New chapter....with or without her

[TJT]

Hi EZ,

First, want to acknowledge the dog comment. There's a similar element in my sitch and while the dog hasn't seen H in almost 2 months, and I do feel she would still be excited if he appeared, I am very surprised at how well she seems to be doing with him not coming home at all. Sure the first few days she kind of seemed to be expecting him, but after that it's pretty much been normal. I really hope she "gets" it too... I talk to her all the time and tell her I'm sorry this happened to her too, but that we will be better together, haha. Dogs can absolutely get depressed and grieve and I'm so happy this doesn't seem to be the case for us. I have also been making sure to spend more time with her to make up for the other half of interaction that's now missing and hoping she's just thinking "wow mom's really awesome!"

Second, SM is really a whole other wrench in dealing with these situations. It's way too easy for things to become a "game". Although I know a lot of other elements or our sitches feel like that too. I guess it just adds on is what I'm saying, but I do agree with what's been said in other threads about SM also being helpful toward socializing and detaching, if you can control the other parts that are distracting. It just [censored] to even have to think about, especially if before you both participated jointly as many couples do.

For me it's totally changed my social profile "personality" and where I would normally share regular updates about things happening in my life, obviously nothing has been bigger than my sitch so I've kind of gone radio silent. I have seriously considered whether I would even fully "rejoin" in terms of fully participating/actively posting again... I almost feel like it's one form of a "life" that is going to be immortalized as it is today, and if I wanted to be active again that I would even rather just create a separate, fresh account vs. having to hide/delete all kinds of things from the past 10 years on the current account. But I'm just not worrying about it for now. In my case I'm still kind of marinating in what even just happened.

Definitely a downfall of SM, it saves every memory you give it!