That feeling of abandonment

My therapist, Maureen, tells me that people who score as high as I do on abandonment schema almost always are intensely into a relationship, and when one comes to a crashing trauma-causing end, they jump into a new one immediately, like by the next weekend.

She has never known of someone scoring as high as I do who does not act this way.

But, I am so intense about abandonment from a relationship it is like I refuse to be in one. Absolute avoidance. It feels like my time with Marilyn -- less than four years, never lived together: my only LTR -- was just a blip or burr in a smooth record.

But even my online "relationships" -- an oxymoron, if you ask me -- for me are fraught with freaky abandonment fears. It is the nature of such interactions, even the most intense and personal and emotional ones, that someone online will one day-- disappear.

Just like that. Poof. Nothing but the archived chats. no warning. Just no communication. And most of the time your only contact with them is online, through one paired IM profile and email account. Don't know if they were really married and their partner found out. Or if they made the decision that this was no longer something they wanted to pursue. Or if their computer died, and by the months later when they could finally afford to get a new one, their feelings had just died. Or if the service deleted their account and they can't remember your IM name off the top of their head. Or if they had a stroke. Or if they got murdered in a botched bank robber.

So yes, even though I do not have "real" relationships, I still get rattled to the point of barely functioning, of being a nervous wreck, when someone doesn't pop online for a few days. A brisk white noise of the cold emptiness of the universe.