Anotherstander, trust me that I am trying to work on myself. I've been going to a C since the bomb dropped. First, H and I went to a C1 and H thought that he was biased towards me. I picked a former marine and the guy was all rough around the edges, which I thought H would identify with, and he did. He liked C1, but when C1 told him some hard truths, H wanted to look for another C.
Now we both see a C2 individually and as a couple, so she has heard my side of the story, his side of the story and both of us interacting. When we are alone and I ask her what she thinks I'm doing wrong, her response is, "you are too tolerant," and when we do MC, she tells him exactly the things C1 said. Basically, both Cs think H is missing a sensitivity chip.
I'm sure you identify as a man with the things H complains about this family and marriage and I see you have three children and at one point your W was pregnant with two other kids to care for but I doubt it ever crossed your mind to leave her because and cheat on her with the argument that it was "just too hard."
This is what H says about every relationship he has ever had. This is his third marriage and he had one to two year relationships in between. When I ask him what went wrong in each of them, he says they "just got too hard."
I should have paid attention to this huge red flag.
Another red flag I did not pay attention was that when we met, he had just gotten back from Iraq, where he had someone as well while he had a live in girlfriend back home. I asked him why he cheated and he said the previous relationship was getting too hard and that he started seeing that girl more like a sister (same thing he says about me now) and when I asked what happened with the relationship that started there, he said that also got too hard.
I thought naively at the time I was just different from all of them, that I was more ambitious, driven, independent, curvier, you name it. I even asked if he'd cheat in Afghanistan, since he had said before he cannot go more than 3 months without sex and that he had cheated in Iraq. He said I was crazy, because now he is married, with a kid and one on the way and that I was "it," the woman of his dreams, his best friend and that this is forever. This was a few weeks before his plane took off.
So you see why I am devastated, even though I had every red flag on the planet asking me to take a step back.
