D and Gerda, thank you for taking the time to share your wisdom, experience and support. HE WILL NOT SEE YOU. HE CANNOT SEE YOU. The façade. I am reminding myself of all of this.
Originally Posted by DnJ
What you are not seeing is your attempts to reconcile these two at odds views. They come from the same person/body, not the same inside. Two different people from different times. The H of your marriage has been dragged down and troubled H is dominate, for the moment. I’m sure you see flashes and times of old H peaking through, right?
I thought there had been glimpses of old H, but this week he confirmed to me again that he is gone. I am in another cycle of grieving that death. I have that feeling again like I did at the beginning of this two years ago, like I have woken up from a nightmare but then it turns out it's not a nightmare--this person I knew for 17 years has stopped telling me how happy he is to be with me and is suddenly telling me he’s never been happy.
The last six months have been peaceful between H and me--no more barely contained anger radiating from him. We joke, I have complicated feelings about it that I don’t share with him, and that's been the extent of it. Then last night H asked if we could talk about next steps. The last time we'd talked about D, six months ago, was when he raged and then acknowledged he shouldn't have filed for an annulment and was just angry, etc. Well, this time he stayed mostly calm. He started by apologizing for his anger again and for the annulment filing and said he will change it to a D. He said he knows I'd wanted to do mediation and we have L (though he hasn't checked in with his since last year), but maybe we could try now that he's in a better place to talk through an agreement ourselves. I said maybe we could outline issues and then go from there if we need outside help. I was curious if his stance (basically that I deserve nothing) had changed. I let him know I still felt strongly about the portion of his pension I am entitled to, and he said that is the one thing he feels strongly about too, because he worked for it, it should be his
. He said he wishes it wasn't this way, but he'll always hold it against me if I don't let him have what he earned. We can go to mediation, and I'll get it all and he'll get nothing because that's how it works. (He seemed to recognize the court would follow suit with the pension too--his only hope is if I give it up.)
And this led to us basically hitting all the same old points. I'm cold if I just say the law entitles me to it, period, and that’s just how D goes. Why can’t I understand how he feels? If I say instead we had a partnership, that's what a M is, and everything we both earned was shared, then it's that we didn't have a true partnership, he supported me but I didn't support him in the same way.
One minute he says he supported my writing because he wanted to make me happy; another minute he says it was a sacrifice for him and it didn’t go anywhere (I guess meaning I never sold a book and made him money?). He felt like he was solely responsible for "supporting our lifestyle," and I would never get a job (though I did teach part-time as a lecturer and often brought up whether I should try to find a FT job in another field, but he always said no, keep writing!). Because of that (i.e. me) we took on debt. I pointed out he never discussed these feelings or our financial situation with me, that I couldn't have known about debt or savings because I didn't have access to it, that whenever I brought up finances, he assured me we were fine.
This is how it went--brief acknowledgement of something he should have communicated but didn't, then turning around and blaming me again. Old gems: Communication shouldn't be this hard, you shouldn't have to communicate your needs to your partner, they should just know because they understand you so well (and I never understood him); I should have known he was unhappy, should have sensed it. I said I did at times think you were upset or angry, but when I tried to talk about it, you insisted you fine or you would tell me, and if I pressed, you were often angrier and shut down any conversation. His response: you should have pushed harder. Or you should have just known even though I didn’t want to talk about it. These all relate to reasons he should keep all of his retirement.
He wasn't as full of contempt this time. He didn’t yell. I was more emotional, as it was upsetting (even though I should know by now) to hear again how I should have known XYZ and that is why I don’t deserve this and wow, his life is so much better now. He was still condescending: he said clearly I still have some processing to do (because I couldn’t stop myself from expressing that emotion), while he's already processed everything, he's really worked on himself (by the way he's vaping pot *and* ecigs now), and he's grown, and he’s always processed his emotions faster than me, etc.
Um, I said, didn’t you tell me part of the issue that you *didn't* process your emotions and then they all caught up with you at once? I'm not like that anymore, he said. Now I let my emotions out. He's happy now, he feels free! He checked out of the convo and started looking at his phone. He said he was disappointed our talk hadn’t gone as he’d thought it would. I’m thinking after my kindness with the tax situation, he expected me to similarly "help" him here by not accepting my portion of the retirement.
We ended with his agreeing to share his pension info with me so we’re on the same page, since I already shared all of my info with him when I filed my response.
Finally I broke down later in the night. I was vulnerable, I cried. I said that I remember the nicknames we used to call each other, ever since we started dating. That’s who we were. We only used those names for each other. And when I think of those two people, and how that guy was my best friend, it’s excruciating to hear that he thinks I’m someone who would try to punish him, or go after his money, that he would believe that of me. I said it’s hard for me to shift from friendly roommate banter to talking about D stuff, and I don’t ever feel like I’m doing it right. I
It was after that, remembering and acknowledging how we'd kept that ritual of the names through our 17 year R, that I also remembered the way that guy looked at me when he saw me on our wedding day for the first time (after seven years of dating), and it just broke me that, when I was talking to that guy for the very last time, I didn't know it was the last time. I didn't know what was coming, how he would change. I sobbed for an hour, didn’t sleep at all.
My mind keeps replaying everything and, yes, I feel like I did everything wrong. I don't know why this time made me feel like BD all over again. It was just a reminder that old H isn’t there and he may not even be buried somewhere inside new H; he may really have killed that part of himself like he said. It’s reminded me how unsettled I used to feel all the time when he would rage, how weird it is to live in a house with someone you don’t feel like you know anymore, someone who doesn’t know you anymore, doesn’t recognize you for who you’ve always been.
A long and not... great update. Before all this happened, my update was going to be that at a visit to our dentist, she surprised me by asking if H and I were still together. We've gone there for many years. I said we still live together but he's wanted a divorce for two years. She said, not jokingly, "Is he having a midlife crisis?" No one has ever flat out asked me that. She recommended a book on boundaries. Makes me wonder if she's had some experience with MLC in her life.
