Living with groundlessness

[AntoniaB]

I agree with what you're saying, Seeking. He's justifying his choices by comparing only the last 2-3 years of our marriage to the honeymoon phase with OW. He SAYS he was happy the rest of the years, but in making his "life choice", those years never entered into the picture.

He grossly underestimated how "easy" it would be to walk away from me emotionally. He took almost no reminders of our life, and yet he says his biggest problem is learning how to quiet my influence on him or his thoughts of me in his head. He thinks if he puts enough distractions in his life I'll just recede into the background, but we all know it doesn't work that way.

My mom pointed out something interesting...he said that what made his life better than "before", was that he had a house and he had furniture and stuff to fill it, and friends. Um...he's just renting. And guess what? He had a house with me. And furniture. Before we were married, he had his own apartment. And furniture. And friends. I don't get why this would be the thing that gives him empowerment when he's been through it before, but I think that in the end he won't feel empowered, for one reason. He has yet to really establish a home for himself without being strongly influenced by his romantic partner. I helped him pick his apartment and furnish it when we were not married. She helped him pick his place and furnish it now, and I orchestrated the entire move from apt. to house 15 years ago because he was too scared to make the leap to mortgage.

What I'm seeing in him now is the old me. When his mask fell off (great way to put it) I could see anxiety, avoidance, fear, jumpiness, mood swings, someone depending very heavily on someone else to make their world right, the sense that there are some things that just are terrible (like his job) and if he just has the right woman, all the other troubles melt away.

That's old me, to a T. I guess that's why I feel so sorry for him. It will take something monumentally bad to wake him up out of that--I should know.

When we were separated prior to OW, he told me that one day on his way to work he was listening to a song where the lyrics went, "And now she knows it's like a curse, to find our chosen roles reversed, to unify my universe." He said he had to pull over because he was crying so hard and he didn't know why other than it must have been the lyrics.

I don't think that I am "old him", but I think that if we were together right now, I'd turn into old him, trying to protect him from himself and the world.