She's Gone Again - 10 Years On

[SteveLW]

smilie, I saw your question to Mr. B (great work here by the way!) about getting over it. I think one of the realizations a lot of LBSs come to at some point is that the MR they are trying to save wasn't all that great. We have a tendency when we get BD'd to romanticize the MR. "It was the best MR ever!" "He/she were the best spouse ever!" Etc.

At some point reality sets in and you realize that reconciliation or not, you do NOT want to go back to the MR as it was prior to BD. I know this was the case in my sitch. Immediately after BD I was thinking about how was I going to let go fo a MR that I enjoyed? After a few weeks I remembered that I spent a lot of time thinking that I couldn't wait until my daughter turned 18 so that I would have the freedom to decide whether I wanted to stay in a MR that was pretty stagnant. Now a lot of the stagnancy was my fault. I had fallen into some pretty awful patterns that were contributing to the state of the MR. But the overall point was that in the days/weeks after BD I had in my head that my MR was the greatest ever and that I had to save it all costs.

We have a saying around here: You should be working towards MR 2.0, whether that is with your WAS or someone new. You want to improve to the point where your next MR will be successful! As someone above stated, there is always plenty of blame to go around in these sitches, your goal should be to become a man only a fool would leave.