Maybell XXVI

[Mozza]

I, too, think back on the great things we were doing as a couple right up until DB, and that includes dates and ML (and cooking, visiting friends, playing with the kids, etc.). Even if my mind wanders there more than I care for, I've concluded that their problem was elsewhere so it's useless to find evidence that things weren't so bad. If you want your H back (I'm not sure at this point!), at least it'll fall in the column of the positives when the fog dissipates, so that's that.

One day, we'll be so detached that we'll use this forum to exchange recipes!

[bravo61]

funny!

i'm on a no carb diet but XW and the kids love pasta so i would have her call me on the way home from work and pick up of the kids and cook her homemade marinara and her favorite noodles (penne) so it would be ready for her when she walked through the door. and i couldn't even eat any of it! LOL

[Train]

I do not intend to fold. I want to roar.

I agree with everyone else. Listen. And hold your cards close to the vest when you meet with H. I've been able to tell for at least a month via your posts that you're growing so much stronger and more resolved.

You *will* roar, sister. I promise. It's coming.

And Betsey? Wow. Our paths are different, but your gentle wisdom is absolutely remarkable ... and spot-on. I'm almost speechless. Good, good stuff.

[Ggrass]

You are roaring mayb you are.

At the end of the day it's all, lies how far back only he knows.
I'm my case the more h doth protest the more of his lies the further back are being exposed. More and more and more.

I have Zero respect for me putting up with the crap, but I didn't really have the total facts.

Now I do I have absolutely zero respect for a man who " I will die before I lie, even if it's not in my best interest! " is his fave lie.

What will be will be. The chips are falling and time will revel that like the truth it cannot be hidden for too long.

[labug]

I do think now he might have been cheating. I don't think that was an idle question. The only reason to ask if it was an std is if he thought id gotten it that way, since I had been negative with D11. Between the two of us he's the one with the opportunity to stray. I certainly never went anywhere but church, book club, and yoga.

There were several times in our marriage when he would do something new in bed and I wondered where that came from -- especially in the last five years.

He traveled a LOT. And I strongly feel (in retrospect) that there was at least some boundary crossing before the OW I know about, if not actual sex happening.

He set up the Tinder account at the time he told me specifically he wasn't going to date. He violated every agreement we made when I agreed to the separation (and he wrote the separation agreement himself). He can't be trusted.

I don't know that your husband has cheated or not. I do know that I work with people learning about GBS everyday and the question he asked is common for both husbands and wives because no one knows about it until pregnant and need tested.

It's not an STD and women can test positive and negative many times throughout their lives. It is what it is.

Whether you reconcile with your H or not is a side issue. I want you to be whole. I want everyone to be whole. It seems to me looking from the outside that you are building a case. I think I mentioned before the self-fulfilling prophecy, when our mind interprets happenings to match the narrative we've created to keep us safe.

Our WASs do much the same when they decide they can't stay. They tell their, what is it we call it here, revised history of the marriage and we all stand, mouth agape thinking "That's not how I recall things."

We can't live our lives based on our interpretations of what people say. If you're really curious, ask him what he means. Maybe his new sexual moves were things he read about to see if he couldn't spice things up. If you were suspicious, did you ask him at the time?

Tinder-schminder, most of the people on here have a spouse or themselves with some kind of account soon after BD. They want to see what's out there.

[labug]

Lost nailed it -- I want to have ONE time where I hear honesty from him. Tinder and dating aren't the point; the point is, I don't want to waste a perfectly good evening listening to more BS. Just because I don't believe a word he's said I don't want to go. But if I go and listen to more lies, I'd like to say that I know they're lies and that I'm done. And have him know for absolute certain that I mean it.

But maybe I'll go, I'll listen to his BS, and I'll have papers as soon as I can. Then it'll be actions, not words, and perhaps he'll remember who I am.

If he's being honest, will you believe him? It seems not.

You're hurt and I get that and maybe he is a lying sack o shite but if you're not going to believe him why not just cancel the meeting and file.

Don't set a trap.

[Maybell]

Are you telling me I'm boxing with shadows?

I'm not setting a trap. I don't think. Probably highly defensive. He's traveling almost all of January and I fail to see the rush here. I'm starting to see charges that show him having a stupid hipster lifestyle and it makes me mad because he made such a point of saying he was "leaving the door open" and then in July when he kept wanting to have lunch and said "I've stopped seeing OW" like that was supposed to make me magically warm up to him. And then when I did he pushed me away again.

I don't want to meet with him if he DOESN"T want to divorce because I want more time to recover from his cheating.

Labug, I bought books when we were newly married that were supposed to help us spice things up and he got all embarrassed and said he wasn't comfortable playing like that. But he was TOTALLY comfortable looking at porn in the middle of the afternoon in the basement (and telling me not to come downstairs and bother him) while he was supposed to be job hunting when D11 was an infant (I caught him when he came upstairs for lunch and I went to move the laundry over; he'd left the screen open to a really appalling picture and he grinned and said "oops"). He asked me to do some grooming "down there" out of nowhere and when I did it was clear that what I'd done was really not what he had in mind. Some of the things he asked me to do were well beyond the range of our normal repertoire -- WELL beyond. But it's not like he was generous about doing things I asked for that were more about setting the stage than running the game (to mix a metaphor).

I can't remember things being good anymore. I don't know if I even would know what good looked like. All I remember now is bad and less bad. How I never felt like he wanted to know me. How mocking he can be. How lonely I've been. How I've been asking for ten years to go on a specific trip WITH HIM because it means a lot to me in my heart (and he's BEEN to this location a LOT, including with OW) and he always put it off. And then when we got to the date that he'd finally set for actually going... he left me instead. How instead of ever joining me on the things I did for myself, he just threw money at it and made excuses and sent me to go by myself.

Yes, I'm hurt, a LOT. Yes, I'm probably being defensive. I don't want to share a meal with him. Not even a little. But I feel like I owe it to myself to at least close these 17 years in person and not through a lawyer or electronically. But I also I think he just wants me to sit there again and listen to him tell me about how he just can't feel love for me and it's never going to work and he's found someone else who he can be passionate about. And I'm SO TIRED of listening to him sit there and hurt me on purpose when I've been luggage and "the help" for so long. It's just such a stupid ending.

[Dawn70]

The idea of a gratitude jar is a nice one for with the kids (or on your own?) I went shopping with a friend of mine and she was looking for a big jar to use as a memory jar with her S7 this year. He is going to write the dates and the memory on little postits, put them in the jar and they'll look at them Xmas next year.....lovely!

I tried to do this with XH for 2 years (we called ours a blessing jar) but he never hardly put anything in it. So, I started a new one just for me on Jan. 1. I already have 6 slips of paper in mine and while I don't force myself to write something everyday, obviously some days just seem to have stuff that needs to be recorded for posterity!

[Maybell]

Labug, I feel unclear about what you're getting at.

I feel like on the one hand I'm starting to see that I was treated unjustly for a long time. I feel like that's true and the message I'm getting from people who've known me a long time (mostly my brothers) is that they could see that my H was kind of just along for the ride, that he wasn't invested in being a good dad and that he was satisfied to let me do all the work while he stood around and told me what I was doing wrong.

(I never had the nerve to ask if he was cheating when he did something unexpected, but I did ask "where that came from" and he gave a very unspecific answer. Considering I knew about the porn and that he was around a lot of entitled single guys in the job before this one, I suspected someone might have "taught" him that stuff but didn't want to pursue it for fear of learning the truth.)

I know for certain that he cheated and lied for a very long time. Two years that I know about.

I know for certain that he went to a LOT of happy hours and dinners and parties and traveled a lot and that he frequently called me from late at night outside bars in the middle of the week. Also that this happened at least once a week and sometimes several times a week. Also that this happened over a period of years, but that it escalated in the last five years.

I know for certain that he promised me he didn't want a relationship and wasn't going to date the very same month he set up the Tinder account.

I know for certain that he intentionally didn't ask my opinion about moving to the west coast because he didn't want to take my opinion into account. He has told me this is so.

What part of all this is self-fulfilling prophecy? Why should I think there is any possibility at all of reconciliation when he was perfectly satisfied to treat me this way for years, and probably would have carried on for years more if OW's baby daddy hadn't outed him?

[labug]

Gotta go to work, be back later.