Just about done

[Catman19]

Thank you DnJ, such an eloquent post and hit straight at the heart. I am sorry for what you went through, none of us deserve to be in this place but yet here we are trying to play the card game of life with the cards we are dealt.

The mixed up hurt crisis person equates sex with happiness. Realize they have no joy in their now tormented life, and they are desperate to find it. And desperate people do desperate things.

Yeah it was one one night stand followed by a long term physical affair with a man who was clearly using her for her body, and then an EA that became a PA as well and a full relationship while bouncing back and forth with me. It feels like a rebellious teenager acting out and trying to have one last hurrah and reliving lost youth, filling a self esteem deficit with superficial attention.

Affairs are staggeringly common. The affair partner means nothing. They are a band-aid, a symptom of a deep problem within. The AP is being used, and is using the spouse. Two broken people trying to find something.

Initially I thought what does he see in this guy but then realized it could be anyone, anyone who would tell her whatever she wanted to hear to fill her need for validating words and encouraging whatever it is she was saying or feeling, I realized I could never compete with this, no matter how hard I tried I had to be absolutely perfect and he was completely flawless in her eyes, despite multiple clear flaws that were visible even to me. It's as almost like she had to convince herself he was the perfect man and creating a false image of him or what she wanted him to be to feed her need

My XW days after BD was so happy and assured of her choice. A few days after BD, in a so very smug and absolutely confident manner, she told me that for months before BD she cried all the time I was at work and the kids were at school. She said she didn’t know what was going on. That she thought she was going crazy.

So many similarities, the same time period leading up to BD, endless fights literally about nothing, aggressive behaviour, then next day acted as if nothing happened, meanwhile I was completely broken down by the abuse, I even questioned her once if she had BPD, I even sometimes think she has some sort of NPD, maybe not fully but somewhere high on the spectrum. The more she asked of me to do for her the more I did and the more she wasn't satisfied, it was endless shifting of goalposts and brought me extreme exhaustion and demoralized me to no end. Later after BD she even repeated multiple times to me "I don't know what's wrong with me" . But she never tried to deal with outside of IC, and tbh the IC was our MC and she was terrible, almost like an enabler and master rugsweeper, focused on building our relationship without addressing the damage or the elephant in the room.

W needs to feel the loss of you and the relationship. To come to the point where she realizes that “hmmm, Catman hasn’t been bothering me for quite a while and I’m still unhappy”. Then with some good fortune W might realize that “maybe Catman is not the cause of my unhappiness”. And with even more good fortune, W might look inward and start to do her much needed inner work. Or she’ll move on to OM4,5,6.

I sense this might not end well for her but I can see her blowing all her money and continuously looking got answers in OM instead of looking inward. W will definitely feel my loss as I'm making a permanent move overseas and I will be gone like a ghost, not even a shadow will be left behind, I've held on for too long at the expense of my mental health and prolonging of decisiveness of my future