Milestones of Moving On (?)

[burned]

Wow THANK YOU burned for responding in such detail to my post!

You're welcome. In all honesty, it's more for me than for you but I'm glad it's helpful.

Wish he had friends like you who would say that to him.

Unfortunately the people who don't tolerate people who do those things are also the people who tend not to befriend people who do those things, or who de-friend them. Hence,

people doing these kinds of things surround themselves by people who reinforce their thinking and behavior

That. They'll drop anyone who doesn't support them. Wouldn't you?

I asked how it went when we came home and he said that he's doing well and deciding to focus on his family now.

The lying had already commenced.

I mean my my H left me for someone younger, and she isn't ugly, and she does have many of the same traits as me... so it's VERY hard not to compare. In fact, based on the things I saw in the past on her pin boards, it's almost like H left me for a younger and I'll say, of course, dumber version of me.

Don't compare yourself to OW. It's a losing battle. He doesn't know you're doing it, so you're only hurting yourself. And I hope you'll run into people in real life who think that "dumber" is a dealbreaker. Your intelligence, or at least your ability to fake it (thereby indicating that you really have it, paradox!), is an asset that you should lean on.

And then all those times you are with your spouse and you think, "I'm so glad he/she puts up with X thing I do, because I KNOW it's annoying/not perfect/whatever"? Alllll of those things are just bubbling up and freaking me out.

Oh that one, I know it well. I have a long list of things that I'm certain people will immediately dump me for. But you know what? W snored and that was super annoying. Did that make me not love her? No. So, remember that if/when you fall in love with someone else or re-fall in love with H, then YOU will be the one suffering from what some people call a mental disorder that causes you to do irrational things, like tolerate snoring. It's called limerence. We hate it when it's with OP but it also can work in our favor at some point.

the thing that IS valuable about me (that you pointed out earlier) is that I have a lot of fight in me.

Yeah and not to sound like the creepy stalker next door but I think a lot of guys are into that. Women who know their worth. Plucky? I dunno. Around here there's TONS of talk about how women like men who know their worth. I say it works both ways.

I read an article about that this morning too, in terms of loyalty being one of the main reasons people who leave their spouses regret it.

Very curious to hear more about this. If I were to use a popular search engine to find it, what would I type? Or can you summarize?

H may be on his best behavior with her right now, but surely he will fall back into some of his lazy habits and she'll start to notice those too. Unless of course H makes the changes individually to improve while he's with her because he knows he needs to do that and doesn't want to lose her whereas with me he just didn't care *shrug*.

NO. I agree that it's hard to "work on yourself" in a relationship but if H didn't want to make changes to himself while he was with someone like you, what makes you think he'd do it with anyone else? Here's the reality: she's not special. You are special, but that's irrelevant. It's about HIM. The hope is that at some point he will stop and think, yikes, I don't like this one either, but TJT was kind of neat. Wonder if she's still single. Then you get to decide if you want to try again with a guy with that kind of track record.

how do you differentiate between someone making a mistake and someone REALLY being that as a person?

Mistake: "Sorry I shat on your rug, I won't do it again and here's 20 bucks. We cool? Let's get a beer." Being that as a person: "What, that? Oh that's your sh#t. Yeah I mean I stepped in it but you're the one who put it there. Anyway, whatever, I gotta run, there's some other sh#t I need to step in. Burn the rug, I'll send you a bill. Have a nice life!"