uplifts me from whatever despair I am feeling at any given time in my life.

However, loving Maddie so much is a double edged sword.

I get to know her and love her, and share personal things with her. I don’t believe that the relationship we share is like any other kind of relationship either of us has ever been in.

But because we have never managed to be together – not even for a minute – the painful side of loving her is knowing that she finds the romantic love she needs from others.

I’ve always been happy for her when she is with someone, and I would never in a million years interfere with any relationship she was in, just to give myself a chance again.

I get to see her that happy, while I am often struggling with my own painful personal life. It often feels completely unfair that she gets to feel that, and I don’t.

The thing is, we both know we love each other.

We also know that we are both too special to each other to ever wreck what we do have.

That’s the dichotomy of us.

Love without love. It is so powerful, but while I understand where we stand, sometimes I need more.

So much more.

My father battled with cancer for the last ten years of his life, and as a family we were devastated when he finally left this world.

At diagnosis we were given five years of life expectancy, so to get double that was a blessing that we cherished greatly. Every single day, week, month, and year after that initial five year prognosis was time we took to make sure we built as many memories and moments that we could.

It was clear for some months that the end was near – yet it was still a shock when the moment comes.

When that day finally came, the world was in the midst of the COVID pandemic, when there were restrictions on the number of people who could attend many events, including funerals.

Dad was a well-known figure in our home town, and we expected a large number of people would want to fill the limited ranks of mourners allowed to attend. Indeed, we heard from many people, and it broke our hearts to turn so many away.

We eventually settled on immediate family and as many of his closest friends we could fit into the allowed quota, and it wasn’t difficult to fill.

For my son, it was the first time he had lost a family member, and preparing him for the funeral was a difficult exercise in managing emotions.

The night before Dad’s funeral, a familiar number appeared on my phone.

Maddie.

She had already shown a great deal of love and support in the week between Dad’s passing and his funeral – because of course she did – but what she asked me during that phone call blew me away.

“Andrew, if possible I’d love to come tomorrow, to support you? I know you’re taking this pretty hard, and I just want to be there for you.”

I was frozen, briefly.

I thought about how the quota was already full, but thinking quickly – (and perhaps a little bit selfishly) – I answered.

“Maddie, the quota is full, but if you want to come, you’re coming. I’ll make sure they don’t count too carefully. I can’t wait to see you, and thank you for caring, like you always have.”

It rained a little during the funeral, good for hiding tears.

Maddie of course saw each each and every tear, and held my hand the entire time.

She had never met any of my family before that day, so I was getting a few odd looks and I would have some explaining to do later – but she was made welcome by everyone.

She looked impeccable, shining as much as one could in a black dress on a rainy day.

She stuck with me during the wake, and stayed as long as she possibly could – making sure that I was okay every step of the way.

I wasn’t, but having her there was something that I will never forget. To have her there on the saddest day of my life was immeasurably valuable to me.

I walked her to her car, and we chatted quietly for a few minutes – we hadn’t actually seen each other for almost a year, thanks to COVID. She kissed me on each cheek, and then gave me a little peck on the lips.

I shouldn’t have been happy, but I was smiling like an idiot.

I watched this magical woman drive off into the distance before heading back inside.

Now, time to explain.

The entire world changed in 2020, with the onset of the COVID pandemic. Lives changed, people were artificially kept away from each other for long periods of time.

I was someone who absolutely supported the distance we were made to keep from other people – one only has to look at how the United States failed to cope in the early days of the pandemic.

Just how many people died there, and were buried in mass graves due to the sheer number of people succumbing to the virus – I didn’t need to be convinced beyond that.

While I had been holding back somewhat from Maddie for a good two-and-a-half years by this time, we were still in touch and still caught up for lunch every now and then. We still loved being around each other.

On a personal level, my employer at the time didn’t really have a specific policy on working in the office or working from home for at least six months into the pandemic. Without one, we just started following the government directive of “…if you can work from home, work from home…”

I could, and I did.

Aside from grocery shopping and visits to the doctor, I didn’t leave the house for basically three months. Despite my employer not having a policy, my department started running with its own policy and after those first three months, I started going into the office once a week.

It was nice to escape a little bit, because being at home was hard work – even for an introvert like me.

For Maddie, she was in a similar boat – mostly able to work from home, but coming into the office a fair bit more than I was.

But because of all the restrictions, catching up for lunch was – (technically) – against the law, and it had been nearly six months since we had. Her work sometimes takes her away from the city for even weeks at a time, but even when she wasn’t away we still couldn’t.

The lock-downs also broke down her relationship. He apparently wasn’t a believer in those lock-downs, and got really upset that Maddie wouldn’t allow him to come over to her house.

Like me, Maddie was a believer in the policies of social isolation.

All of a sudden, we found ourselves talking online…a lot.

She didn’t have to be sensitive to a partner since that had ended, and I was emotionally very drained from being home so much and not connecting with anyone.

As such, as much as I was still in the “hold back from Maddie” space, that chance to connect with anyone was just what I needed. That it was Maddie wasn’t necessarily the best choice for me at the time, but it wasn’t a problem either.

It was fantastic to connect again, and we probably chatted on Zoom at least a couple of times a week for months and months – even when the restrictions began to ease a little.

Maddie was back in my heart, and later that year when my father died – (despite not actually needing convincing) – she showed me once and for all just how wonderful she was.

Part of deciding to step away from Maddie a little was the need to find a way to fill that gap in my life that she had always filled.

I was still happy being single, but at times we were almost a surrogate partner for each other. We would talk about things that were personal – (not intimate necessarily) – to give each other something of a sounding board for things going on in our lives.

Having decided to take my romantic focus away from her, it was difficult to adjust to not having that regular connection.

I didn’t tell her that I was pulling back – the friendship was as strong as it had ever been, but for my own sake, I had to communicate a little less.

There was no way at all that I was going to cut her off, and there were still text messages and phone calls from time to time. I just deliberately did it less.

We still did our catch up lunches from time to time, but even those I tried to organise less regularly.

I never sensed that she was worried for our friendship or concerned that I was contacting her somewhat less often – but the dynamic did change a little. The things we talked about were less personal than before, but we both knew that the other would always be there when needed.

Maddie did enter a relationship with a guy – (I never met this one) – and she did talk about him from time to time – however I never got the feeling from her that she thought he would be the “forever guy” – it just sounded like companionship rather than love.

I wished for more than that for her – she deserved a “forever guy”.

I just couldn’t put myself in that position again, I couldn’t give her the feeling that that was what I was interested in – and at that time I wasn’t.

My decision to step back from her romantically was a decision I was completely comfortable with, and I didn’t want to compromise the process I was going through within myself by complicating it with feelings for Maddie again.

I still watched her with some envy, but I was feeling better about life than I had for a long time.

There were a few women drifting in and out of my view, but nobody really caught my eye enough to push anything serious with them.

I was completely okay with that.

Maddie and I never lost contact, but this was the most distant we had been for some time. I was happy for me for her to have some time to look the other way too.

I did miss her, and I also didn’t.

Did I ever really stop loving her though?

No.

A few months went by after my emotional crash, and I really didn’t feel much like myself.

I really had bottomed out, just as the psychologist had suggested, and had suggested was probably a good thing.

I cried a lot for probably about three or four months. So much pent up energy from loving Maddie for so long – (30 years by this point) – and not being able to properly express that energy really ripped my insides out of me.

It wasn’t different as such – there had obviously always been a distance between myself and Maddie, even though in contradiction we had always been so close. Whenever there had ever been even a slight chance that we might found ourselves together, there was always something that blocked it.

Other relationships. Geographic distance. Not being ready.

So many things had always seem to block us. Was the universe trying to tell us something?

Was it trying to say we shouldn’t be together?

Was it telling us that the time had not arrived yet?

These were questions I had spent 30 years trying to process and answer, and this emotional crash over her left me bare.

I found myself questioning my feelings for Maddie. Was I just in love with the idea of being in love with Maddie? Was I taking my feelings for her massively too seriously?

I asked myself those and many more questions and the answers I kept finding, kept upsetting me.

I would always care for Maddie – there was nothing that could change that.

However, for the very first time in those 30 years, I actually started to believe that Maddie was not, and should not be the one for me. It was very much a light-bulb moment, a new light shining into my mind and challenging me to challenge my long held love for Maddie.

Eventually, I found myself deciding to let her go.

I hadn’t convinced myself that it was the right thing to do, but allowing myself to think like that about her was in many ways soothing, albeit still confusing.

Did I get her completely out of my system?

No.

I did open my eyes to other possibilities – and while there was nobody around me that I felt I wanted to try and be in a relationship with, being able to take Maddie off that pedestal was empowering.

The idea of being with someone that wasn’t Maddie was hugely attractive to me.

I guess in many ways I was just tired of being alone.

I wasn’t walking away from the friendship with her, but I guess I had reached a point where I had run out of the energy of love that I had always felt for her.

The sounds in my head were hollow. There was so much space in there for new ideas about what the rest of my life could be.

I could still look at Maddie and smile – but it was all different.

Very different.

There was a new freedom within me, but a dream felt like it was over.

It was a strange time – still reveling in the love and support from Maddie, yet still healing from the pain of Nadine.

Things between Nadine and I were still fine – as I’ve previously talked about, we didn’t hate each other, we had just run out of steam. We still had a wonderful son to somehow raise together, and we were making that work, even when he spent most of his time with me.

As per my last post – (and shall I be honest, also per pretty much my entire life) – Maddie was the person I was leaning on. She was there when I needed her, never more than a phone call away.

In many ways, it felt like the support she gave me when Shannon had ripped up my heart 20 years beforehand. The warmth and the kindness she showed reminded me very much of that time.

The difference this time around was that I knew Maddie was seeing someone, and quite seriously at that. As such, I was very conscious of not calling her too often and not sending her too many text messages.

The very last thing I wanted to do was to cause her any pain and anguish by being responsible in even a small way towards her relationship failing.

When we did talk, she was brilliant – as always.

There was no doubt in my mind after so very many years that Maddie loved me, and that perhaps at times that that love may even have been a romantic love.

This just wasn’t one of those times, and as I always found myself when she was with someone, I was so very happy for her.

There wasn’t a single specific thing she did for me or said to me during this time that was any more or less significantly helpful to me. She was loving and supportive, consistent and kind.

In the initial few months, I leant on her more than I did later on, but nothing ever changed. She of course knew about my mental health battles, and how important it was for me to be heard and encouraged. She never strayed from that understanding.

As I said, as her relationship grew stronger, I kept a comfortable distance to show her that I cared that she had found someone special again – (and I absolutely did!) – and be respectful of both Maddie and her man.

The trouble for me was that I started to desperately miss her. I shouldn’t have, as it wasn’t as if we were talking every single day. Far from it in fact.

Yet my heart was aching terribly. I missed her every day, and wanted to talk to her every day.

So many times over the years she had been there for me, and she was doing it again. We loved each other very much – but I couldn’t be with her.

It was agonising. It was constant. It was a physical pain.

I loved Maddie, and I couldn’t see anything else – but like the good best friend, I was determined not to interfere with her relationship. I wouldn’t be much of a friend if I did.

This process in my head went on for about two years – yes, two years.

It was like the old days – loving her from a distance, and not being able to do anything about it – but this time I was sure I was in love with her, when back then I probably only thought I was.

It was not good for my mental state. So many of the those same thought patterns I had when I was 12 and 13, trying to understand how I felt about her, were back and really affecting me in a deeply complex and emotional way.

I crashed.

I didn’t completely break down, but one morning I woke up so confused within myself, that I called in sick to work and went to see my doctor.

He took one look at me and asked me what the hell was going on. He told me he’d never known me like this before, and that he was concerned for me. I was rambling, incoherent, and not making sense to myself – so I wasn’t going to be making sense to him.

I told him as much as I was comfortable with explaining to him, and that I was able to explain. My blood pressure – (which is normally low) – was off the scale.

I was about a week and a half away from two weeks of annual leave from work, so he signed a medical certificate off to cover up until that day, therefore effectively giving me a month off work. I was upfront with my employer, and they were very supportive.

The doctor had sent me for a psych consult, and I was given some anti-depressants.

I was so happy that I had Maddie in my life as the beautiful friend she had almost always been, but I was desperately sad because I knew I was so in love with her by this stage, yet had no way to be with her.

The month away from work, someone to talk to, and that short course of medication lifted me off the floor.

The psychologist gave me some advice which appeared a bit negative on the surface, but turned out to be completely correct.

“…sometimes you have to bottom out completely before you can get better…”

I was completely bottomed out, and could completely feel it in almost every waking moment.

I felt so close to Maddie – closer than ever before. Yet, as usually seemed to happen, the timing was all wrong, and the distance between us could have been a thousand miles.

Oceans apart, day after day.

That song still held true.

Maddie still doesn’t know that I went through all of this, and I don’t know if I could ever tell her about it.

One day, I hope that I can.

I should probably have been a mess inside at this point, but I was actually doing okay.

I had never been great at being alone, despite most of my need to be with someone being related to how I’ve felt about Maddie over the years. By that I mean that, yes, I had always wanted to be with her, but I was always interested in being close to someone, even when there was not an opportunity to be closer to Maddie.

If I had to choose, I would choose her every time, but I’ve never really had the chance to choose her. We were always either struggling with our friendship in the early days, in different parts of the world in later years, or in different stages in our lives.

I never felt as if there wasn’t a possibility for us, just that there was rarely the opportunity. Circumstances rarely brought us together at the right time.

The break up with Nadine was difficult, but by the time I had written the Facebook post I described in my last post, I had reset my head.

This was the time I figured out that I really didn’t need to be with someone to be happy. Being with someone would still have been amazing, but the overwhelming need I had always felt just wasn’t with me any longer.

Maddie was an amazing support through this period. It wasn’t that there was any doubt that she would be – and indeed, she always had been, but she was a massive part of me finding the inner peace I had found by this time.

I was focused on myself, and on my son.

That was all that mattered – yet Maddie was always there to listen. Despite being largely at peace and happy in life, there were definitely still days and nights – especially the nights – where sitting alone was hard work.

All it took was a phone call to Maddie – (who by this time was a bit over relationships too) – to hear her friendly voice, and sometimes just have a long silly chat about nothing at all to help me feel not alone.

We were like this for about two and a half years. The person each other would call when life was feeling a bit dark – the closest we had ever been, yet still not the closest we would ever be.

That would come some years later still.

Maddie allowed me to find a calmness and clearness that I had probably never felt before.

Was I about to fall in love with her again?

Yes, I was about to – but it would take me back to a mental space I had not been in since I first met her so many years earlier.

I loved her, but didn’t have the courage to tell her.

Again.

Despite my love for Nadine, and the connection we were sharing through our son, the love was never as strong as it needed to be.

It became apparent over time that it wasn’t going to last forever, and it was becoming clear that the relationship meant more to me than it did to Nadine.

That said, we did make it to almost eight-and-a-half years, the longest relationship I have had in my entire life – with every previous one measurable only in weeks or months.

There was no hate, nor any anger. We barely argued the entire time we were together, although there were frayed emotions when she decided to tell me it was time to move on from me.

I had felt it coming for some time, and in many respects we both tried really hard to keep a family together for our son – however because the relationship started in such a low-key way, just finding ourselves together one day, a lot of the things that form the basis of a strong and ongoing relationship just weren’t there.

The biggest problem I faced was that I didn’t know how to be in a relationship that was coming to an end.

Yes, I had been through the trauma of the time with the psychopath who tried to kill me, but in the end that was easy to walk away from. I wasn’t keen on being dead for her.

So a “normal” relationship coming to an end? I had zero experience of that, and it is fair to say that I didn’t cope very well.

I remember one Sunday afternoon when our son had spent the weekend with my parents, and tempers and emotions were high as I was getting ready to leave the house to collect him. I think it was the only time in the whole “death period” that voices had been raised.

I believe that was the moment we both understood that things had run their course. I cried and cried and cried the whole time I was driving the 40 minutes to pick him up, stopping only a few minutes before getting there to pull myself together.

We moved into separate rooms, and that crushed me. It felt like things were over, but I still wanted to try to sort things out until the last dying gasp of the relationship.

What hurt the most was that Nadine seemingly had no interest in trying at all.

To be clear – I blame neither myself nor Nadine for the relationship dying on the vine. Neither of us did anything “wrong” – (and we’ve always been friends despite it all) – and we’ll always be connected given we have a son together.

It just………..stopped working.

I didn’t move out straight away – I wanted to make sure I found the right place for me and our son, because it became clear pretty quickly that he was more interested in living with me, than with Nadine.

He still lives with me to this day, more than a decade later. We all still get along well, just that Nadine and I don’t work on an intimate level any longer.

When we did finally move, the only people who knew were our direct families. Mine and Nadine’s.

I didn’t even tell Maddie. We weren’t in as regular contact as we might otherwise have been, as I chose to respect the relationship Nadine and I were in – but we were casually in touch, mainly on Facebook.

I didn’t tell anyone for a good four or five months.

Despite things ending amicably, and living effectively as a single dad with my wonderful kiddo, I was torn apart inside. I cried myself to sleep most nights. Most days I simply just existed.

Out of bed, kiddo to school, off to work, collect kiddo from Nadine’s, and then home. That was my new normal, and I was so unfocused that I couldn’t break that cycle. I did nothing for myself. I hid myself away.

I didn’t talk about anything to anyone. I was in a trance, and I was not coping.

I hated being alone again.

Then one night, we were playing Wii Sports together in the lounge room, and something clicked in my head.

It was time to talk.

As soon as kiddo was in bed, I sat down at the computer and typed out a long Facebook post, restricted to just my most important friends.

Explaining where I was, what had happened – where I was inside my head and inside myself. I apologised for “going missing”. I bawled my eyes out the whole time. I had been holding it all in and now it was coming out.

Eventually I clicked “save”.

Before long, I got a bunch of “shocked emojis” and comments on how people were offering to be there whenever I needed an ear or a shoulder. No disrespect to any of those comments at all, but they kind of felt like “that’s what they are supposed to say”. It was appreciated though, of course.

Maddie of course was the comment I was looking for the most, and despite her being about the tenth person to respond, she was the first to not come up with the plain old “I’m here when you need someone” guff.

She proclaimed that she was proud of me, and that I was inspiring for tackling the whole thing head on and doing what was needed for me and kiddo.

That’s what I needed to hear, and that was the point I started coming back to life.