So today I began to wonder, why is it that this breakup has hit me harder than any other breakup I've ever had? I went over them one by one:
Girlfriend #1 (1 yr): we just lost interest in each other. Girlfriend #2 (2 yrs): I cheated on her (horny college freshman). Girlfriend #3 (1.5 yr): She was too needy. Girlfriend #4 (7 yrs): She cheated on me (repeatedly). Girlfriend #5 (2 yrs): I was pathologically obsessive. Girlfriend #6 (1 yr): I was too insecure. W (3/7 years): Current situation.
For 1, 2, 5, and 6, even at the time of the breakup, I was fully aware that I had driven her away by my own undesirable behaviors, so however unhappy I was I nonetheless had to sigh and let it go as my own screw-up. #3 was "too needy" just because I was impatient and selfish; that is, I wasn't fully committed to her, and dropped her when it became too much effort.
#4 was obviously the nearest to my current situation, and I was actually engaged to her. I can see now that she cheated on me for the same reasons as my STBX-- I didn't give her as much quality time as she wanted, and when I express emotion I tend to state it rather than show it. But when that happened, I still got over it relatively quickly.
The main difference I see between then and now is that she actually WAS remorseful. She wasn't having affairs; she was looking for affection. If I had changed my behavior, and given her the affection she wanted, we would have been fine. (I didn't see that at the time, but in hindsight it's obvious.) So I was unhappy with the way she had behaved, and I had "had enough", but I was still convinced that she loved me and didn't want to hurt me.
Now? STBX was not remorseful. She hurt me on purpose. She hurt me as punishment. She hated me for making her feel guilty about hurting me, and made me feel awful for making her feel guilty. That alone is bad enough.
And this was someone who promised a lifelong commitment to me and, through her affair and her subsequent miserable treatment of me, betrayed my trust and broke her promise. That's what's different from the rest. Thinking of this-- her betrayal, and her lack of remorse-- is what makes me feel truly awful.
And yet... I married her young. She was straight out of undergrad and had only ever had one other serious boyfriend before me. I knew, when I married her, that she might one day wonder what she had missed out on, but I just thought that we would be able to see the signs when they appeared and deal with them. I never imagined an affair, so I wasn't looking out for that... and, more to the point, it never occurred to me that she WOULD see the signs and would fail to take action to fix things. Which is exactly what happened. But that's the kind of person she always was. When things went wrong between us, she never acted to fix anything. She would just let it go wrong. I can see that now.
Which means that I will not forget something she said, shortly after I discovered the affair, in that brief window of time when she actually was considering the possibility of cutting off contact with OM: "I didn't understand what I was committing to."
In truth, what she was committing to was the conviction that we would remain life partners-- that we would work through our problems, however difficult, instead of running away. But here I had already gone through six other girlfriends in my life, and I knew, where she did not, how important and difficult it is to find a supportive life partner, even where that means no longer experiencing the intoxicating thrill of infatuation and accepting even the most serious disillusionments with your partner. Commitment means, in this context at the very least, knowing what you need to make yourself happy and figuring out how to get that from your partner. She genuinely didn't know what made her happy until she saw it in OM; and, once she knew, she didn't have the knowledge, emotional intelligence, or courage to get it from me.
Bottom line?
I shouldn't have married her.
We had some great times, and some great years together. There's no question of that.
But getting married-- that was something I wanted because I knew it's what I needed. It was something she agreed to because she didn't understand what it truly meant. And when it came time to live up to the vows she'd made, she didn't have the strength, the strategy, or the maturity to do it.
I very much despise the fact that here I am having to start over at age 43 (although I appreciate that there are no kids involved here). But, curiously enough, if I think of this as "being dumped" rather than "getting divorced"-- that is, from the immature perspective of "this didn't work out" rather than the mature perspective of "she destroyed our lifetime partnership"...
For some reason, that doesn't seem so bad.
[At least, for the moment. We'll see how long this clear-headedness lasts before again giving way to depression.]
