Long initial post - sorry guys... Hey all. I haven't been on the boards for some time now. It's been since March that I posted, and since July of last year that H and I reconciled. Sage, Slowly, Debcb - I see you are still around. Sage, I briefly read your most recent post. I will have to go back and read more. Of everyone on here, I learned so much from you. I thank you for your wisdom and kindness in the past to help me through my tough times.
Briefly to recap my story... In August 2003, H said he wasn't "in love" with me anymore. That he felt about me like a sister. I was shocked. We were the couple people looked up to as the "perfect" example of true love. We were so in love, and it was all a shock to me.
In Jan 2004 after doing all the wrong things - bitching, crying, making a general nuisance of myself - constantly going down the wrong tunnels over and over and over, I found DBing. I loosely applied principles, never really sure that it would work. Around that time, it came to light that my deepest suspicion - another woman - was true. H had begun having an emotional affair with a woman at work.
I began DBing and almost immediately saw results. I was almost a model DBer, and he was a model MLCer. Whatever I read in the book and on the boards fit his behavior to a “t” and I reacted back to his behavior in the right ways, I guess, because before long, he was admitting to having an EA. He tried unsuccessfully back and forth to break it off with her. Eventually, I got involved. I called her, she swore up and down they were in love and he was going to leave me for her. I decided he could have her, and started to walk out the door. Like a light went on, H suddenly panicked and all the love he felt for me “suddenly” came back to him. It was like his feelings towards me came flooding back, and he begged me to stay.
We cried a lot that day. It felt good. He did all the right things instinctively. Changed his phone number, cut off all ties, threw out all the things she bought him. He began to tell me the truth – all the truth. There was never anything physical between them, but he had felt he was in love with her and that she was his true love. Somehow, he had forgotten our “true love” and replaced it. Slowly he came around to realizing that he had never loved her at all, which I had felt all along. That little hope had kept me hanging on a long, long time. Through all the pain, I still felt that he and I were “meant” to be together.
To this day, he is the love of my life. He can’t explain why he did the things he did, but perhaps I should leave that for him to write. You see, we have decided to come here to discuss our lives now, for two reasons. One, we are having trouble getting over one last little hump. I will describe more later. Two, I am hoping that our story will help some of you still struggling. Perhaps he can even help some of you with insight into the other side of the story, and maybe learn something himself. My suspicion is that he went to another woman for emotional love because I had become absent in our relationship. Both because the first love in my life, and ex-boyfriend, had died recently, and I took it very hard. Mind you, he killed himself with a heroin overdose and I blamed myself. It wasn’t because I felt I had lost a love, but rather because I felt guilt about many things in our past relationship. I know now that nothing I did caused him to kill himself. But it still sometimes feels that way. Secondly, in my marriage, I had become a work-a-holic, always looking for the next way to make more money for us. Being a landlord, full time work, full time college, etc. I was just not there with him, and when I was, I was mourning my life. Perhaps something in him felt that he was a failure at making me happy. Which was the furthest thing from the truth. He was all I had in my life that kept me grounded and happy at all. The rest I spent a lot of energy trying to escape. My husband was and is the love of my life, my best friend, and somehow I had begun to take him for granted. I wish I had never done that, it’s my biggest regret.
We need your help and insight guys. First I will catch up on all the new people out there and read some posts. My husband is going to post to this forum also. Then we will post together what we are hoping you all can help us with. Maybe we need counseling. But I feel that perhaps just some insight from some good people will help us out with our last little hurdle to getting back on track. We have the love, and the friendship. We somehow are just lacking that last little bit to our relationship.
