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 few 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

[This message edited by FaithFool at 7:36 PM, Wednesday, November 11th]

What a stark contrast between my story and FaithFool's and I'm about her same age. Food for thought for you as you seem determined to follow my approach. It just gets to be the status quo and always our minds can point to someone who has it worse, in order to convince ourselves that we made the right decision.

Listen to your deepest pain! Please don't minimize it as you have been doing for so long. You deserve much better than the path forward you face coping with these issues.

[This message edited by Superesse at 8:06 PM, Wednesday, November 11th]

Ah… sex with other people… that is appealing. I’m definitely a novelty seeker for that. I think spending last week away from him, back in the place I lived when I was last single, has eased some of that fear of being alone again now. It reminded me how much more productive and creative and social I am when single. I know I would rather be in a relationship than not in one though, cos bliss for me is easy access snuggles. And I do love partnership and feeling like I have my person. But I am feeling less doomy about the possibility of him no longer being that person now. I want to give this process a chance to see what happens, but I am definitely prepared to leave if things don’t turn around. I can’t have sex with him at the moment because of my anger and disgust and the ickiness of the parent-child dynamic, so I know within myself that if he doesn’t do enough to turn that around, I will move on.

The woman actually contacted him today. He sent a cut off message start of October saying that he realised he had developed too close a relationship to her, invested too much in both her and their collaboration, depriving our relationship of that energy and thereby betraying me. Saying that he needed a clean break to repair our relationship, making it clear she had done nothing wrong and the responsibility is all his, but also that he would be blocking her on WhatsApp. Me and my partner are both members of an art collective but he essentially runs it; nothing in it happens without him. The collaboration they worked on together was sort of hosted by the collective, but she never actually joined the collective, though she was considering it. I had asked him to delete her from both his and the collective’s instagram before and I saw a couple of weeks ago that he’d deleted her from his own but not the collective’s. So I offered to do it, which he agreed to as he didn’t want to be triggered by seeing her account. I decided to block her rather than just delete her, because I didn’t want the risk of her turning up at any events and it seemed better that she just not be aware of them than know what she’s missing out on, and I thought it would lessen my anxiety that she might just turn up at something.

Anyway, today she emailed him with a bunch of questions. Was he happy for her to take forward the collaborative work that they did independently; could she have the footage of an art thing that they did together; did he want her to post a book of his she had back, and also could he explain why she had been blocked from the collective’s instagram. And he actually criticised me for having done that, said he understood why I had, but also said that there were better ways of dealing with it and ensuring she didn’t attend events. And then he showed a whole lot of compassion for her, about how angry and hurt she must feel, and saying me blocking her probably heightened that anger. I said he needed to prioritise my needs; I am his main commitment, yes it’s a shame for her, but these are the circumstances his shitty choices have created. He didn’t invalidate me, but it’s really pissed me off that he can independently experience empathy and compassion for her while that was clearly not at all present for me all that time he was lying to me and prioritising her. So annoyed! And if he had deleted her when he said he was going to, I’d never have had to get involved. Also - I have been very reasonable in not holding her to account for all this because I do think she genuinely just saw it as a friendship - but I think it was completely unnecessary of her to ask about the collective’s instagram. She doesn’t need to see it. He’s said he needs a clean break. Her other questions all seem reasonable, but that one just feels like she’s pushing at the no contact boundary a bit; she knows that he is involved in everything the collective does. It doesn’t feel very respectful of her. But a) she’s only 26 so I can’t blame her for lacking the maturity to understand the situation, and b) she actually has been told very little, so probably is confused by the whole thing. His cut off message said his intentions were only ever platonic, so she probably feels it’s a bit harsh/unnecessary.

So that’s all a bit shitty, but I’m also proud of myself because everything in me wanted to sit and explain to him exactly why he was wrong to criticise me and to show him how his response was prioritising her needs and how I should be the one to get his compassion, not her. He had said compassion doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, but actually I think it does have to be in this situation. (I’m not saying this isn’t crap for her too, but I am the one who has been betrayed and who is owed more). But anyway, I resisted all urges to keep explaining to him. I simply got him to agree not to respond to her until we talk to our couples therapist next week. And then told him that I was feeling angry and would be spending the evening alone rather than with him because I need to take care of myself and prioritise my needs and get myself out of a position where I’m drawn into coaching him through our repair. And I’ve stuck by that.

He did send a message later saying he understands why it’s so hurtful for me to hear him express concern for her when he consistently disregarded my pain and jeopardised our relationship and that he understands why I need time alone. And he sent a youtube about the effects of betrayal trauma that he has watched this evening (I’ve told him before I like to see what he’s watching to learn how to deal with this). So that does feel like good progress. He did fuck up and I am still angry. But also he has independently tried to initiate repair rather than me holding his hand through it. I think that me getting some distance each fuck up and resisting my own tendencies to coach and guide him will actually help me find out who he really is and whether we have a future or not. As well as giving me practice in being more alone and focusing on myself.

Thank you both for sharing your stories - I do really appreciate it, especially as they are two very different responses. Food for thought for sure.

[This message edited by ouchythishurts at 9:22 PM, Wednesday, November 11th]