Interestingly of late she has said to me, “I didn’t realize I was leaving when I moved out. I though I was going for a week,” and “I have been defending you to my friends, saying you are a good man.”
Not sure why you give any thought to these details. She’s still living rent free in your head. If my ex wife said those things, I’d say “oh well, bad luck for you” and wouldn’t give them a second thought. What she thinks of you or says to others about you seems to still affect you.
We established several years ago this woman is an idiot, not sure why her opinions matter? Should be a business transaction at this point.
Also agree with DNJ challenging you over your interaction with OM, and disagree with the comments that you’re allowed to react at him the way you did because have emotions and detest him.
I agree you can hate him. And you can have emotions. But telling him what he can and can’t do or confronting him in public is not good DBing. You can hate someone and completely ignore their existence. I see OM #4 from time to time and couldn’t give a sh*t. Just ignore and get on with my life. If he sat next to me at a restaurant, I couldn’t care in the slightest.
Of course your behaviour got back to your ex wife, and I don’t disagree with some of the comments she made. On the one hand you portray this image of a zen, calm, moving on man roaming around the mountains… and yet you’re telling people where they can and can’t eat?
Lots more work required. You can hate him, but you control no-one other than yourself.
Would it motivate you to work on your emotional control if I told you that you rewarded your ex wife by having a go at OM? When he told her about the interaction, I guarantee it would have brought a smile to her face knowing she got to you. It’s sort of like training dogs - any attention is good in their eyes, and so when she heard you had a go at OM, she got her dopamine hit. That’s why she texted you about it, she wanted you to know that she knows you still get affected by him and her.
Imagine if you’d completely ignored him, and then he’d gone back to her and said “he didn’t even notice me there.” That would have been a much bigger hit to her ego.
You can’t feign indifference. Indifference shows through your actions, and when you do it long enough and she realises she can’t get to you (like the baited text messages), eventually she’ll give up.
