Re: Email anon
Your people are probably terrified they'll say the wrong thing. I'm not.
I think it isn't as definitive as you seem to think it is. Taking care of someone, being there - it's not an on-off switch. It's not all or nothing. If I was a millionaire, and you were a vagrant, you giving me a dollar when I needed a hundred thousand would still be generous. My giving you fifty bucks would be practically nothing to me, but everything to you. It's like that. Right now, you don't have a buck to wipe your arse with, but you're looking for potential spares you can scrounge up to give to him. That's not selfish.
Sounds like he's the millionaire right now. He's got deeper pockets than you do. If you stick around for him long enough, eventually you'll be the one with spare change. And I come back to my original point: you're worried that he'll get tired of you, tired of your choices, tired of your life, tired of how things are with you - you're so busy predicting the end, you're missing the fact he's got a couple hundred thousand spare right now.
What I meant by saying it's selfish is, if you try and predict what's in his best interests and manage him because you're scared what will happen if you just let it be, then you're not letting him determine whether he's got spare change, lust, love, a desire to stick around. Yes, of course his happiness is important. But if the means by which you're trying to ensure his happiness is by trying to ensure he doesn't get hurt (or you) in the first place, I don't think it'll have the effect you hope it will.
I don't know how it works perfectly. But what I do know is a lot of this is about trust. You trusting him to tell you when he's out of cash, and him trusting you to want not to take his last dime. It can't work if you're doing all the running for him.
There's no magic, sweetheart. No formula, no perfect recipe. It's mostly letting go. Trusting. Acknowledging that there's a risk of getting hurt, of falling, of it all going to pieces and doing it anyway. But the more you get wound up in waiting for him to leave, the less you are focused on the living together that forges the ties that keep you together.
I've never had a child (that I know about). But I imagine that if you feed it, and love it, and clothe it, and occasionally entertain it, and keep working the program it'll be fine.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're usually the one trying to identify the ways someone else can be happy. You've done it at least twice to me already, to my reckoning. What would you say, to someone like you?