"Sharks and fish can be friends" from Finding Nemo

[AntoniaB]

hey B, glad to see you back and even happier you were off having fun!

You know reading your post made me think of an analogy, and it's not a pleasant one but it makes the point.

No one on this earth would expect someone who was sexually violated to get back out there and have sex a year or so, probably even several years, after being traumatized. In fact, we'd expect that person to have years of the effects of that trauma to work through before a sexual relationship with a kind and loving person would be ok for them. Granted, I know of at least one friend who was the victim of date rape who then became numb to sex and had it often after...but that created its own set of problems for her. I'm sure most people who are traumatized in that way shy away from future intimacy.

Well what happened to us wasn't rape but an emotional violation of our trust, and I'm sure that it is every bit as devastating. So for people around us or even ourselves to not "honor" that level of trauma and indicate that we just have to get back out there shows that we don't as a society really understand the level of traumatiziation that a divorce under THESE circumstances can bring. Maybe it's because so many people divorce frivolously or immediately flaunt dating new people or publicly trash their exes, I don't know. But there is a lack of empathy/understanding for the level of betrayal we've faced, and honestly, till we can overcome a lot of that, we will probably not function well in new relationships. We might end up pushing away really nice people because we lack trust or because we still have work to do in rebuilding our shattered self-esteem.

I'd like to suggest that since it seems a lot of us are struggling with this now that we take it as an opportunity to change the face of what being divorced or stbd after an MLC is seen as by others...that we need to work on showing our family and friends that we are beat up but we got back up again, and part of our rebuilding of ourselves involves loving being by ourselves and not wishing or hoping we could move things forward faster to the day we are with someone else.

I suspect we want to be "there", dating others/potentially in a rel., because we assume if we are there "this" is now over. We want "it" to be over.

Well, it's not. But maybe we have to just embrace "it" for what it is, say that a year ago, or more, we couldnt' have imagined that we would be doing THIS well, and just learn how to love being with ourselves and our family and friends and SHOW THEM that being single is an awesome place to be and we're choosing that because it's best for us right now.

Ok wow, didn't expect my soap box to be so big on that one. Bea inspired me :-)