3yrs on. Do you feel like I do occasionally?

I have not visited this website for a long time. In the early days when my husband left me I visited it daily and it gave me great comfort. I have just re read my own messages and can now see how I have moved on from those long tearful, desperate black days and I am proud of myself for rebuilding a new life and at present dipping my toes into a new relationship.

The divorce is going through and I should be clear by christmas. I will be starting my 50th year as a (single) woman who is reverting to her maiden name.

On reflection I feel I can see where there were faults within my marriage. I did not make many decisions and my confidence and self esteem went vey low. We did have good times and I naively thought I would be in that relationship for ever, that my husband was the most trustworthy man out there who would never even contemplate having an affair!!!

The reason I write today is to pose the question to others if they still find they have unanswered questions about the demise of their marriage, why it happened etc

People say to me that my husband changed and wanted different things in life and none of it was my fault but there is the voice inside me that will rear its ugly head at times and say to me he left you because you were boring and not fun enough. He left me for another woman who he told me had "sparkle" (he by the way is not with her anymore) however the demise of my marriage just poses questions about me and who I am and I wonder why out of all my friends I was unable to sustain a marriage and all my hopes and dreams did not come to fruition.

I am not permanently in this state of questioning and I have new hopes and dreams now but on the occasional low days that I experience these questions rear their ugly heads. I have a good life now, excellent friends, am my own boss and in control of my own destiny. And 3 years on I have come to a good place that I never thought I would ever reach and I hope this will give hope to anybody now starting out on the long emotional roller coaster ride. There are good times to be had out there again.

But occasionally the hurt of those times sits on my shoulder and I ponder and get upset. I feel that my husband was so glad to "get rid of me" and his old life but on the other hand know that that is not the way to be thinking but at times I can't help it.

Do others feel occasionally the way I do would love to know how others have survived and does the hurt ever totally go away?

Thanks for reading this

Coming up to a year, now, since my wife left me. The pain hasn't gone away by a long chalk, but I suppose that it's early days comparatively speaking. Being stuck in our joint home in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by her stuff, and the things we put together doesn't really help. Looking around, it feels like she's just gone shopping, and will be back soon. Don't really know why she left, she wasn't honest with me, blaming France for all her unhappiness, then me in turn, when it was her idea to move here in the first place!

So my low days are the norm, and the odd day when my stomach isn't knotted up, and I'm not suffering anxiety about the future, is a welcome rarity.

Chris

Thanks for writing it.

It was good to hear all the positives you have created for yourself post separation.

You said that this wonderfully sparkly lady he dumped you for has already bitten the dust. This must help you underline the obvious fact: 'it is not you'.

No one is responsible for making someone else happy. You know that in your head. Your ex has been left chasing rainbows while you have spent the time apart consolidating who you are and rebuilding where you can.

You are prepared to put in all the hard work while he just looks for others to provide a quick fix.

We all have our bad days. We all have times where we are triggered into feeling overburdened by the 'what if's' and 'if only's'.

We are only human. We are not robots. Of course, our ex's left us with alot of unanswered questions and self doubts.

Yes, I am pretty sure many people on this site will admit they are not immune to sad reflections even after they are well through the acceptance phase. That is certainly my situation.

I just notice that setbacks that used to take days or weeks to recover from now take hours or even minutes to process.

Thanks for your post.

mm

I'm only at 8 months since I found out about my husband's affair and he left me. But the questions you say you have in your mind, plague me on a daily basis. My culpability in what happened is something that I constantly turn over in my mind. Was I too grumpy? Too boring? Too critical? Not clever enough? I remember things I said to him over the years and wonder if that had remained unsaid or I had done something differently then things may have turned out differently for me and I wouldn't be where I am now.

So yes, I self-blame and soul-search a lot, almost constantly in fact. And, no I've not found a way for this to stop undermining my sense of self-worth and my ability to regard any new person in my life as anything other than potentially damaging and therefore not to be trusted.

So I've not really answered your question, just aired a bit of my hurt that sounds a bits similar to the way you feel at times. I guess my answer would be I feel like that all the time and it really gives me a sense of optimism to know that at 3 years you feel like that only occasionally!

However, from where I'm standing right now, I am assuming that the hurt and self-doubt will eventually go away. I am also assuming that you come out of an experience of this type a different sort of person than you were when you went in.

To an extent I also see I have choices here. I could curl up in a ball and refuse to ever get up again. And that's what I want to do most of the time. But the fury he's also inspired in me has made me decide that I will not do that. I will get up and I will smile and I will get on with my life and I will fight to not let what he's done beat me and totally undermine my sense of self-worth.

That's my view and my attitude, but I too am interested in any replies you get this post from people farther along the time line and anxieties about how they feel about themselves and their role in what they feel about their break ups.

Take care of yourself, lovestinks (doesn't it just?) x

I think its natural to question things from time to time, particularly when we are not feeling very confident. But we also have the choice of deciding not to go over old ground over and over.

I suspect you are questioning your role in your marriage break up now (it clearly wasn't your lack of sparkle since the ow has gone!) because you're feeling apprehensive about your new relationship, which is quite natural.

It will be 3 years for me in a couple of months time. I have found getting my life back on track pretty hard going - married for 10 years, lived together for a couple of years prior to that and pregnant with our third child at the point he left me (which partly explains why it's taken a while to work things through - 9 months dealing with the pregnancy and then another year dealing with a baby on my own). I also had to make a major move, pack the house up on my own etc. etc. as well as deal with the pretty much constant abuse and bullying of the ex and his girlfriend (let's just say you'd have thought it had been me sleeping with her husband when I realised I was pregnant!).

I only struggled with being on my own for the first few months - possibly something to do with being an only child - and I can't say I'm lonely despite the isolation brought about by the pregnancy, not working for a while, and then the house move and having to get to know new people and make new friends. But there are times when my mind wanders to what could have been (what should have been) and I have a bit of a wallow. Mainly now I question why I spent so many years with a man who had such a blatant disregard for my feelings and emotions and who, above everything else, could treat a pregnant woman (any pregnant woman, not just someone he was supposed to have loved) the way he treated me. But when you're in the middle of it, I guess you don't see it the way outsiders do - with the benefit of hindsight and distance, I see my ex very, very differently and know I don't want to be with him as he is today.

I think my self esteem took a huge knock and it has taken a while to build it back (and I'm not there yet). Indeed, I got turned down for a training course earlier this year and the feedback (which was very 'critically constructive' to the point of being brutal and perhaps the most helpful thing to have happened since the ex left!) was focused mainly on issues that could be traced back to self esteem so I got a hold of myself and have just this week been offered as much temp work as I can handle working in the same field which will, hopefully, minimize the likelihood of rejection when I reapply later this year. So I know things are improving and I'm getting better at dealing with it all.

I think counselling would, at the moment, be of great benefit to me but I can't afford it. I am torn between believing that no matter what I do, this whole episode of my life will follow me round to a greater or lesser extent and will always cause me some upset (and probably when I least expect it), and wanting to believe that there is a point in the future when none of this will matter to me anymore. I struggle to believe such a point exists but I guess time will tell - and I wonder if counselling might push me more quickly towards that point. But maybe it wouldn't. No way of knowing!

I used to struggle with the fact that my friends all seem to have successful marriages but I also know that no one saw what happened to me coming. As such, I think anyone is vulnerable and those who are smug today, may not be quite so smug tomorrow. I had an amusing encounter with the mother of one of my son's classmates last year - not a friend of his so we had never spoken and she didn't know what was going on for me. She was all 'my wonderful husband this' and 'my wonderful husband that' until it came out I was divorced and she changed her tune - her marriage was not/is not what she would first have had me believe! It made me smile and it just shows that you really do not know what goes on behind closed doors, even with your closest and oldest friends. You may envy them their successful marriages but I suspect a good number will be envying your freedom!

So yes, I guess there are still ends that need tying up and lots of unanswered questions. But I think that's part of it and if you let it, it can get the better of you and stop you moving on. I think sometimes we have to accept that best 'closure' we can hope for is no closure at all. I certainly have spoken with my ex on several occassions but his answers are incomplete, unsatisfactory and represent such a twisting of the basic facts that they can't be relied on as 'the truth' as he sees it. That's also something that needs accepting - 3 years ago I thought my marriage was happy and it took a while to accept that it wasn't and hadn't been for a while. It wasn't dreadful, but nor was it what I wanted to believe it was. My version of 'the truth' has, no doubt, changed over the last 3 years so it's not surprising that so has my ex's. We live and learn and we move on. That's life, perhaps?

None of us will ever get the answer to the question 'why?' For that to happen your ex would have to face up to what they had done and thats not comfortable. Before getting absolute I sent a mail saying is your life now that much better and she said it was then I got one last week saying is was everything but...but still clearly better than it was with me. I once told a freind I was a sum of my parts and the biggest part of me was my wife..sort of blows everything out of the water.

For my part I have failed, I can't see what my failure was but I need to keeping moving as 'mumtoboys' has said. We won't get closure we've got to do the best with what we have got, teach our kids that our ex's way is not the way it should be and try and find that person we should have been with.