Hi, there. I’m almost exactly 6 months post-BD and maybe a year into what seems like my H’s MLC. Still living as roommates in the home we’ve rented for 7 years, though he’s gone 98% of the time living his “new life.” We were married 10 years in November, have known each other for 16. I started DBing a week and a half after the BD, and I’ve been visiting this board off and on since. It’s been a great source of support, but this is my first time posting. I expect divorce papers to arrive at the beginning of the year, and I’m having trouble lately not being sucked in to my H’s rewriting of our history so that it’s all negative. I’m having trouble maintaining my own sense of reality. I wasn’t sure whether to post this in the Newcomers section or MLC. This is so long; I apologize! It’s so hard to summarize and I know I’m leaving stuff out.
Upfront, one thing I’m wondering: does anyone here have experience with MLCers seeing counselors? Is that a potentially hopeful thing in the long run for their coming through the crisis?
Marriage/BD: This summer I’d been noticing anger and distance in my H even as we were talking about where we’d want to go for a 10th anniversary trip we’d decided to take, so I asked him what was up. His answer was a shock to me but followed the script many of you are familiar with—he’s been unhappy for a long time, cares about me but doesn’t love me, believes that I only want to make changes only now that he’s threatening divorce. He also said he doesn’t know who he is at home anymore. There was the script, but there were also issues, I knew, we needed to work on in our marriage, including intimacy and communication, and we were finally talking about them. He was open to trying marriage counseling at first but said he thought we had a 4% chance of making it. A couple days later, he kissed me and said he was trying. The first therapist I found with an opening wanted us to come in for an in-person consult—right before we walked in to the appointment, H told me he felt it was pointless and didn’t mean what he’d said when he kissed me and said he was trying. He said he was just in a good mood that night. I was crushed. Appt. was a terrible experience—therapist just let us repeat everything we’d already said to each other during/after BD. I think it confirmed for him counseling would be pointless. We had a couple of other phone consults with other Cs that week, one that came recommended from some married friends of his and also recommended by other marriage counselors. We both liked her, but he said his mind was made up, counseling wouldn’t help us. I suggested we both try individual C—I let him stick with that counselor since I doubted he’d follow through otherwise, and I found my own, and started working with a DB-style coach as well.
Read The Divorce Remedy and started DBing that next week. In C I’ve really focused on understanding his POV and taking responsibility for my contributions to the state of our marriage, including lack of sex (and my shame surrounding that) and defensiveness. The first thing my C said was: These things are totally workable and are things that so many couples struggle with—he just needs to be on board!
About H: A few things I think are essential to understanding H and our sitch now. As long as I’ve known him, he’s defined himself as a perpetually happy person—nothing can get him down. It’s a point of pride for him, and everyone around him knows this. I used to think this was such an amazing way to live, always positive, always choosing to be happy no matter what. I absolutely believed him. And then a few years ago his mom had a kind of breakdown where we were worried about her stability for a while, and it came out that she’d struggled with depression and anxiety her whole life and had never told him. He became even more afraid of upsetting her. I started to see that she’d always done what he’s done—put on a happy face, act like nothing is wrong. His role has always been to do anything to make her happy, even if it went against his own feelings. His mom and dad divorced when he was young, and his dad doesn’t have much of a role in his life. They maybe talk a couple of times a year on the phone, and we always spend Christmas with his mom and dad—they’ve remained friends, and everyone has always remarked on how strange it is that they get along. I now wonder if there’s more to the story there. Is he sad that he doesn’t have a relationship with his dad? “Naaah, my dad’s weird. What can you do?” That was his response to anything that might mess with his happy outlook—“Naah, what’re you gonna do? I choose to be happy.”
One other thing is that he’s always said he’s good at not thinking about things until he “has” to—he compartmentalizes like no one I’ve ever known, and he would tell anyone this as well. Example: When we were dating in college, I broke up with him, we stayed friends, and a few months later I told him I’d realized I still loved him. But he’d started dating someone else. When we got back together a year or so later, he wrote me a letter that said he’d been in so much pain when I broke up with him. He convinced himself I would never love him again, then stayed busy and ran away from thinking about us until he couldn’t do that anymore. Post-BD: More and more I’ve begun to understand how the BD was the culmination not only of a marriage crisis but a personal crisis for H: if you’ve always staked your identity on being a genuinely happy, carefree person, and suddenly you realize you do have feelings of sadness and anger and unhappiness like everyone else, how do you cope? Who are you?
MLC? The last 6 months have been a rollercoaster—some days he’s warm and treats me like a distant friend, some days he offers me food or candy, which we always used to share. Most days he’s cold and shut down and makes me feel like a stranger. He’s become a stranger in a lot of ways to me and our friends—he was always a guy who said he couldn’t wait to get old, looked down on people our age who partied, loved staying at home and cooking and baking, loved our cats like children, loved our chickens and spent months building a coop for them last summer. He’s accused the only mutual friend of ours he’s kept of interrogating him. When she asked him what he imagined his life would be like after divorce, he said he’s not thinking about it. He’s ignored texts from our good friends, a couple who we’ve known for ten years, and who have a toddler he adored. He’s found new friends and stays out until midnight or 3 am, drinking a lot of the time. For months I’ve taken over all the house stuff, all the pet stuff. He maybe cooks something for himself once a month. He spends money like we have it—I think since June he’s bought 8 pair of shoes, lots of new clothes, and pocketknives.
With the help of my db coach, I’d been working on an apology letter for months, a letter that focused on acknowledging his pain and taking responsibility for my failures in our marriage. I gave it to him at the end of October, not expecting it to change anything, but of course hoping it might.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, he left me a letter saying he was planning to file for divorce, that he couldn’t be the kind of happy he wanted to be with me, and that we could talk in person about it if I wanted. The next day I was home, but he’d conveniently been out drinking until the early morning hours and slept until noon, when I had to leave for work. We did talk that night, the first R talk since June, and what surprised me is that he sounded sad. He said on paper we’re perfect, but all his (new) friends say we aren’t fixable. He doesn’t know if he could fall in love with me again. I tried to validate and listen—I respect his view and desire for divorce, I said, even if I don’t agree with it. He said he thinks we should be able to come to an agreement ourselves, even though I brought up mediation. In his view, we’ve been communicating just fine since June, even though he’s barely spoken to me. He said he wished he’d been able to realize he was unhappy so much earlier, maybe then we could’ve done counseling.
I really felt my 180 at work that night; all these months I’d been giving him space, not pressuring him, focusing on myself in C while he distanced himself from me and everything in his “old” life. I was calm, vulnerable, not defensive. Going in to the conversation, I wanted to focus on radiating unconditional love and support and remaining nonjudgmental.
A couple of weeks ago, we were supposed to talk again (I had questions about the legal insurance he’d said he was signing up for), and he walked in with a completely different attitude, super angry, and started yelling right off the bat:
“I don’t have time for this! I’m busy with my NEW life and my NEW friends who appreciate me!” (He’d already told me he’d decided to dump another one of his old friends, because she also didn’t appreciate him.)
I stayed calm. I said, “If you want to try to work out an agreement ourselves, we probably will have to set aside a time to talk. Does another time/day work for you?” He kept yelling.
“I have stuff to do! I don’t have time for this! I’ve always done what you want! I’m not a selfish person, but I’ve spent my whole life putting other people first, and now I have to put me first!”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I said. “That’s not cool, to feel like you always have to do what other people want. Just text me whenever you think it’s a good time for you.”
I’m sure his C encouraged him to open up communication with me, but clearly he’s not ready. I wanted to say to him: “You’ve been living this new life with your awesome friends for almost six months now—I haven’t been stopping you or asking you anything about it. And now you’re starting the divorce process. So why do you think you’re still not happy?”
He stormed out and hasn’t brought talking up again. I did talk to him briefly when he happened to be here last weekend. I said I wanted to let him know I’d been thinking about what he said—that I’d seen him always put his mom first, and that I wished I’d realized that he’d been doing that with me too. I said I was sorry for that. I wanted to mirror some of the complaints he’s had. I said I wanted him to be happy, and feel understood, and feel appreciated, and desired.
He said “Thanks, but I don’t want that with you.” He repeated the thing about how he’s not sure if he could fall in love with me again.
I asked him why he doesn’t think he could try.
He said he’s hurt that I only made changes in myself once he threatened to leave, and he worries things would just go back to how they were. He said all this time he was pretending to be someone he wasn’t to please me, and I wouldn’t like the new him.
I can tell he’s still angry and blames me for not recognizing how unhappy he was; at the same time, he says he wishes *he* could’ve recognized how unhappy he was.
He’s been distant in the few minutes each day I do see him. He’s asked me a couple of polite questions, but mostly keeps his headphones on when he is here.
Knowing his personality, knowing how he kept himself busy and shut down thinking about our relationship when we dated, I’ve always told myself he’d have to follow through with the D before he could ever start to face what it actually means for his life. Or before he’d ever be able to see that I’m not the source of all his unhappiness. As he says, if he doesn’t want to think about things, he doesn’t. With these new friends, the partying, the drinking, I can’t help but feel he’s been running away from feeling anything that’s more complex than D = freedom, happiness. Some days I want to ask him to leave and start his new life. Some days I miss him. Some days I let him get to me, as much as I try to detach.
