Husband gone for second time - 3

[Coconut]

A lot of what I write feels like I'm just complaining but I'm really struggling to accept this is my new life. How can everything just be gone?

If you feel it and want to vent or discuss, write away… sometimes it helps to hear someone else say they feel/felt that way too. I know for me personally, I owned my own home since I moved out of my parents, I had never rented in my life. When I met my wife, I lived in a house that I had completely restored top to bottom, I had a car that was going to paid off in a little over a year, and I only had a couple thousand dollars in debt. I was in my 30’s, doing well towards building a nice life for myself. When I divorced, we had to sell the family home, I had a newer vehicle with 4 yrs of payments left, and all the profit that I made on the sell of the house was used to pay off my half of the debt, and I only had a couple of thousand left over. Early in my M I wanted to have children, after trying for over a year, found out my W could not have any more.

Moral of the story, I went into my M in a pretty good financial position (she came with nothing but debt), I gave up my opportunity to have children so I could be with her, and when she walked away I was left with no assets (but no debt other than my truck), no biological children, and stuck with renting (I’m about to move for the third time in a year and a half.

But all of that is ok, because I see a light at the end of the tunnel. Once I decide where I want to settle I will purchase another house to settle into, I have a stepson who means the world to me, and I am happier than I was during the last 3 or 4 years of my M.

There are probably many here who will disagree and say you have to be happy alone before you can be happy with someone else but I don't agree. In my experience, especially in villages in developing countries, the happiest people are those who live in close-knit communities with strong families that support each other. This notion that we have to make it alone, and be happy alone, and be alone before we can make someone else happy is something I reject. I married into a different culture because there were things about that culture I felt were better than our culture. Some are worse too, but I wanted to be part of a culture that's less individualistic and more focused on family. Too bad I married into that culture for those reasons and got left behind! My husband came here and became American and is now embracing his freedom whereas I'm back to square one.

This is an interesting comment, and one that I never thought much about, but Zues126 touched on this recently and I’m going to quote his post here (I hope he doesn’t mind), where he touches on his thoughts about what you just said. It’s an interesting train of thought, and basically makes me wonder if you took those villagers that are so happy and put them in another environment, would their contentment remain? For me, I think the importance of being happy with yourself simply minimizes your co-dependency, as well as allows for you to share your happiness with the other person, which is a very attractive quality.

To set up my new train of thought I'll recap a few of my world views that form the basis. It seems to me for most of human history we didn't have choices about what our lives would look like, we were born into a certain life and that's the life we had to live. People had to find ways to adapt to their environment, instead of adapting their environment to them. It is this hardship that forced us to develop traditions and religions, to find meaning in our suffering and make the best of what we had. Marriage in particular was a dominant model because it was a requirement for survival throughout these oppressive times.

After WWII in the 1950s we started to accumulate a surplus of economic resources, technology was developing, and for the first time people weren't forced to follow the old rules for survival. The result was inevitably, the 60s counter culture questioning all of the old beliefs and traditions. It was like a rock long disturbed was uprooted and suddenly the beetles and insects started scampering every direction.

Some of this was good. Think about barbaric traditions such as sacrificing virgins to imaginary deities so the corn crop would come in. This is a tradition that humanity can say, 'hey guys, we've learned a little bit, we don't need to keep doing this anymore'. On the other hand there are many traditions that embody the collective wisdom of thousands of generations we've discovered on how we can best exist together.

One big challenge is how we can tell which is which. And another challenge is that if each of us tries to decide on our own which traditions are positive and which need to go, the result is that we don't have any universal set of values and therefor chaos ensues, like an orchestra where everyone is trying to play their own favorite song. Yes it's freedom, but something is lost in that we aren't harmonious. And as we interpret for ourselves our morality it is too easy to modify our beliefs to match our personal desires.

I've been looking at this with a sense of loss. A loss of the institution of marriage. A loss of the model of sacrifice, servitude, lives dedicated to finding purpose in our suffering. And I used to harbor much more resentment towards XW and other WAS's who I felt had made the choice to go down a road of pursuing selfish worldly desires that was creating a pattern that would bring tremendous pain upon ourselves and destroy much of what we built over many lifetimes.

My friend feels differently. He feels that we were chained down by circumstance and that we are now free to choose our own paths. He views this as a positive. He thinks that marriage and personal sacrifice are outdated traditions that we no longer need. Like we were chained up for so long we came up with traditions on how to live while being chained, and now we're not chained so it would be foolish to stay in our cells when the door isn't locked anymore just because that's what we've always done. I find this very interesting.

There are a few things we agree on. Right or wrong, we both think this is what is happening. We also think that it was and is inevitable. Human nature is human nature. If you leave kids to themselves they'll eat cookies and watch youtube. And similarly the members of our society aren't going to remain in miserable unfulfilling marriages and sacrifice their own personal happiness when they aren't forced to by circumstance. This is clear as even the anti-divorce forum members loath the idea of remaining in an unfulfilling marriage and can easily build cases in which abuse/addiction could justify divorce. We can talk about how we don't like it, but when it's our life that's miserable and we're free to define our own morality and society agrees it's hard for us to be the ones to remain in a difficult situation perpetually because of traditions that no one else is honoring.

And since I feel this is inevitable, I have let go of much of my resentment. I no longer look at my XW or other WASs as horrible people that made selfish choices that destroyed my family and are eroding the society we have built over millennia and dooming our children. Instead I almost feel they didn't have a choice, that we are all sinners and flawed humans and are being swept away in an irresistible current. Sure, a few people can be the exception and decide individually to fight the current, but the majority are going to be pulled downstream. I am no exception to that as proven by the fact I am debating these things for myself instead of following faithfully the teachings of the a priest or a higher power. While I still recognize each person gets to make their own choices, I am finding much more compassion for those being left to navigate their own way while the majority is racing down this path.

Another area I agree on with my friend is that we don't understand partnering up with another person at this time. He doesn't because he doesn't want to make the personal sacrifice, and would rather be free to pursue his own desires in life. I don't because I think that whoever I partnered with would think like he does and ultimately divorce me when they decided that the marriage was no longer working for them. And, as I've mentioned, I have a hard enough time making the sacrifice myself as while I don't always like it, I am human too. So to make a huge sacrifice that would test my dedication so I can endure a number of painful years until my spouse labels me as abusive and leaves to pursue their own happiness again, a result which looks like a foregone conclusion, doesn't seem like a bargain to me.

Maybe this will change at some point and I'll embrace the new ways of serial monogamy as a happy medium and content myself with 3-10 year stints of companionship that expires when it's no longer mutually beneficial. Maybe this will even be a sign of growth for me, a form of embracing what is available to me instead of rejecting it because it isn't everything I wanted. I'm not sure. But I'm not there at this point, that's for sure.

Much of this is churning over old ground, but as time passes and I hear other peoples' input my views gradually evolve. It's too bad we each have to try to go through this and find our own beliefs and we have lost the harmony and much wisdom of the ages, but it does seem inevitable and has carried many benefits in terms of reduction of suffering through oppression. While some will always succumb to chasing worldly pleasures, we still have the choice to appreciate what we have and find meaning in our suffering and purpose in our servitude. I, being human, have a nice mix of both in my life.

Anyway my impression is that most people probably move on with greater ease or faster than I am. I do hope to report back here someday with something positive that I've learned or done to get through this. I hope this resentment won't last forever. More than anything I miss I my husband but hope to find a new husband someday who may not be perfect but at least won't walk away.

Don’t judge your progression against anyone else’s, because everyone grieves in their own way. One of the most popular questions when first appearing on the forum is “How long does this take”, heck, I even pushed for an answer for 1 to 2 pages of my first thread, but the answer is there is no way to tell. I know that a year in I thought I was doing great, another 6 months past that I no longer think I was doing as well as I thought back then and am doing so much better now, so who knows what the future is going to bring me. But I do know that I am happy, I am having fun, but will I be more so in the future?? Only time will tell.