Thanks for the support. Ours really was an atypical divorce. No forgiveness needed, TBH. We were never angry with each other. We just didn’t see it working because we wanted different things back then and neither of us wanted to hold the other one back. I was also missing my family.
When I moved to his area, it was for a job and I had only planned to stay for a year max before returning home. I met him on my first day of work and immediately had a crush on him. We were in a small town and he was the town’s most eligible bachelor at the time. Tall, dark and handsome and a bit mysterious. He was 26 (I was 23) and we became friends. He had grown up there, gone to university and then returned after graduation (fine arts degree). His family was well known in town and he had lots of friends. Being the new girl in town, he kind of took me under his wing, so to speak, and introduced me to a lot of people. For the next six months, we would hang out a couple times a week but he was dating different people. At the time, I think he was suffering from “I was a nerd in high school (in his mind) and now I’m cool” syndrome and seemed to gravitate toward dating the shooter girls at the local bars. I was the opposite of that. Very girl next door and not his type at the time. However, despite this, he would usually come over to my place a couple times a week, make me dinner, chat for a bit and then run out the door at 9 pm saying he needed to go work out. He did this for about four months…lol. His friends kept telling me that he liked me, he just didn’t know it yet.
Long story short…I pretty much gave up on us being anything but friends and had been talking with my ex boyfriend. XH came over the night before I was going on a trip home to make me dinner and I mentioned that my ex boyfriend was going to be at home that weekend too. I remember that he seemed surprised by that and a bit perturbed. When it came time for him to rush out the door at 9:00, he got up and then stopped at the door. I thought it was a bit weird but then decided that maybe he wanted me to open the door for him so I got up off the couch and walked towards him. When I got to the door, he suddenly grabbed me, kissed me, told me to have a good weekend and then took off. You could have knocked me over with a feather. I had seriously given up on him and decided we would only ever be friends. Needless to say, my weekend did not go well (for me and my ex) and me and XH became a couple after I returned. We got married five years later and then separated four years after that.
He reached out to me after XH and I split. He was pretty mad about how I had been treated by and wanted to offer his support. After that, he would text me every so often to see how I was doing. A few times, he let me know that he and his best friend had been watching old videos of all of us. He seemed to think he had been a bit of a jerk to me back then and wanted to apologize for how “stupid” he was. He said the videos were hard to watch because he saw how awesome I was and he was really self-focused at the time and, in his estimation, didn’t treat me the way I deserved to be treated or at least didn’t appreciate me the way he should have. I appreciated hearing that but I think he is a lot harder on himself than he deserves. Anyway…not sure what to expect at Easter. This will be the most time we have spent together since our divorce. He’s a lot more open than he used to be so may want to talk about this in person. Or maybe not…lol. I’m just going to enjoy my time with his family and deal with whatever comes up in the moment.
