Wow, it's been quite some time since I've posted. I had to stop coming to the site because as I progressed through my healing, at some point I realized that I was still a bit obsessive with reading all the MLC stories and it was keeping me a bit in limbo. That of course was a product of my own mental wellbeing, nothing to do with the site itself. You guys are amazing support and I am glad you are here. This site is a godsend!
So much has happened in the last few years. I think that I might have made some decisions which slowed my healing down a bit, but I think I am back on track now, and that is why I am here. After doing a bit of rug sweeping for a little while I have started to revisit my healing. Uncovering all the stuff under the rug has of course stirred up my emotions towards my situation, as well as the new things that have happened. So, I am going to journal a bit. I need to try and do that more because I just reread some of my last posts and in them are things that I completely forgot had happened. I'm glad for the reminder.
For a quick recap:
W and I started dating in high school. After 6 years of dating she got pregnant and we got married in the same year. A year after our S was born she got pregnant again and we had our daughter. Fast forward many years, we had a happy family and were very close. We did family vacations, both had good jobs, went on dates as often as possible, and our families blended well. Lots of love to go around. Then in the fall of 2016, she started becoming a little distant. She started working out, worrying about her appearance more, and starting to go out with coworkers after work for happy hour. Then in January of 2017, BD. She had an EA with a coworker. I did the whole begging and trying to fix things for a few months before I found this site. For about a year and a half I pretzeled myself trying to work things out between us. I tried really hard to use all the DB stuff and GAL. Its not easy, but I love my family and would do anything to keep it together. Lots of minor details of things along the way that I won't list out here again. Then, in June of 2018, W moved out to her own place. So, for the past 5 years we have been living separately only really communicating regarding the kids scheduling. We pretty much do parallel parenting. I tried to co-parent for a while, but that only really works when both parties are trying, so after some time we settled into that parallel parenting and that's how its been. She has never initiated D, and neither have I. I probably should have, but I never wanted a hand in finalizing our marriage. I wanted that to be all her if that's what she wanted. But, there have been a few things to note over the years though that have affected much in my life. Here's where my journaling actually starts...
After W moved out 5 years ago, I slowly started to move away from the anxiety and depression that BD and having a live-in wallower MLC caused in me. Once it began to lift, I felt remarkably better. I thought that I was beginning to come back to myself. And, I started to feel a little lonely. I think the stark difference in feeling overwhelming depression and anxiety (this was my first experience with that so I had no frame of reference) and the way I started to feel once it began to lift made me think I was better...but I wasn't. Anxiety going away is not the same thing as being mentally healthy. I know that now. But then, I decided to try and start dating a little due to the loneliness. After a little time on dating apps, I actually went on a few dates. I met a girl that I really liked. We had a LOT in common. We continued to date. As this was happening, things with W were the same. No D, barely talking, living separate lives. The woman I started dating is quite a bit different than W. Being in a relationship with her taught me a lot. The way she interacts, the way she loves, a great cook, really smart, sweet, and on an on. I realized that maybe my relationship with W wasn't as happy as I had remembered. Or, not that it wasn't happy, it was...but I guess I was just taking off the rose tinted glasses and seeing it for what it truly was. And I was then realizing that it might actually be possible to be happier with someone else. Someone who loved more like I did. Around this time I also began to realize that I had started dating too soon. That I had lots of baggage to work through and that I needed to get myself healed properly before I could really be what I needed to be for someone else. I explained this to my girlfriend. She understood and seemingly wanted to work through things with me as we had already grown close. So, we continued dating and our lives began to become more integrated. She met my kids, my family, and my friends. Everyone loves her and she is an amazing person. But, I also started realizing that she had quite a bit of baggage as well. She was severely abused as a child. She has no real family or support system. She was married for 18 years, but left her marriage due to it not being healthy. The life she described with her H sounded almost like living with a MLCer. Sleeping in separate rooms, doing a lot of stuff on their own, etc. But it wasn't MLC, they just had kind of a loveless marriage. She sees a therapist and is on AD medication. I began to figure out she had attachment issues. Our relationship began to become very much codependent. I was her one and only support system outside of her therapist. We loved each other, but I was also struggling with the W/kid situation and healing from that, which made me hesitant about moving forward in our relationship. That gave her anxiety because she saw that as me not choosing her and she needed to know that our relationship was heading towards marriage. During this time, my son was graduation high school and starting college, and my daughter is moving into her senior year, also looking at colleges. It is a very busy time and my bandwidth for everything has been stretched. This was not a good situation for my girlfriend. She needed more of my time and wanted to be more integrated into my life. She wanted us to move in together and start discussing marriage. I wanted to get my kids off to college without much more interruption to their home life while I also worked on getting things finalized with W...and maintain my relationship with girlfriend of course. But for me, having a girlfriend was enough for now, I wasn't quite ready for more than that. But, it became too much. At some point the stress of not knowing if we were going to be married got to her and she broke up with me. I believe that she was maybe bluffing and wanting me to fight back and try and save things and move them forward between us, but I couldn't do that because I knew that she wasn't happy and wouldn't be until I wanted to get married. But that isn't what I want right now. I do love her and care about her, but with everything that has been going on with my life, I realized that I didn't have the bandwidth for everything, so I swept my healing under the rug and tried to forget it. So after we broke up, I decided to take the time to get back to my healing. My girlfriend has been having a really bad time with things. We have been apart for going on 6 months now, but she is still depressed over our split. I am saddened by it too, but I realize that her depression was feeding my own and as much as I miss her, I need to worry about getting myself back on track before I can be anything to anyone in a healthy way. I am making progress in that regard and am healthier in mind and spirit than I have been in a long time, and am still getting better.
During all of this, I do still love W. It is such a messy thing. I'm not sure why I still do. She doesn't really deserve my love anymore. And I don't like the person she is now. I guess I still love the old W, but she doesn't really exist anymore. Part of me thinks that I need to be done with those feelings before I can move on, but another part of me wonders if I will just always feel that way a little and that I need to learn to move on without that being something that goes away. It has certainly been a stumbling block for moving forward with someone else, but that could be something that gets easier with time. It's hard to say at this point, but I bring it up to explain why the next part is still hard for me. Sometime while I was dating my girlfriend, W started dating a new guy. He is a little older than us, and he has some money I think. I really don't know much about him because I stopped any kind of snooping long ago. But we still have shared children so I see and hear things whether I want to or not. He seems like a weird choice, but...she has been in MLC, so I guess nothing is too weird. I have assumed it would just play itself out and she would tire of him after some time. Seems like a weird thought for someone trying to move on and dating someone themselves, but...like I said...I realize now that I started dating too soon. Anyways, she has been dating him for a few years now. I recently learned that he had moved to our side of town. In an email back and forth about my daughters college searching, W tells me that her and her OM are now engaged. He proposed and she said yes. I was a bit surprised to say the least. And, I also realized in that moment that despite being pretty detached, and despite trying to distance myself from the situation, that I had been standing all this time. I had been waiting for her to come back. I think in the back of my mind I knew this already, but it is something that I had been trying to swallow down and let time take care of. Her telling me that she was engaged (in the middle of a college email thread about my daughter) sparked a few back and forth emails. I would like to share a bit of that exchange as it left me...well, a little speechless at first. Here it goes:
W: "I have one other thing I wanted to bring up. OM and I got engaged the weekend before D and I left. I wanted to make sure you heard it from me. It was a bit of a surprise but I'm happy, and he treats me and the kids well. To be honest I still feel a sadness and regret that I couldn't make our marriage work and I know that is on me, and I will, I think, forever feel sorry to you for that, because I couldn't have asked for a better partner to raise out kids with. I mean...they are both pretty amazing, we did a good job. I have no doubt you will find someone, if you haven't already, who is openly loving, kind and you connect with, because you definitely deserve that. You've always been a catch.
I've already talked to the kids. OM has a house just north of downtown and we'll be moving in at the end of the summer, there is a room for both kids."
Me: "It's hard for me to know how to reply to this. Thank you for letting me know.
It seems like after all this time that it shouldn't matter to me anymore, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't still sting. I am not sure I'll ever understand what happened and why you decided to leave, but I guess at some point it doesn't really matter. We are where we are. I want to apologize to you. When you left, you told me that it was over between us and that I needed to move on with my life. I admit that I did not do that. I've loved you for what feels like my whole life, and I was not able to accept that it was over. Outwardly I tried really hard to move on, but there is a small piece of me that always thought that you would come back after some time. Even after you told me that, even after you stopped talking to me about anything other than the scheduling with the kids. I am sorry I did not accept it. I am not sure I could have done anything else at the time, but I think if I could have that it would have made things easier on both of us. But, regardless of any other feelings, I do want you to be happy. When you care about someone, how can you want anything else for them? I'm not sure I will ever understand how OM was the thing in your life that was missing that brings you happiness, but when you left you were not happy at all. If you are now, then that's all that really matters I guess. I hope that you can continue being happy with him, we all deserve happiness.
Having said that, I am and will be ok. I too will probably always be a little sad that you didn't want to make it work between us, but that feeling will not dictate the direction I take in life. It will just be a small sad reminder at the happiness I once had with you, whether shared or not.
Thank you for the good years that we had together. I will always cherish them."
W: "Me too, for sure! I love you, your family and the family we built together, always will.
I hope you know you definitely weren't the cause of my unhappiness, trust me, you were enough. I just wasn't enough for myself, I needed to find that and I did a few years back, before meeting OM and it felt like coming out of a dark fog. I'm just sorry I left such a path of destruction that I wasn't able to forgive myself for, in order to rebuild with you. Depression, now that I understand it a little better, is a dark passenger like that for me. If I had any sense about what it was or maybe listened to those who said I should get help, I could have kicked it out before I let it drive my life.
I really do appreciate how you stepped up for the kids when I seemed to have stepped out and also how we've been able to continue to co-parent together, and even this email reminds me of just how supportive and understanding you have been as a partner and a parent, so thank you for that."
This really left me a bit dumbstruck. It sounds as though she came through her MLC tunnel a few years ago. Or, that is what I thought after reading her reply. But, then I started to feel like something just still wasn't right, even though she said some of the magic words. (came out of a dark fog, admitted depression, sorry for what she did, wasn't my fault, etc). But, if she came out of it years ago and was sad how she treated me and couldn't forgive herself, why not say something then? Why not apologize then? And in telling me now, why sandwich that in an email about college for our daughter? And she is now happy with that guy enough to marry him despite never making any peace about what happened between us? And on top of that, we are still not divorced. I think she is not fully baked but has had a bit of awareness. I think she is about to make decisions that she will regret in a few years, despite how things play out between her and I.
So, that's it. I am single again but have an ex girlfriend that still loves me (and I her, although I am not in a place to be dating I realize), a S in year 2 of college, a daughter in her final year of high school already committing to a college in Massachusetts, and a W that is showing some MLC awareness while about to get married before even trying to divorce. The whole thing has me scratching my head in confusion. And, that would mean that our kids would be living with a man I don't know in a house I have never seen. I know that's what happens in these situations, but it still stings. My kids are older now and my S actually lives in Chicago now while going to school, so I am not actually worried about them, but it stings anyways.
Sorry for such a long post. I just really needed to get a few things off my chest. If you have read this far, thank you for reading along.
Last edited by DnJ; 08/27/2307:50 PM. Reason: Removed OM’s name.
