Well, I had a feeling he was up to something. He just told me he's filing and he's seeing someone and he's happy. Here is our convo, maybe a bit out of order, just now:
He says he is filing soon and will let me know before I am served. I am calm. I say, okay.
I ask about mediation, and he says we should be able to come to an agreement on our own, because we have no children and we don't own our house. He says it should be straightforward.
I say, it is 50-50.
He agrees. He says we will have time to work all of this out together once he files.
I bring up the house, who is going to live here, as an issue.
He says he hadn't planned on moving, he wanted to stay, but now he guesses he will have to move.
I say yes, I'm planning on staying here.
He says, You can’t afford it.
I said, I can with support.
He says that doesn’t last forever.
I say I’m hoping to have a job in the next year.
I ask if he has a timeline in mind for moving out. He says no. We have time.
I say I'll need financial information, including all the bills he pays that I don't have access to, so that I can start to make a budget. He says he'll get me all of that.
He says he’s sorry it happened the way it did. He knew he couldn’t be happy. He says he's in a relationship now and he's happy.
I WANT TO SCREAM HERE AND SAY SOMETHING ABOUT HOW HE COULD HAVE GOTTEN D BEFORE A NEW R, but I don't. Should I have said anything here?
I do think I said something like, well, I married you, I do want you to be happy. (Trying to focus on letting him go even though I want to be angry.)
He says he was going to file before, but then Covid happened. He doesn't understand why I won't ever talk to him about anything. He says the problem with our whole relationship is that I wouldn’t communicate. (Pretty sure he said "I wouldn't" here and not we.)
I WANT TO YELL AGAIN. Because all I've been working on with my IC is how to improve communication. Multiple times in the fall before I went more NC, I was writing him notes, having little convos to just let him know I was here to talk, etc. To try to just let him know I was open to communicate. But for the first six months after BD, he was drinking all the time and partying/gone all the time.
I don't say any of this.Plus, I don't see how it's on me to communicate about D, to keep asking how that's going, when is he going to file, etc. Doesn't understand why I haven’t been talking to him. Why I wouldn’t ask him for help/things. It's like I'm scared to talk to him.
I said, I might have been a bit scared away when I tried to talk to you after Thanksgiving (because he blew up! when I tried to continue a convo about how we would move forward and work on this agreement he said we were coming to ourselves. He spewed, said he didn't have time to talk, and I said, well, let me know when you want to talk, and he left. END OF STORY.
He said he doesn’t remember it that way. He remembers I wanted to talk about working on our R (nope!). But then he says, "But I don't remember a lot of the last year because it's been stupid."
I said, he's been living his life and I’ve been giving him space. I’ve been living my life, too. I'd felt like it was up to him to move things forward with D/talking about agreement.
He says again, he is here to talk any time I want to talk.
--
This is like the calm convo he had about moving forward with D before Thanksgiving. He was apologetic and said we could talk whenever, just let him know. Every time I wanted to talk about agreement, he said he didn't have time. We scheduled the post-Thanksgiving time, and he ranted and left to go out with friends. Now he seems to be blaming me for not communicating.
I need some reassurance, if possible. I always second-guess everything I do/don't do with him. I have been feeling okay about basically leaving him alone, and now he is saying again that we can't communicate and that's why our M failed.
How do I act around him going forward? He's going to say I'm not communicating no matter what, I guess.
Plus, I am so, so angry that he's never showed any emotion about our 17 year R ending. And now he's "happy" with a new person. Like I said, I'm not entirely surprised, but it still hurts like h*ll.
Should I have said anything about how disappointed I am in him? I wanted to push back so much on how he's been AWOL for a lot of the past year and could have easily talked to me about D any time he wanted to, but I didn't. I feel like I'm keeping in so much emotion, because it would come out the way I don't want it to. It would be me arguing his version of the past year or the M and trying to get him to accept blame, and that seems pointless.
I can't ask him to leave ASAP, because we need an agreement first and I need to be receiving support. I'm planning to get the financial info from him, refine my budget to reflect it, have another L consult so I know going into talking with him exactly what I'm entitled to--like I want to have it written down.
