Despite that, as of now, I'm standing for my marriage. I believe in my vows and in my H's potential.
And as for this: be careful about believing in someone's "potential". He either has a serious mental illness (bipolar), a serious personality disorder (narcissism) or he's just showing you that he is not someone who can be trusted when the chips are down.
Who was it that said "when someone shows you who they are, believe them"?
You need to set the bar very high for him to come back: serious therapy, psychiatric evaluation, monogamous dating for a year without him moving back in and with complete transparency on phone/FB/etc. Anything less and you are setting yourself up for a repeat of this down the road. (Take it from the voice of experience.)
I bet, that if you look back carefully over your life together without the rose colored glasses on, you'll realize that he was never quite the man you thought he was. Did you go along with doing only the activities HE wanted to do, and seeing the friends HE wanted to see? Was he obsessed with your appearance and how you made him look? Was he over-the-top into you in the beginning, sweeping you off your feet, only to turn? Or was he always avoidant, difficult to win, never quite 100% in the relationship? Were you always giving more than he was to the relationship? Were you spending a lot of your energy to keep him "happy"?
Marriage and raising children is hard. You're in a very tough position because you already have a child with him. But you still need to look down the road and think about whether keeping him in your life is going to be the best thing for your child. Will he be the partner you need when your teenager does drugs, or your 12 year old gets a life-threatening illness? Sometimes a good step-father can be better than a really damaged father.
(My sister was married and had a daughter with her first husband, who turned out to be a sociopath. Very good at putting on a charming face while doing and saying completely different things behind her back. He left after having an affair while my sister was providing hospice care to his dying mother - a woman who had never been nice to my sister btw but my sister is a saint. He had 2 more children with the OW then left her for another woman - I think he's on number 4 or 5 by now. He really couldn't be bothered being a proper father to my niece, but my sister remarried a solid guy who was a good step-father - he went to all my niece's basketball games, band performances, fixed her cars. He just sadly died after 22 years married to my sister, and my niece considers him her father. She calls her biological father her "sperm donor". )
Oh - and in regard to dating - it's not really fair to date someone when you're still hoping your H will come back. But it's fine to let H THINK you are dating as sometimes it does indeed wake them from their fantasy.
Now - what big dreams for YOUR future can you start working on? What things did you give up or put on the back burner because of H? What have you always wanted to do but were never brave enough to try?
