Hey WF, this is so my H too. I'm coming to learn that a number of things he introduced to me-- bands, an NPR show, apps-- are things he got from AP. It all feels dirty to me right now but also I really enjoy some of these things. (I just want to mentally Lysol it all.) I would take it for what it is and yes, mentally check out. I know this is NOT validating but I kind of perfected (during the worst of him telling me how much in love they were) eye contact, nodding, looking like I'm listening, and actually just repeating WTF inside my head, or focusing on telling myself to check out, calm down, reacting right now won't help anything, trying to slow down my breath consciously until I was calm again.
The funny thing is she didn't introduce him to things which literally just makes me laugh. He went and did all these things with her that I said I wanted to do, or go eat, or go see. So when he tells me this sh*t I just roll my eyes and either say I know because I went there when I was GALing and not telling him a thing about where I was going or what I was doing, or I'd say "that's good to know; I'll keep it in mind." I honestly relish in the fact of them going to these places and doing these things thinking "yeah you had a great time on my planned dates. Hope you enjoyed me all over your entire relationship."
Weirdly the love stuff doesn't really bother me much either. I knew how hard and how fast he fell for her. It was written all over him. I've know him a long time. It's fairly easy for me to truly validate when he talks about this stuff. As bat crap crazy as it sounds I do genuinely feel bad about how bad his heart was broken. Like part of me is laughing hysterically, but for the most part I am sorry he was so swept up and crushed so quickly. What's hard there is he says things that she said or did, and all I can think is "OMG how dumb are you?? 2 days after she broke up with her bf she was already regretting it you moron. CAN YOU NOT READ PEOPLE AT ALL???" All these things are coming to him in pieces since we had that big talk about it. And he likes to share them with him since I was the genius who had to say to him, "are you really sure this was completely out of the blue?" I just nod and say "oh man, sorry about that."
The mentally checking out thing which is not validating, and kinda on the edge of DBing is what I need to be doing when he's swinging wildly from us/our/home to separate households/him/moving out. That's something I could've really used Wednesday. I'm going to have to remember to just breathe through it.
Originally Posted by may22
I think you are handling all of this with an enormous amount of grace and class. You should hold your head up high. You're amazing.
I do really appreciate this, but if H and I had a reality show, I would look a lot less full of grace during this mess. There's be so much ugly crying, and crying myself to sleep. And rage. I can't even begin to explain how opposite of grace we were last night. On the way home from bday dinner for D16 a song called What You Did by Mahalia came on the radio. It's about a cheating lover and how she wishes she could forgive him but she'd never expect any one to forgive her for that behavior so he just needs to go. 2 seconds in H says he loves the song and turns it up. 20 seconds in he realizes how on the nose the lyrics are, and turns it down and starts cracking jokes about how he doesn't really like the song, the vocals are nice but the lyrics are crap, I turn it up and say I love it the lyrics are amazing. We go back and forth like that a while laughing our butts off with the girls int he back ear buds in completely ignoring us as teenagers do. I, we, what ever are a hot mess. And about as classless as people can get at this point.
