SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Post burp #4 -

[This message edited by FaithFool at 6:55 PM, Tuesday, November 10th]

Superesse, your WH sounds very complex and difficult. Can I ask what made you stay and if you wish you had left?

When I imagine leaving, I can’t help but think the next guy will no doubt have his demons too, and maybe better the devil I know. I hate that thought though. But I also know that I was happy enough before all this. I feel like my brain is always on a seesaw between stay and go… it’s tedious. Only two months in though. It’d be wise to see how the couples therapy plays out for a while longer, even if the long-term outcome from it is just learning more about myself and learning relationship skills I can take elsewhere if things don’t work out.

I do need to find a way to stop myself from keep trying to coach him into doing better. It’s contributing to the annoying parent-child dynamic again, and then I get resentful that everything’s always about him and my pain keeps getting forgotten. I have some wins though when I do it; some moments of seeing him get it and glimpses of empathy. It’s hard to stop chasing that but I need to learn to.

Faithfool, that is absolutely awful, I’m so angry for you. Home is the place where you most want to feel safe and protected and in control - it was cruel for him to tarnish it in that way. Eugh! I feel like there should be laws for these scenarios; it does feel criminal. We were renting our place and then scrambled to buy it when our former landlord said he was selling up. I wonder if things would have been different at all if we’d been more intentionally looking for a place to buy cos it felt like the right time rather than was pushed upon us.

I sense you are locked in the same loop that hung my life up! Please value your inner happiness and really ask yourself if it was all that great to begin with. I say this because when WH finally broke down and proposed marriage to me after years of casual dating, I had no great joy about it, more like "well we have been dating for 4 years (platonically I should add) and I'm 'of an age' (I was 42 and tired of 'user' men and he was not like that because I never allowe him to be like that!) So after talking it over with some friends and family - who all thought he was a good guy - I said "yes."

Had I but known what awaited me!

My father even said to me once, after we'd been going out for 2 years or so when he came over to my house and my BF was there that watching us, he could tell I wasn't in love with him. I replied "I know, Dad, but he just won't go away!"

What that should have told me is my abandonment wounds were still raw from a couple prior disastrous romantic entanglements that had eaten up 13 years of the prime of my life after I'd left my first H (who also had cheated, as I found out once I was leaving him, 5 years after the fact and being forced to walk away from a big house I'd designed and built for us that he let go to foreclosure! I'd only agreed to marry him because he begged me, and my mother was scandalized by us living together.)

So I've spent a total of 29 + 13 years married to partners for whom I only feltwhat I'd call "lukewarm" affection, but here's the key: that seemed enough at the time, Ouchy! Then on top of all those unhappy married years I wasted another decade getting my hopes up for years on end then getting them dashed, and then eventually Mr. Steady Eddie came along. Hence my comment to my father.

But once I discovered my WH's brain had no problem splitting sex from his vows, all my calculus on choosing him was trashed. I was on the floor sobbing because it felt like my whole life had been one mistake after another. And we'd had such a pretty, grand-scale wedding, something I'd skipped when I was 19. It all crashed and burned. Except I had re-mortgaged MY little house, the first one I ever was able to afford as a single woman, in order to get funds to buy a bigger place with room for his hobby (mechanical work). The divorce attorney I immediataly saw after D-Day 1 warned I was in a terrible situation, because we were hundreds of thousands in debt by then and he is not a citizen of this country so he told me he could be a flight risk if we pursued a settlement that would make me whole. And then he asked me "How would you pay for all this if we got it for you?" I just had left my career 2 years prior to follow him around the globe as he travelled a lot. So I did what the attorney suggested, mainly because, having lost my first home I built, I wasn't about to lose a second one to some man!

So please don't do as I did, it was such a series of compensations for other deficiencies that kept me "hooked" and not wanting to start over.

The reason I returned to college at age 55 was to study counseling psychology because of the bad therapist we'd had...I felt she defrauded me of my rightful process in sorting out what was wrong with this relationship I had chosen to end, but she wanted to "work with us both." and he came along...(By the way she was an Imago therapist and it is not helpful with ND partners, as they cannot MIRROR and they don't "get" the other's emotions that way.) Then during one-year of intensive weekly MC sessions, the second counselor suggested I had a gift for that kind of MH work and I wanted a career change anyway. But my schooling was mostly to assuage my own mid-life devastation.

So save yourself the bad investment of your time and youth, which you still have! The glass may look half full to you right now because it is early days but this issue of not allowing you the agency to decide about your own future is pathological, full stop. I know that's harsh. But the manipulations of a self-centered individual blinds them to their own destructiveness, as they want their cake and eat it too, as you already said.

It’d be wise to see how the couples therapy plays out for a while longer, even if the long-term outcome from it is just learning more about myself and learning relationship skills I can take elsewhere if things don’t work out.

Again this was how I approached what should have been a clean break and it's the frog in the proverbial pot of hot water...you never will jump to get out of the mess if you decide to tough it out like I did (on my attorney's advice). His exact words to me were "You've hung in there this long, hang on until we can get you an ironclad settlement." Sheer pain. But the math never worked for me to just split, so I submitted to a sexless In House Separation for the next 12 years, until he re-offended and I finally did get a lawyer to draw up formal division of assets, which he signed in lieu of divorce. Even that has proven to be a trap for me, since he needs what is now MY property to do HIS business! I didn't want to "punish" him for his inability to remember his vows, I just wanted to END the false premise of a partnership that didn't work for me. Yet nobody would help me see a way out, either. (Because they all saw the nice guy side of him and I kept listening to that voice in my head that wheedled "maybe he'll get it some day...") Yeah, no. Please! You need to take a longer-range perspective here, and not sign up for more of that demeaning daily parent-child dynamic...which you say you despise (me too!)

And just read tour lsst sentence to FF and I can see where feeling the pressure to buy the house you already occupied could have triggered a cascade of emotions and fears as it did with my WH. Sorry. I used to have a horse or two, and could never afford a really good one, but I found out that some horses look very good in the sale ring but after get them home and try to work with them, they let you down. Or they're lame in some way you didn't detect. In any case, they don't have what it takes to make the grade.

I do think it genuinely was pretty good before. We just got along well, had fun together, were very accepting and easy going with each other. It wasn’t perfect, there were things I’d like to have been different, he was limited in some ways, but I did feel content overall. Our friends are all quite shocked by what’s happened; we were seen as a good and loving couple and even my mates who don’t know him so well are rooting for us to stay together cos they always saw me as being happy with him. Not that I put a huge amount of stock in their view, but it does help with the ‘was I just imagining it was good before?’ inner questioning.

I know that it can’t go back to what it was now though. I’ll never be able to be that at ease again. And I think we are both different people to who we were. I think because I was studying for the last four years and that took up so much of my time and attention, what I want in a relationship, now that I’m free of those commitments, is different. Is more. I do want to give it some time to see what we can create and then decide if I/we want that. I am committing myself to moving cities in 2 years, when our mortgage term ends, to prioritise myself and my needs and I think that’ll be a set point at which we’ll both really have to reckon with whether we are right together and if the new relationship is one that we both want. And if it becomes clear to me before then that’s it’s not working, I can act on that. But I have been quite flighty when things have turned sour my whole life, so this feels a worthwhile opportunity to see what it’d be like to try work it through, rather than my default rip it up and start again approach. Also, I have faith in our couples therapist, she does not hold back confronting either of us with difficult truths, which is my fave style of therapist. And she’s not invested in any outcome; there’s no pressure towards staying together at all.

I’m definitely not gonna marry him anytime soon. Even if he becomes dream bf in these next few years. I’ve never been fussed about marriage and always suspected that it just makes people complacent, or even rebellious cos they feel trapped. It feels like even him planning to propose to me triggered some of those reactions. I’ve only ever really liked the idea of getting married in my 70s, so gonna wait until then, if I ever do.

Your position sounds so tough and a real warning about getting too entangled and giving too much up for a man. It sounds like luck in love has never really come you way - I feel for all you’ve been through. How do you cope?? I hope life is rich outside of the relationship.x

I’m really scared of being single right now.

I struggled so hard with this as well, for a long time. We're conditioned by society to fear being alone.

Eventually I worked my way through the terror and decided to just be the best partner I could be to .... ME.

Went back to school, finished a degree, got another one, met all kinds of cool folks via co-op work and academic cohorts. Had gobs of time to revisit my creative side in music, wrote and finished recording an album, started doing house concerts and residencies before the pandemic shut it all down.

Funny story: Was accepted to a very prestigious residency in an amazing resort space, five-star everything, nothing to do but pour all my energy into ME and MY THING.

Guess who was there on another residency in a different department? INDIGENOUS SHAMAN WANNABE HO. I shit you not I had to see her face every day at breakfast lunch and dinner in the food hall. She got so uncomfortable with me just looking at her from across the dining room with my neutral bitch face that she would find another seat facing away from me. Bumped into her a time or two on the campus, again just stared with my neutral resting bitchface as she scurried away.

Fucking triumph, that was.

After trying a couple of dates with some nice men I decided to just keep flying solo. The upside was I got to revisit having sex with someone who wasn't my fucknut ex, and the last encounter was with a much younger fan of mine. (It was short-lived but absolutely mind blowing lol). I'm 73 now and I LOVE living alone.

You're much younger so of course your fear is a different variety, but seriously, give it a go for a few years and see what develops. You will likely be pleasantly surprised.

Onward

FF