Hello to everyone and thank you in advance for taking the time to read my story.
My overall situation may be similar to many members on here...we were together overall for 7.5 years, have a 3 year old daughter and lived together for the last 3.5 years, but our situation is a little different in one particular and possibly very significant way: we were engaged but not married. I don’t know if that is a problem (against the board rules) for me to post here since it's about "divorce" busting or for the solutions/advice to work here, but I hope not.
With our daughter, how long we've been together and living together, and the fact that we were engaged, I feel that while our situation wasn’t a marriage, it was still more than just "boyfriend/girlfriend"...so I'm hoping any advice and support I receive here can be applied to my situation.
My current situation is, my (now ex) fiancée (who I'll refer to as "L"), moved out of our home at the start of December and moved in with her father and her father’s girlfriend (L's parents are divorced). While I am trying to not contact her (in what's been termed "Limited Contact"), we see each other/have contact almost daily due to our daughter and our mutually agreed upon (non-legally binding) shared visitation with her.
I am so in love with L, and even with our brief contact on a daily basis, I’ve been able to see that the sweet and caring girl I fell in love with and who promised to always love me is still in there. She seems to be shielded by a lot of hurt, anger, and resentment though, and as a result, I’m not able to reach that person so to speak.
In the past, L has frequently threatened to leave whenever we’ve gotten into an argument that hasn’t gone her way, and this time she made good on her threat. On November 2nd, a day I will never forget, we had gotten into a discussion about her using her vacation time to do something on her birthday as opposed to using it to spend time with my family at Thanksgiving, and that was when she gave the “we need to talk” speech.
She said that she’d had enough, and as soon as she could find a place to go, she was going to move out. At the time, she said she didn’t feel comfortable moving in with her mother or father. Fast forward to the beginning of December, and throughout November I had been trying to reach out to her, do nice things for her, to improve things between us, with all my efforts being rejected/ignored.
One morning we got into a discussion about our relationship and I got upset at her not wanting to try to work things out and her still intending to leave, and she ended up contacting her father right then to come help her get some of her things so she could move out.
Two main reasons she cites for not wanting to be with me is that she isn’t “in love” with me anymore, though she said she doesn’t hate me and does love me as the Father of our daughter, and she says that for the past three years she’s been “miserable” living with me, walking around pretending with a big grin on her face. Both statements caught me by surprise, to a degree.
We’ve had disagreements in the past, but we’ve always managed to work them out…usually by one of us giving in, which she claims she is the one who always did. Therefore, she didn’t really “seem” to be “miserable”…as up until the November morning we argued about that time off from vacation, we were intimate, and even that very morning before the argument she came downstairs and fell into my arms in an embrace.
As far as L “giving in” goes, she has mentioned to me that for the past three years, when she claims she was so miserable but didn’t openly, or frequently at least, show it, that I always got my way. She says that it was all about what I wanted, and that now its time for things to be all about her and what she wants.
L always had issues with the way I took care of our daughter, as I was very meticulous at to how things were done, and did most of the caretaking, to the point that she said I put our daughter in a virtual bubble. She claimed that she could never do anything/do anything right and that I always was checking up on her when she did...making her feel like a guest in her own home.
Another issue L seems to have had is the fact that we didn’t do anything together as we used to and our common interests dwindled. It seems that after our daughter came along, most of my attention went from L and our relationship to our daughter. In the past three years, we haven’t gone out on many dates like those that we used to, not without our daughter.
In a recent discussion, L said that at night when she would come home from work, I would either be already sleeping or playing on the computer, and would pay little to no attention to her.
L said she is not interested in going to counseling, as no matter whom we go to, they will tell her that she is doing the wrong thing. As I understand it, one or two members of her family have already expressed similar notions, that she’s going about this all wrong and doing the wrong thing. Her mother, who she hasn’t gotten along with very well since her parents divorce, told her that she was being selfish, a bad mother, she didn’t have her priorities straight, and a whole other slew of things that really angered L.
One person that I doubt feels this way, is her father, who L told me she overheard about 9 months ago discussing with his girlfriend trying to get L and our daughter to move in with them, despite there being no problems between L and me at the time. I have never done anything wrong to that man...even did a few big favors for him in the way of being a pall bearer at his mothers funeral and writing a letter of recommendation for him to a judge in a court case he was involved in.
In the past three years, he has not seen our daughter as much as he probably would have liked, and that was his own doing as much as it was anything else. Now, with L living there, he’s seen our daughter more in a month than he has in the past three years and is unlikely to want to give that up. Since L has moved in over there, money and gifts have been thrown at L left and right like I've never seen before. They go out to family breakfasts every weekend (with my daughter) and they rarely if ever did that when L and I were together.
L just bought a new car with her father offering to pay if she didn’t have the money to make payments. Given that L has little money of her own, said she was going to try to save money to get a place of her own, and she barely earns above minimum wage, getting a new car at this time is baffling from a financial standpoint. Two things that come to mind though are that the new car is easier to get in and out of for my daughter, and the old car was one she and I picked out together. She seems to have this "out with the old in with the new" attitude.
Another person who may not be upset at L being out of a relationship is her friend, who’s happens to be her father’s girlfriend’s sister and who is roughly twice L’s age. She recently separated/divorced her husband, and I think it’s possible that she’s supportive of L leaving me so that they can hang around together. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for L to feel the same way, considering that about 5 years ago, L broke up with me for about 4 months under similar circumstances when her then best friend broke up with her boyfriend. As well as I can remember, her reasons for breaking up with me then were that she needed space, and she just wanted to have fun and not be tied down…essentially allowing her and her friend to hang out and party without commitments or anyone being a 3rd wheel.
Back then, she told me she wanted to remain friends. I was able to get back together with her then by romancing her a little, as well as to remind her of the great times we’d had up to then, and eventually spending time with her little by little. Currently, with her working almost every day of the week at night, along with the fact that we now have our daughter to care for, and the fact that she claims she was miserable for so much of the past few years, such a strategy seems unlikely if not impossible to work again. In fact, I found the scrapbook I had made for her when we broke up the first time, and showed it to her recently, and she flipped through it as if she was skimming an operator’s manual for a toaster…no emotion. She stated that it has been so long since we had these good memories, found fault with some of the photos etc, and was generally annoyed and disinterested.
I have acknowledged and sincerely apologized that I was overprotective of our daughter, and that I didn’t let L do much for her or around the house without seemingly checking up on her. I told her that I was committed to changing and being a better person, and she said that I hadn’t changed in the past when I said I would, so why would I do it now. She also said that it’s likely “too little too late”…that even if I do change she isn’t sure she would want to be with me again. She’s said, “Sometimes people figure things out too late.”
While I'm not certain, I know there’s always the possibility that there may be someone else she's either involved with, or has been interested in and is planning on pursuing. It would make me sick to think she really broke up our family to see how things with another guy might be...or to be with him and not "technically" be a cheater. So soon after our parting to be involved with someone would still be cheating in my eyes. She hasn’t said anything to me nor have I found any concrete evidence. Though the other day I found out she was getting a prescription for birth control filled after having been to her doctor for a regular exam. I said to her "I didn’t know you needed those" and she responded, "I don’t, but its good to have, isn’t it?"
There were also a few times back in November before she moved out that she accused me of spying on her when I was not. One night her cell phone was lying beside her in bed and was flashing, so I reached over to turn it off and she woke up thinking I was going through it. Another time I was making room in her car for some luggage for a trip and she thought I was going through her stuff. It's not concrete evidence, but it was strange. Though in the past she reacted similarly when I would try to straighten up her stuff in the house...so such a reaction isn’t necessarily an indication of fidelity as much as it might be invading her personal space.
For the first few weeks after she left, I tried talking to her about our situation, in a calm and polite manner, but it seemed that the more I tried to talk about our relationship, the worse things get. She said that she doesn’t like being pressured and the more I try to talk to her about things, the more I’m pushing her away. About a week ago were able to sit down and have a fairly productive discussion about what happened between us and why she felt she had to leave without her stonewalling me/storming out. In it, I was able to express my thoughts and desires, my hopes of us reconciling and having a new and stronger relationship when we do, though she still firmly stated that she didnt want to come back.
As I said, I am trying to limit contact, though with our daughter it’s almost impossible to have no contact. Our daughter is the variable in this situation that may make things much more difficult to resolve than our previous separation. Once I’m feeling good enough about myself to consider re-initiating regular contact with her, I’m concerned we won’t be able to reconnect like most couples through time together with just one another. At any given time, one of us will have our daughter and to suggest doing something without her will be conspicuous and likely make L’s defenses go up immediately.
L has expressed interest in us remaining friends, though I think it was more in the context of friends as our daughter’s parents. He own parents cant stand one another and that makes holidays and special occasions almost unbearable. Some say the “I love you but I’m not in love with you” is another way of saying she wants to stay friends without allowing me the more intimate side of her. I’m wondering if I should go for that approach and, like last time, use that friendship, hanging out, etc. as a path to open her heart again. I’ve heard conflicting advice about remaining friends after a breakup…one the one hand it, as I said, could be a good doorway to getting close to her again. On the other hand, it could be a bad way to let her absolve herself of guilt and make this breakup easier on her. She would have me to cushion her as a friend while she moves on and I don’t…then if she meets someone else, assuming she hasn’t already, I’m left to watch them enjoy what she and I once had.
At any rate, as upset and down as this situation has gotten me, I’m trying to be happy and pretend that I’m not bothered by the situation, as well as trying to limit my contact with her, but it isn’t easy. When the one person in the world that I love the most, who I always thought would be there, says she’s no longer in love with me and doesn’t want to be with me, and that is the one person I would normally turn to in a time of crisis like this, it turns my world upside down.
I'm doing many things to try to help myself get past all this and prepare myself for a possible reconciliation should it come. I joined a gym and have worked out there almost every day, I bought some new clothes, etc...all to try to get myself "normal" again. While I want to get back with L, I've come to learn that neediness and desperation are unattractive, and reading between the lines, she's basically said she's lost her attraction to me, so as I said I'm limiting my contact with her to give us both time to heal and grow...and hopefully get myself in a better place to some day re-ignite the "spark" between us...for both my sake and our daughter.
It's a lot harder for me to do than her. Some people say it takes a lot for a woman to leave her family...but in this case, that doesn't seem to be the case. From what I've seen of her on a daily basis, she doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course, her father is now paying most of her bills, and as long as he's doing that to fulfill his own agenda, the grass may indeed continue to look greener on the other side.
It's been a little over two weeks since I decided to implement Limited Contact, where I only contact her about our daughter and try to remain business-like when she picks up/drops off our daughter. I have floundered from that a bit in our in person encounters, as there was one day when she was here, she was all dressed up and looking great b/c she had a party to go to...so we engaged in minor flirting via my complimenting her. Another recent development is her having serious wisdom teeth problems and needing surgery...a topic that has entered our conversation when she's been at the house and, due to my lingering feelings has caused me to reveal/show concern for her.
I am wholeheartedly interested in/committed to reconciling with my ex, and I know its not something that will happen overnight.
I would appreciate any comments/feedback that you have to offer. Thank you.
nsw, Welcome. Whoa. A lot to read there for a first post. I just skimmed for now. Will read more later.
Tough, complicated sitch. Read DR. Definitely read The Walk Out Woman: When Your Heart Is Empty And Your Dreams Are Lost by Stephens and Grey. It's a bit on the religious side but gave me a lot of insight into my WAW's perspective. As did Michele's The Walkaway Wife Syndrome (under "Articles" on the home page of this site).
Work on you for you. Hang on. The rest of the Cavalry will be here shortly with more. Good luck.
Gardener
"My soul, be satisfied with flowers, With fruit, with weeds even; but gather them In the one garden you may call your own." Cyrano deBergerac
Thanks Gardener. I will check out the article and book.
As an side, I actually already own Michele's "7 steps..." book. I bought it yesterday and have already read it cover to cover. I found it to be inspiring and insighful...and I'm hoping I can apply what I've learned from it as well as any tips and suggestions from others here to my relationship.
With my significant other having already moved out, and the specifics like the fact that we arent married, I am essentially putting into action somethimg between the "last resort" and "last, last resort" strategies...and since she's said she wasnt interested in working things out, I'm doing all the heavy lifting on my own.
As I was reading through the 7 steps book, I had set goals of having my SO return by May...our anniversary month. However, as I got through more of the book I came to realize that at this stage, and with the fact that my SO falls into something of a WAW/MLC type, I should be prepared for a good deal of waiting...many months...but hopefully not years.
My SO has an extremely short fuse, so the trial and error/experimentation of what works and what doesnt is not easy. So far it seems that the only thing that might be working is being polite/lighthearted and keeping discussions fairly focused on our daughter. Even that I'm not 100% sure on though...it's hard to tell if she's reacting positively to that, or if there are other things going on in her life that might be affecting her mood/demeanor.
At any rate, thanks again for the suggestions and encouragement. I welcome and am looking forward to futher responses from everyone.
Well you talked about everything but marriage. You've been with this woman for over seven years.....you are engaged to her but you never M her. She had you child.......I mean, why the heck did the two of you never make it legal?
It is not about what you feel should work in your M. It is about doing the work that gets the right results. Do what works!
As far as L “giving in” goes, she has mentioned to me that for the past three years, when she claims she was so miserable but didn’t openly, or frequently at least, show it, that I always got my way. She says that it was all about what I wanted, and that now its time for things to be all about her and what she wants.
And you are STILL making this all about what you want. She says she wants out, but YOU want her to come back.
So you are still being the same selfish person she always saw in you. IF she wants out then so be it. LET her go. Stop contacting her. Stop trying to win her back. Anything else is making it all about you again. You are basically tellling her once again.. "I don't care what you want, give me what i want. I want to stay together, I want you back, I want another chance"
Well you talked about everything but marriage. You've been with this woman for over seven years.....you are engaged to her but you never M her. She had you child.......I mean, why the heck did the two of you never make it legal?
Several people have asked me this since we broke up. While I cant speak for her, on my end, I slowed down on the desire for marriage because she was very bad with money and she had such a short fuse that I was afraid she would do what she ended up doing anyway, getitng mad and walking out on me, only with us being married things would be even more complicated.
In hindsight, not only do those reasons seem insignificant, but the assumption that marriage may have complicated matters may have been completely opposite from the truth. Instead of us being essentially done in her mind right now, we could instead be separated but not divorced.
Or maybe not.
Originally Posted By: gucci loafer
And you are STILL making this all about what you want. She says she wants out, but YOU want her to come back.
So you are still being the same selfish person she always saw in you. IF she wants out then so be it. LET her go. Stop contacting her. Stop trying to win her back. Anything else is making it all about you again. You are basically tellling her once again.. "I don't care what you want, give me what i want. I want to stay together, I want you back, I want another chance"
She doesn't want that right now. Let her go.
Well...I have been doing better about not contacting her than I did when all this first happened. With our daughter, it's unlikely to not have any contact. But I have been making efforts not to be the one to contact her but instead let her call or message me, and I've tried to limit the topic to our daughter.
She's made several (likely insignificant) contacts with me that havent really had anything to do with our daughter. She just got a new car with satellite radio and called me the other day to ask about what stations were what and how to find the station she wanted.
Along with that, the day she got the new car, she called me, had me come to remove the carseat from her old car and move it to her new car, saying neither she nor her dad could get it out. It literally took 30 seconds and was effortless. She then asked me if I wanted to go for a ride in the car and that I was the first person to ride in it.
Stuff like that is weird and even messes with my head a little. If you dont want to be around someone, why call them about stuff like that.
I read your story and I am sure you know by cruising the site here a bit that it is unfortunately the same song and dance that many of us have lived (or are living) through. You will find that some of the stories have happy endings and others take a little longer to get there (with or without our spouse/sig.other). I agree with Gardener...take the time now to work on you. Try to figure out what you really want in your life...with or without her. Focus on your daughter. She will always be your light and keeping her happy and healthy should be #1 priority for you. However, to do that, you need to take care of you and make sure that her life goes on as uninterrupted as possible. Her mom is almost definitely dealing with a lot of junk right now that she will never understand and you have to do your best to be solid for her. Continue your soul searching and read some more of Michelle's books. Married or not, if your relationship is worth working for, you will need to be the one to keep the ball rolling. Stay strong and keep posting here. You are not alone!
Trust in yourself...you are the only one that can guide your future...
Me-28 X-30 QLC-just separated from OW after 3 yrs M-3yrs Tog-8yrs D-3yrs Bomb-8/5/06
Thanks for the advice FP. I do plan to do more reading not only to help me in this situation but also to pick back up as a hobby. It's something that will occupy my time and keep the lonely downtime thoughts form creeping in.
Something happened today with my SO that I wanted to share in the hopes that some of you who may have similar experiences can tell me if it means anything...or perhaps if I'm being used:
For the past 4 or 5 days our daughter has been sick with a cold. At any rate, my SO and I have a set (again, non-legally binding) visitation agreement where she comes to get our daughter at ~10 every morning and drops her off in the afternoons before she goes to work.
Yesterday, with our daughter being so sick, she decided not to come pick her up, but she told our daughter she was going to take her to lunch. So this morning rolls around, I let my daughter try to sleep in a bit as she's still sick, and then she got up and I fed her breakfast. My SO messaged me as to how our daughter was doing and if she needed to go to the doctor. I responded and didn’t hear anything else.
10AM rolls around and my SO shows up, but my daughter is still eating breakfast(she didnt start eating til later than usual). My SO is annoyed that our daughter isn’t ready, and says she's going to get gas for her car and she'll be back. She called me while she was out and was angry, yelling at me. I told her that with her letting our daughter get rest and stay here yesterday and her saying she was going to take our daughter to lunch today, I didn’t think she was going to be coming over until closer to lunchtime. My SO said that was a stupid reason and told me just to have her ready when she got back.
Therefore, I did, and my SO came in and was surprisingly pleasant. I'm not sure why she calmed down. At any rate, she started asking me what I was doing today, if I was going to the gym and whatnot and I said probably. She said she needed to drop our daughter off by 1:30 since she had a dentist appointment at 2:30. I told her I'd be home by 1:30, and that’s when she asked if I wanted to meet her and my daughter for lunch.
I was enthralled by the prospect of spending time with my family, though I only replied calmly that that would be fine. I told her to message me when she decided when and where. We both left our house, and she waved to me as she pulled off.
About an hour or so later, she messaged me and we determined a place and time to meet.
The lunch was nice...aside from the food being pretty good (and each of us eating some of one another’s food), it was relaxed with lighthearted chitchat. We didn’t talk about the relationship; we joked around and laughed about some stuff. Our daughter was there and like most her age was frequently craving attention when she saw her mom and me talking to one another and not focusing on her. The only thing that was talked about that bothered me, even though I didn’t let on, was when she talked about doing a lot of housework around her dad's house and in exchange, he said he would pay on her new car. I thought to myself "I would pay off your whole car if you'd open up emotionally and come back home".
We ate at a restaurant in a shopping mall, so after we were done eating we walked around the mall for 20 minutes or so. Then my SO had to heave for her appointment.
Therefore, we said our goodbyes and confirmed that she would come at 10 tomorrow. She said "I'll talk to you later" and I said, "Have a good night". She waved at me again as she drove off.
I don’t know what she's thinking, and unless she tells me (and maybe not even then), I can’t know what her motives are. However, I'm hoping for some educated guesses.
So for those of you with a WAS...or for anyone who's seen this type of behavior before...should I see her inviting me to have lunch and waving at me to be a positive sign, no matter how small? Is she confused and/or unsure about her decisions to leave me? Alternatively, was I being used...either as a pillow to cushion my SO's guilt at leaving or as a taxi so that my SO wouldn’t have to come back to our house to drop off our daughter before going to her dentist appointment?
It would be great if it were a positive sign. I mean my SO told me that she hoped we could be friends unlike her own parents...so in a sense that's what we were doing.
However, when people who've been more than friends do the friends route, there’s a chance that that’s where things can be stuck. If both are ok with that, then that’s fine, but I know that I would like things to be more than that. Therefore, from my perspective, friends "for now" is fine...but it’s not how I want things to always be. I'm not interested in being her friend while she moves on with someone else and that guy gets all the closeness and intimacy that I once had but wont as a friend.
I would appreciate any thoughts and feedback anyone has to offer.
Well then maybe my SO was "Cake Eating" yesterday with the whole lunch thing. She may have used it to not only get me to take our daughter back to our home instead of her doing it, but also to pump out of me any personal information of what I've been up to and whatnot that she hasnt privy to by not living at home anymore.
I say that now because this morning when she came to pick up our daughter, while the conversation we had was pleasant and friendly, she didnt wave to me like she did yesterday, and she had two opportunities to do so.
I'm having extreme difficulty "detaching" and strictly adhering to "Limited Contact" strategies. It seems no matter what she says or does, I'm willing to come to her rescue and/or let her bend my ear about stuff...to the point where others have called me a doormat and a crutch for my SO.
While I rarely call or messsage her, she still calls and messages me whenever she feels like it, and while most of the time its strictly about our daughter, sometimes it isnt. People have told me that even the calls about our daughter, when in excess, are a way to ger her "me" fix and its holding both of us back.
What do you guys think? Was I being used yesterday? How do I detach and become less emotionally available to her? How do I ignore her calls and messages without seeming rude?
I've tried to in the past few weeks...I've tried to be vague about my activites and miss some of her calls...but she gets so angry and jumps to the conclusoin that if I'm not telling her whats going on then I must be trying to do something behind her back to screw her over (like talking to a lawyer about custody of our daughter or something...which wasnt even in my mind).
