Those of you who have been strong enough to stand for years amaze me! Perhaps I will gain that type of strength over time but, right now, just 1 month post-BD, I just want to run away and never see this "alien" again. Unfortunately, we have 2 children so I will have to deal with him, whether he snaps back into reality or not, for the rest of my life perhaps. OMG!!!!!!!!!!!
Well my handle may make it sound like I'm still standing but I moved on long ago. I leave my handle the same so people know it's still me (it always confuses the heck out of me when people change their handles).
Job really nailed it, you don't know if your spouse is going to return to their old self, or partially their old self, or remain an alien. It's up to each of us how long we stand. For me it was about 2 years, and then I pushed my XW for D (she had drawn up the paperwork months earlier but never filed). I started dating others and settled into a LTR with my current GF, 5 years now.
I used to have thoughts similar to NewLife's- that it would be easier to handle your spouse's death than being BD'd by them. Not that I would wish death on my XW, not at all. But at least with death you know the person is gone for good. You grieve and recover and learn to live with the loss. After BD you don't know what to do. Is the person going to return to normal? Should you wait? Are they gone forever and you should move on? It's very confusing and frustrating, and very painful to go through.
Originally Posted by NewLife3
if someone can treat me this terribly and walk completely out of my life like it means nothing to them, then 1) they're much more likely to do it in the future and 2) I don't deserve to have someone treat me like this... There are so many other great people in the world that would never treat us this way.
This is quite true, but there's also that nagging thought that this may be temporary and that maybe they are going through something akin to being sick and therefore we might feel it's incumbent upon us to wait it out for their sake. I think almost every one of us would agree that our old spouse, the one we married, would NEVER BD us and leave us like this. This act is so out of character for the person we thought we knew. My "real" W would never have left me, she would have fought tooth and nail to make things work. The person she became just simply gave up, kept saying "I don't want to try". So that's a struggle for the LBS to be sure.
When I said my XW has slowly returned to 50% of my old W, she has slowly regained some of her sense of humor and some of her old interests and (apparently) some of her fondness for me. But before, she had a razor-sharp memory and could remember everything about our M in stunning detail. After BD she became very fuzzy and remembered only the bad things as so many WAS's do. Now she seems to remember almost nothing, good or bad. My kids will bring up old events she used to talk about over and over to friends and family and she remembers nothing at all about them, it's really strange. We've settled into a "kinder, gentler" relationship than we had in the months after BD. Not that she was ever mean and angry, but she was very cold and distant and isn't anymore. We do things together with the kids now and then and then we go our separate ways and that works fine for us.
