Is it humanly possible to drop the rope?

[AntoniaB]

Ha ha I've not updated to this thread for so long I am not even sure it's the right one!

Well I've got a long update about my XH, which is that I'm a month away from 3 years post-affair revelation, a month away from 4 years post-initial MLC BD, and I can report that XH is no different now than he was before. Seems he is quite stuck in "the tunnel" and has made a home there.

I ran into him and OW for the first time ever a few weeks ago when I was having dinner in the only restaurant in a beach town that had meaning for he and I. It was where he threw my 40th surprise party and where he and I had gone every time we visited. I was with my GF of 20 years, one of only 3 people who tried to be both his friend and mine post-bomb, but whom HE rejected because she wouldn't welcome OW into her life when he hadn't even filed for divorce. So I looked up and there he was, and there OW was. I'd seen pics of her online but never in person. She is shockingly childish looking. He looks like a pedophile next to her. It's creepy. He finally saw me, looked like he'd been "caught in the act", and steered her to the back of the restaurant, then within a few minutes they both literally jogged out the front door. 10 min. later 2 friends texted me that he'd posted a complaint on FB about how if his day wasn't bad enough, he just had to run into me "and the friend who abandoned him." (It was her 40th bday. She now says her bday was ruined because of that). Well this started off people commenting on how he was "better off without us" and how "he won".

Couple of things I took from this:

1. OW is not the formidable competitor I assumed she'd be. I felt classier and stronger and more put together by far than she. This made me feel really good.
2. OW is childish and naive and though I wanted to go up and rearrange her face (mainly because I saw her as one half the reason I spent a long period of my life in a nervous breakdown) I also felt sorry for her.
3. XH did not give me butterflies anymore. I had zero reaction to him. I didn't want him at all physically or emotionally. I felt nothing for him.
4. It amazes me how he's rewritten history to make me the villain in his little drama. Somehow the woman who stood by him in his MLC breakdown and even the cheating, willing to take him back, is the bad person, and he "won" by getting away from me.
5. Interesting side note, though: not one person who was a former mutual friend of ours supported his FB rant. Not even one acquaintance coworker of his. The only people who responded were 2 people he grew up with who I guess he got in contact with post-divorce who never had anything to do with us before, and his brother, who is certifiably nuts and has had serious mental problems and has been abusive to women his whole life. Interesting to see XH his friend now.

I ended up reading through a few months of his FB posts when one friend still connected to him let me. What I see is a very cynical angry man. Angry at life, the world, other people, his job. The only thing he is happy about is OW whom he brags about incessantly. He's constantly putting pics of her online. In fact he put a pic of her right after he ranted about seeing me in person.

(OH I forgot to add!!! I did nothing when I saw him. Looked him right in the eye, then went back to talking to my dinner partner and never looked at them again. My friend said my face was twitching on one side because I was about to have a stroke, but I held myself together.)

So in the end this was a bad thing to witness but necessary. Unlike most posters I don't have to be in contact with XH as we don't have kids, and they live downstate. But a random occurrence like this was bound to occur, and I'm glad that it did because it showed me that I don't want him in my life anymore.

He has truly become the MLC guy permanently I think. Anyone who followed my story knows that this guy never wavered. And he's still not wavering. He's defiant as can be that this is his destiny. I think it's all a bunch of bravado, because frankly if you're happy with your life and you feel good about your choices, you don't run into your ex-wife who does absolutely nothing to confront you and then act like she rained on your parade just to get people to pat you on the back and say "you poor soul." But the man is so good at deluding others that it is only natural he can delude himself.

I do miss being married sometimes, but not to him, not anymore. It's only now that I can see the pattern of abuse he had growing over a longer period than the MLC. I can see now that he and his family are cynical abusive people. His father and brother are abusive towards women. His mother was the reason he and his brother grew up being hit. These are angry people with very dark lives. I think for a time he broke away from it and that time coincided with the first 10 years or so we were together. But overall he has returned to his roots, and because of that, I don't think he's "coming back." In fact, I wonder if his being married and happy all those years ago was some sort of tunnel he was in, if that part was the anomaly.

When I met him he said I didn't know what I was getting into, that he had a very dark side. I am the eternal optimist and I insisted no he didn't. I think he proved me wrong.

I've noticed that my entire friendship group has drastically changed over the past several years without him. Only now can I see that the people we had as mutual friends (most of them) and even my own friends were very negative and cynical people. We also refused to be friends with anyone who had children. It was like we couldn't tolerate anyone who was any different from us.

Now I'm friends with a very different set of people. Everyone I am close to is an optimist and strives to be kind and generous. And I feel oddly drawn in bits and pieces to new friends who have kids. I feel like I learn from their different lifestyle and I like the way they appreciate stability and having a home and goals instead of trying to go out and get drunk every weekend and just sit around doing nothing when you're off work.

I can see now how ill-suited XH and I were and are. I'm very ambitious and want to make a mark on the world. I want to create, to produce, to care about my career. XH isn't that type. He wants to put his hours in and then party all his non-work hours and oomplain about his job. And I think so much of this comes down to how we were raised. I was raised by parents ironically from his area of the state, but my parents were the only ones in their family who "got out" and went to school and worked their way up to have careers. My parents to this day are the type who, if I would say "I want to learn XYZ", they would say "great, how can we help?" XH's parents are the type who would say "Well what do you want to bother with that for?"

I think because I came from a helping type family I saw him at 19 years and wanted to pull him from that darkness. My diary at the time is filled with my comments about how he was "softening" before my eyes, becoming this loving man. And his letters to me from that time are all about how much he wanted to "get out" from his parents' cynicism and backwards mentality and really do something with his life. But in the end, those are the very people he went to for support when he betrayed me. And being a family where abusive behavior was normal, when they found out that he didn't "hit me", they gave him a pass. I don't think they had it in them to act differently. And in the end I don't think he has it in him either.

There are times I'm angry that I wasted so much energy on trying to stand by him, trying to get him to see that our marriage could work, that I was willing to forgive him. I'm glad that he didn't give in. I'm truly better off without him. I'm happy with who I am and don't have the anxieties and fears I did when I was married to him. I'm really self-sufficient and strong and feel like I can tackle anything. My career has taken off through all my work and I'm developing a second career as a writer, and I know for sure that especially was never going to happen if I was still with him. But I guess it was good for me to try to stand by my marriage as long as I did, even after he left me the first time. I learned to give to someone unconditionally. And in the end I've not received anything back from him but anger and retribution. I always took the high road and it netted me nothing FROM HIM. But I'm sure it taught me to be a better person than I was.

In fact, all of this experience taught me to be a better person. I think in the end I lost him, but I gained me, and that's the most important thing of all to me.