Over the last few days, Hubby has bounced back and forth between "we can try to work on things" to "we're totally over" a few times, before calling me on the phone to tell me he wasn't coming home. Ever. I got upset, which turned into anger, which lead me down a path that I'm not proud of... I threw a bunch of his clothes outside and when he showed up here... well, I basically attacked him. I pushed him and hit him in the face. I didn't hurt him, but there are no words to describe how angry and hurt I was that he ended things with me over the phone.
We talked for ages and he said we'd work on things, give it one more try. Two days later, he sent me an email saying he wanted a divorce. The "trial" in our "trial separation" had lasted less than a week and he was already done.
He said he wanted to talk to me about it face to face but because of how angry I got, he wasn't able to. So he sent me an email. An email. 8 years together and he told me he wanted to file for divorce in an email. I begged him to come and see me, to talk to me and he said he wouldn't unless there was a "witness" there. He said that if things had gone badly, I could have hurt myself and charged him with assault or something. Wow. The thought that I would do something like that, cry abuse when there was none, just because I was angry or upset... I was so offended and hurt, I was physically sick over it.
So he came home the next day with a friend. Someone I've known since high school, since long before I ever met Hubby, and he followed me around my own apartment while Hubby packed his things. There's being hurt and then there's being humiliated. I was humiliated.
We met up later, in a public place at his insistence, and talked for ages. He came around some, admitted that he had handled things really poorly and was "make things right" about this 'needing someone as a witness' bullshit. The conversation went okay, but he is not budging on giving us another chance. He's done.
He came back in the evening and hung out and, for the most part, it felt normal. He agreed to stay the night and slept next to me (nothing happened). He left the next morning and I thought everything was okay... well, as okay as it could be at this point.
Later, I tried to talk to him and he blanked me again. Said he thought he could have a day without me. I was having a really hard time and all I wanted to do was see him. I knew I should be stronger, that I shouldn't be so pathetic, but I couldn't help it. He rejected me completely.
So, I did a very stupid thing. I went over to the friend's house where he was (it was Halloween and everyone was at a party that I was SUPPOSED to be at, but he went so I didn't go). I tried to talk to him outside and he was such an asshole. I tried to hold onto him to get him to talk to him and he told me I was assaulting him. I was barely touching him, I'd hugged him and had my hand on his waist. Then he literally RAN away from me. Like, took off running down the street.
So I'm sure I've made things a lot worse now. He definitely won't want to see me now. I sent him an email and told me how hurt I was by the way he was acting, but that I was going to try and just not contact him at all for a while.
I was sick all night, couldn't get any sleep and have a huge "cry rash" on my cheeks. I called in sick to work, but I need to get back to my normal life....
I just feel like that's impossible.
Monday, November 1, 2010
He doesn't love me anymore
There are a lot of things that Hubby criticizes me for that I can do something about:
You're too fat.
I'll lose weight.
You're too messy.
I'll be more tidy.
But then he figured out something I have no response for:
I don't love you anymore.
Well, that's pretty clear. I tried to explain that in long relationships, people go through phases of being more and less in love with each other but being married means working it out and finding your way back, but he wasn't interested. He took his ring off. He says he just doesn't want to be married to me anymore.
This hurts so much that I literally don't know what to do with myself. I go through periods of feeling okay and then suddenly this panic starts to well up inside me and I think I'm going crazy. I think I HAVE to fix this, but he won't let me. He won't even try. I feel like a country song, like a bunch of cliche drama, like I'm never going to be okay again.
And now he's just blanking me completely, refusing to take my calls and ignoring texts, etc. It would be so much easier if we had drifted apart first, if we had been living in the same place but not really engaging. If we had been sleeping in separate beds or fighting all the time or SOMETHING. But a few weeks ago, we were very much a couple. And now there's nothing. And I literally can't handle it.
Friday, October 29, 2010
GirlStupid
GirlStupid
[gurl stoo-pid]
-adjective
1. Normally intelligent female who, although she knows better, lacks common sense when it comes to personal relationships.
2. Is unable to take her own advice. ie. Would advise friends in the same situation to do one thing and then does the opposite when faced with it herself.
She knew the relationship was bad for her, but kept going back and making excuses for him.
She sent him 18 text messages over the course over 2 days, even though she knew it was crazy.
She was suspicious and went through all his things, all the while berating herself for doing it.
***
I can't remember how old I was when I came up with GirlStupid, accusing a friend of tolerating way more in a relationship than she ever thought she would or would have advised me to. I think I must have been 18 or so, considering this is when my friends and I made some decidedly poor choices regarding members of the opposite sex.
I suspect that most women have been GirlStupid at one time or another, allowing themselves to set their better judgement and sometimes self-respect at the door in the name of love, or sex, or just plain attention. It always amazes me how confident and intelligent women can give the most sound and common sense advice to everyone else around them but can't make their own good decisions to save their lives. I'm not talking about the big bad things, the women (and men) who have real emotional problems, just the every day bad decisions that, once we are far removed from the relationship, we kick ourselves for.
Example: I have a friend, Jenny. She hadn't been in a relationship for a while and was maybe feeling a little less than self-confident. Until YoungOne came along. YoungOne was selfish and immature and just... Young. But when he gave my smart, beautiful some attention and then stopped calling... well, what's a smart, beautiful girl to do? Call too often. Text too much. Cry over someone who doesn't deserve it. Now, a lot later, she knows where she went from Girl to GirlStupid. Having said that, if YoungOne were to reappear in a weak moment for Jenny... GirlStupid is a very strong and has a long memory.
I have another friend, Eva, who slept with the same guy for two years because she was crazy in-love with him. She overlooked the fact that he was nothing more than a friend in public, and not a good one at that. Eventually, it ended and she was broken up about it and she hated him. Probably still does.
I have way more examples than that, but you get the point. GirlStupid - an epidemic!
And yeah, okay, I've been GS in the past. I can get over the stupid things from the past, what I am worried about is the stupid to come. What if this split brings out not only the GirlStupid, but the GirlCrazy and the GirlDesperate in me?
[gurl stoo-pid]
-adjective
1. Normally intelligent female who, although she knows better, lacks common sense when it comes to personal relationships.
2. Is unable to take her own advice. ie. Would advise friends in the same situation to do one thing and then does the opposite when faced with it herself.
She knew the relationship was bad for her, but kept going back and making excuses for him.
She sent him 18 text messages over the course over 2 days, even though she knew it was crazy.
She was suspicious and went through all his things, all the while berating herself for doing it.
***
I can't remember how old I was when I came up with GirlStupid, accusing a friend of tolerating way more in a relationship than she ever thought she would or would have advised me to. I think I must have been 18 or so, considering this is when my friends and I made some decidedly poor choices regarding members of the opposite sex.
I suspect that most women have been GirlStupid at one time or another, allowing themselves to set their better judgement and sometimes self-respect at the door in the name of love, or sex, or just plain attention. It always amazes me how confident and intelligent women can give the most sound and common sense advice to everyone else around them but can't make their own good decisions to save their lives. I'm not talking about the big bad things, the women (and men) who have real emotional problems, just the every day bad decisions that, once we are far removed from the relationship, we kick ourselves for.
Example: I have a friend, Jenny. She hadn't been in a relationship for a while and was maybe feeling a little less than self-confident. Until YoungOne came along. YoungOne was selfish and immature and just... Young. But when he gave my smart, beautiful some attention and then stopped calling... well, what's a smart, beautiful girl to do? Call too often. Text too much. Cry over someone who doesn't deserve it. Now, a lot later, she knows where she went from Girl to GirlStupid. Having said that, if YoungOne were to reappear in a weak moment for Jenny... GirlStupid is a very strong and has a long memory.
I have another friend, Eva, who slept with the same guy for two years because she was crazy in-love with him. She overlooked the fact that he was nothing more than a friend in public, and not a good one at that. Eventually, it ended and she was broken up about it and she hated him. Probably still does.
I have way more examples than that, but you get the point. GirlStupid - an epidemic!
And yeah, okay, I've been GS in the past. I can get over the stupid things from the past, what I am worried about is the stupid to come. What if this split brings out not only the GirlStupid, but the GirlCrazy and the GirlDesperate in me?
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Day 3 - Part 2
So after the terrible counseling session, hubby came back to our condo.
He got some more stuff, visited with the dog and took apart some weights that he'd left in the bedroom and that are constantly in my way. Then we watched an HBO show we've been watching together and cuddled.
Cuddled??
Was that a smart thing to do?
I don't think so...
But it was so nice.
Ugh, I'm screwed.
He got some more stuff, visited with the dog and took apart some weights that he'd left in the bedroom and that are constantly in my way. Then we watched an HBO show we've been watching together and cuddled.
Cuddled??
Was that a smart thing to do?
I don't think so...
But it was so nice.
Ugh, I'm screwed.
Day 3
Day 3 was the hardest day for a couple of reasons: 1) It was my first day back to work since he left. Over the weekend, I could lounge around with my friends and let them distract me between tears. On Monday, however, I had to put myself together like a normal person and try to be productive. 2) I was seeing hubby for our counseling appointment in the evening.
Because of the 2nd reason, I was completely distracted all day and was highly UNproductive at work for the entire day. Plus, because I tend to over-share things about my personal life and had told a few of the people I work with that I was going through a rough time, everyone wanted to know how I was doing. Considering that things had gone so much further "wrong" than I had anticipated the week before, I had to (well, didn't HAVE to) tell them that he'd actually walked out.
When I finally left work and came home, all I could think about was going to see him at the appointment. We had planned to meet half an hour before the appointment at a coffee shop to see each other before the session. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself in the hours until I had to leave, so I crawled into bed and took a nap. Maybe not the healthiest way to approach things, but it gave me 2 hours reprieve from obsessing about what I was going to say, what he was going to say, etc.
I got up and put on some make up and did my hair... I'm not sure why looking so put together was important to me, but I had been thinking about it all day. If he was fine, I didn't want to walk in and look like a mess. I met him at the coffee shop, 15 minutes late, and so began our most awkward encounter in the 8 years that I've known him. We hugged and he held on tightly for a moment, but all I could do what give him a frigid hug-pat thing to keep myself together.
"I don't think you handled things very well." I told him after we tried to make small talk for a few minutes. He didn't think there was a good way to handle things.
"True. But you could have waited until after my birthday, after this session with the counselor, and you didn't have to tell all my friends before you told me."
He conceded that he could have waited the extra 2 days, but wouldn't agree about the friends piece. "I had to find a place to live." Agree to disagree then.
The session with the counselor was awful. It was 10+ minutes of him saying why our relationship was so bad, why he left and how he basically didn't think things would ever get better. I sat there quietly, getting more and more angry at all the half-truths and things that he had clearly "misremembered".
My husband is, I explained to the counselor, a malcontent. Nothing is ever good enough and nothing is ever satisfying or fulfilling. He looks to external things for happiness and, not surprisingly, never finds it. It was only my own naivety that stopped me from realizing that it was only a matter of time until I was the thing that wasn't good enough and that was stopping him from being happy.
It went back and forth like that for a while before the counselor said that he needed to be honest, with himself and with me, about whether or not he wanted things to work or he was weaning himself off the relationship with this "separation".
He said both.
The counselor told him he couldn't do both, so he said that he did want to try to work things about BUT that things would need to change if we were ever going to work out. "Things" in this case meant me; I had to change if we were going to stay together. I had to be tidier and I had to lose weight. Period. He wasn't going to change anything, wasn't going to put any effort in.
Eventually, the counselor convinced him that effort had to be both ways and that efforts had to be acknowledged when they did happen.
She also gave me some weight loss tips. And at the same time acknowledged that because of a health issue (PCOS), it would be really, really difficult for me to do that. She also suggested living separately permanently, like in half a duplex or in suites in a house. She also said we had to decide what we were willing to live with/without...
Okay, so: Is the goal that I lose weight, get tidy, we live apart, we never have a sex life, we never have kids? If that's the case, I am not on board. That wasn't part of our vows and not what I signed up for.
Because of the 2nd reason, I was completely distracted all day and was highly UNproductive at work for the entire day. Plus, because I tend to over-share things about my personal life and had told a few of the people I work with that I was going through a rough time, everyone wanted to know how I was doing. Considering that things had gone so much further "wrong" than I had anticipated the week before, I had to (well, didn't HAVE to) tell them that he'd actually walked out.
When I finally left work and came home, all I could think about was going to see him at the appointment. We had planned to meet half an hour before the appointment at a coffee shop to see each other before the session. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself in the hours until I had to leave, so I crawled into bed and took a nap. Maybe not the healthiest way to approach things, but it gave me 2 hours reprieve from obsessing about what I was going to say, what he was going to say, etc.
I got up and put on some make up and did my hair... I'm not sure why looking so put together was important to me, but I had been thinking about it all day. If he was fine, I didn't want to walk in and look like a mess. I met him at the coffee shop, 15 minutes late, and so began our most awkward encounter in the 8 years that I've known him. We hugged and he held on tightly for a moment, but all I could do what give him a frigid hug-pat thing to keep myself together.
"I don't think you handled things very well." I told him after we tried to make small talk for a few minutes. He didn't think there was a good way to handle things.
"True. But you could have waited until after my birthday, after this session with the counselor, and you didn't have to tell all my friends before you told me."
He conceded that he could have waited the extra 2 days, but wouldn't agree about the friends piece. "I had to find a place to live." Agree to disagree then.
The session with the counselor was awful. It was 10+ minutes of him saying why our relationship was so bad, why he left and how he basically didn't think things would ever get better. I sat there quietly, getting more and more angry at all the half-truths and things that he had clearly "misremembered".
My husband is, I explained to the counselor, a malcontent. Nothing is ever good enough and nothing is ever satisfying or fulfilling. He looks to external things for happiness and, not surprisingly, never finds it. It was only my own naivety that stopped me from realizing that it was only a matter of time until I was the thing that wasn't good enough and that was stopping him from being happy.
It went back and forth like that for a while before the counselor said that he needed to be honest, with himself and with me, about whether or not he wanted things to work or he was weaning himself off the relationship with this "separation".
He said both.
The counselor told him he couldn't do both, so he said that he did want to try to work things about BUT that things would need to change if we were ever going to work out. "Things" in this case meant me; I had to change if we were going to stay together. I had to be tidier and I had to lose weight. Period. He wasn't going to change anything, wasn't going to put any effort in.
Eventually, the counselor convinced him that effort had to be both ways and that efforts had to be acknowledged when they did happen.
She also gave me some weight loss tips. And at the same time acknowledged that because of a health issue (PCOS), it would be really, really difficult for me to do that. She also suggested living separately permanently, like in half a duplex or in suites in a house. She also said we had to decide what we were willing to live with/without...
Okay, so: Is the goal that I lose weight, get tidy, we live apart, we never have a sex life, we never have kids? If that's the case, I am not on board. That wasn't part of our vows and not what I signed up for.
Monday, October 25, 2010
Back to life, back to reality
It might have seemed like the longest weekend ever, but now it's Monday morning and it's time for life to carry on like normal.
I'm not a very good sleeper in the best of situations, so these last few nights have been particularly awful. I woke up early and had one of those awful waking dreams where something terrible happens and then you have that amazing moment of relief as you wake up, when you realize it was only a dream. This time, though, that was followed by the sinking feeling that it wasn't a dream. He really did leave.
Even still, when I looked at my alarm clock this morning after hours of tossing and turning, I re-set it for later and huddled down further into the covers. If I could hide here for a while longer, I would. I don't want to go to work and have people ask me why I look so tired. I don't want to sit at my desk with a million things to do and not be able to concentrate on any of them. I don't want to do any of it. Not today.
Inevitably, I have to get up and get on with my day. First up, drag my ass out of bed and try to throw together an outfit and do myself up in a way that doesn't read "Had the worst weekend of all time". Then, drag my ass out the door and get to work... ideally, on time. Then just a quick 8 hours of work and I can come home again. Not for long, though, because tonight is our first session with the counselor since he left. For that, it seems even more important that I don't go in looking like the bride of Frankenstein. Then home. Then sleep. Then do it all again.
I'm not a very good sleeper in the best of situations, so these last few nights have been particularly awful. I woke up early and had one of those awful waking dreams where something terrible happens and then you have that amazing moment of relief as you wake up, when you realize it was only a dream. This time, though, that was followed by the sinking feeling that it wasn't a dream. He really did leave.
Even still, when I looked at my alarm clock this morning after hours of tossing and turning, I re-set it for later and huddled down further into the covers. If I could hide here for a while longer, I would. I don't want to go to work and have people ask me why I look so tired. I don't want to sit at my desk with a million things to do and not be able to concentrate on any of them. I don't want to do any of it. Not today.
Inevitably, I have to get up and get on with my day. First up, drag my ass out of bed and try to throw together an outfit and do myself up in a way that doesn't read "Had the worst weekend of all time". Then, drag my ass out the door and get to work... ideally, on time. Then just a quick 8 hours of work and I can come home again. Not for long, though, because tonight is our first session with the counselor since he left. For that, it seems even more important that I don't go in looking like the bride of Frankenstein. Then home. Then sleep. Then do it all again.
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Is it because...?
The following probably goes without saying but in case there are any of you that don't know the social "dos" and "don'ts" of talking to someone going through a break up, here's a helpful hint:
If the broken up person says they either don't know or don't want to talk about why a break up has occurred, don't just start guessing.
Example: "Hmm, do you think maybe it's because of your weight?" or "Could it be because you don't have much of a career?"
If someone loses their job, you don't ask them if they think it's because they're stupid or lazy. Yet somehow playing "pin the tail on the break up reason" is fair game for some people.
How could that possibly help the situation? Regardless of whether you've sleuthed out the mystery behind the break up, your guessing is only going to make the person feel worse about themselves AND not only will it point out the negative things about that person, but that THEY have noticed these things and consider them logical reasons behind someone leaving.
It's like if someone finds our their ex has jumped straight into another relationship and then gets asked, "Do you think they were seeing them behind your back?" Of course that thought has crossed your mind and now it's just been confirmed as a legitimate concern. How is that helpful? How is that supportive?
At least I don't have to worry about the second scenario... I can think of a lot of choice adjectives for my ex right now, but I know that "cheater" isn't one of them.
But seriously, don't guess why he left. If there's a reason, I've thought of it. I don't need help compiling of list, thankyouverymuch.
If the broken up person says they either don't know or don't want to talk about why a break up has occurred, don't just start guessing.
Example: "Hmm, do you think maybe it's because of your weight?" or "Could it be because you don't have much of a career?"
If someone loses their job, you don't ask them if they think it's because they're stupid or lazy. Yet somehow playing "pin the tail on the break up reason" is fair game for some people.
How could that possibly help the situation? Regardless of whether you've sleuthed out the mystery behind the break up, your guessing is only going to make the person feel worse about themselves AND not only will it point out the negative things about that person, but that THEY have noticed these things and consider them logical reasons behind someone leaving.
It's like if someone finds our their ex has jumped straight into another relationship and then gets asked, "Do you think they were seeing them behind your back?" Of course that thought has crossed your mind and now it's just been confirmed as a legitimate concern. How is that helpful? How is that supportive?
At least I don't have to worry about the second scenario... I can think of a lot of choice adjectives for my ex right now, but I know that "cheater" isn't one of them.
But seriously, don't guess why he left. If there's a reason, I've thought of it. I don't need help compiling of list, thankyouverymuch.
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