“hey I met this great guy, BUT he’s been divorced twice”. Guaranteed to her and her GFs it’s “what’s wrong with him?” “Girl, be careful”, “RUN!” THAT is what I feel I’m up against.
This might happen, and it might not. Her friends might also say "he tucks in his shirt? he's not cool, run away!"
Point is, if she has good chemistry with you she's not going to care what her friends say beyond being annoyed by it. Its not going to be the big deal you're worried about.
I am worried, obviously, about who you're picking. If your IC is right and your wife has "severe anxiety disorder" that has all kinds of not so great behaviors associated with it. Why were you attracted to that, and why were you okay with being in a relationship with a person with severe anxiety disorder?
What you should be worried about is not figuring that out, and going headlong into the same situation again. That has everything to do with ballast, and nothing to do with "women" in the abstract.
If your first wife cheated on you, what got your relationship to that point? For that to happen, either she was very resentful and angry at you, or she didn't value you, or she was opportunistic and made a mistake she regretted. In the last category, you typically get apologies and contrition but it doesn't sound like that was the case. If not, *why* did you end up in a relationship with someone who didn't value you and why was that okay?
I really hope you're digging deep into this in IC, that's really the key to your future is understanding that. You can't make whatever "that" is go away, but you can learn new and better tools for coping with it and managing it. I had a woman friend who was repeatedly cheated on. As a result, whenever she got into a new relationship she was paranoid and distrustful. Because she was paranoid and distrustful, her partner would resent being mistrusted, and wouldn't value her because her behaviors reflected low self-esteem. So if you have someone who is resented and not valued, that's just a breeding ground for cheating, which is why she kept getting herself into that situation.
She needed to re-write her story to see herself as the prize to be won, and conduct herself in the relationship on the basis of "I rock, so you'd be an idiot to cheat on me, but if you do, your loss". That's taking the power back.
I read a great book that put forth the theory that a relationship can't survive long term unless each person in it *truly believes* that the other person is willing to walk away if things don't work for them. That is the great equalizer. If you think you can only push your partner so far and then they're out the door, you've got motivation to change yourself and/or seek compromise when things get bad.
If you think that when push comes to shove, your partner is going to fold and give in to whatever crap you're bringing to the table, deep down you're not really going to respect them. If you don't respect them, you can't really value them, and at that point you can't really value the relationship, so you may be "hanging in" and going through the motions of being married, but you're not really in.
Each person needs to be willing to say "hey, what's going on now isn't working for me. If it doesn't change, I'm done." They need to mean it, and the other person needs to believe it.
If you've got that, you've got a relationship that can evolve with the people in it, and can stand the test of time.
Acc
Married 18, Together 20, Now Divorced M: 48, W: 50, D: 18, S: 16, D: 12 Bomb Dropped (EA, D): 7/13/11 Start Reconcile: 8/15/11 Bomb Dropped (EA, D): 5/1/2014 (Divorced) In a New Relationship: 3/2015
