Here’s my story. I’ll try to keep it short, but I’ve been living it for the past year so it’ll be difficult. My H and I were married for three years at that point and one day, out of the blue, he says that he wants more kids (he has a 10 year old son from a previous relationship) and that if I don’t, we can’t be together. I was days away from starting my graduate program and didn’t feel financially stable enough to fully take care of his son (I am a super responsible, over planner!) so I needed time to think. I always thought I’d have all the time in the world if I wanted a child of my own, and H knew that most likely I didn’t. But I begin to realize that my mid 30s are drawing near and maybe I do want a child. I think a lot of this was brought on by his son’s stepfather joining the military and knowing that he wouldn’t have his son living a few towns away anymore.
At this point, he’s now saying that we have other problems, but we could work on those if we’d have children, but he couldn’t believe that I really wanted kids. Less than a month later, he’s dating a girl who has friends with drug issues and has had child protective services called on her for her not so great child rearing of her two boys. I love H dearly and want him to be happy. If he’s going to leave me for an awesome woman who loves kids and adores H, I’ll be sad, but glad that he’s happy. To see him with this girl who was the opposite of everything he wanted threw me for a loop.
By July, he’s decided that I should move out of the house so we can have space to think things over. We’ve had the house on the market since June, but no offers since I wanted the house for our family and if we’re not going to be together we need to get rid of it. We purchased it right before we married, so it’s in my name and even after putting 30K into repairs, we can’t get it sold. As hard as it is, I agree to move out, because I couldn’t stand the idea of being in the house by myself with all of the memories. At this point, he’d already broken up with the girl, but even though he knew she wasn’t right for him, he was still upset.
During the summer and fall, we tried to limit our contact, but occasionally spent time together. In December he surprised me by saying that we’d actually been dating, to see if we could work things out. I know how important the holidays are to him, so I spent both of them with his extended family, who really wish we could work things out. We went to a few sessions of counseling in January/February, but even though we both committed to six months of therapy, he said he was done after 3 meetings because he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to be married.
Now I’ve found out that he’s dating another girl. I think she has two kids and appears really young, so I think he’s just feeling depressed and wants attention. He doesn’t think he deserves any better. I really want to make a solid effort to try DB’ing because I think our problems are minor and if we tried, we could make it work. I’ve identified quite a few things I need to work on, even if this relationship doesn’t work out. I’m just not sure if I have false hope and should give up. All of the other divorce sites I’ve seen are about coping with the loss and moving on, but I still love my H and want to make things work. Any advice you can give me? I’d really appreciate it as this last year has been dreadful for me.
