Day 7-- Reflections on my first comment

I had my first comment! And it was critical! And I deserved it! (Seriously, I appreciate it very much.) 

One of the things the commenter said was that it was naturally much easier to cut off contact with my husband since I knew he betrayed me. The point she was making, and there's a way in which I think she's absolutely right, is I need to see Patte as betraying me in the same way to really cut off contact with him in a good way.

But I wondered whether it was really easy to cut off contact with Jan or not? In one way, it's been shockingly easy. It's also only been 7 days. But still. 

I called one of my good (female!) friends to ask her view. Part of my preparation work for cutting off contact with Patte has been about coming clean regarding the affair to some of my closest friends. 

She shared that for the last year she's been watching me nearly kill myself trying to communicate with my husband.  She said:

"While I respect why you are cutting off the affair with Patte, and I think it says a lot of good things about your ethics and common decency, I don't care so much about that. I am *desperate* for you to stop talking to Jan. For a year, you've been acting as though he was the same man you married and we've all been desperate to get you stop. Somehow." 

And that's true. It's only easy to cut off contact with Jan now because for so long it was impossible. 

I recently read a book about how we think; how we make decisions. What it basically said was that conscious decision making takes place in one part of our brain-- the seat of reason. However, habits don't live there anymore. Once you've built a habit-- and a habit consists of trigger, routine and reward-- it moves from your higher reason into your ganglia. Even if you suffer brain trauma. Even if you literally lose your short term memory, you're going to remember your habits. They're written in your bones, in a very real way. It's probably a survival adaptation, right? For good routines, you don't want to have to think too hard to engage them if one day you happen to find yourself running from a bear.

Jan is written in this part of my brain. We had what I thought was a great marriage. If I heard something funny, I called him. Whenever I travelled for work, I would buy him some small gift-- just to show I was thinking of him. We talked *constantly*, laughed all the time.

I only stopped buying him travel gifts a month ago, by the way. For the last 10 months, I've been buying him gifts as I always have done, and then throwing them away. How sad is that? I couldn't even sacrifice the routine. 

Within 6 months of my final decision to stop trying to get pregnant, he'd begun to cut himself off from me and had begun his affair. Within a year, he was gone. 

The affair was the LEAST of the pain he dealt me. I have no parents, no children. He was my only family. He never ONCE tried to fix what was broken once he had decided I could not provide him with the life he wanted.  He told me it was all my fault-- he never (not until quite recently) came right out and said it was because I couldn't have children, but he danced on the edge of that every single day. He told me I was unattractive as a woman. He told me I wasn't caring, wasn't nurturing. He told me I was career obsessed. He told me I was cold. You can add up all those comments into bad mother pretty easily, and you can be sure I did.

To put this in perspective-- most of our 15 years has been completely different. The bad period with each other lasted for one year. 

I don't blame Wendy the Wine Girl. I don't think much of her, but I don't blame her. I blame my husband, right between the eyes. The affair didn't cause the way he behaved. He had an affair because he didn't even consider it was worth breaking up with me in a clean way before he started a new relationship.  Even his mother said to me after DDay that "you should have known he can't be alone". And I do know that. I do. Wendy the Wine Girl isn't the fucking problem. She's nothing more than a particularly ugly symptom.

And in one sense, yes, not talking to him is easy. In another sense, it's been the hardest fought battle in my life. In the past year I've dragged myself to painful therapy sessions, talked all night with him, listen to him *scream* at me that I should respect Wendy the Wine Girl as a "real girlfriend". (Part of his fiction is that it wasn't an affair because we were really already broken up, and I knew it.) I did all that because it was the first thing we had ever encountered which we couldn't talk our way through. I thought-- i really believed!-- that if I just listened and engaged, we would somehow find our way through. It was so stupid, and so destructive. 

To stop talking to him, I had to let him hurt me enough times that the aversion to the pain he caused me overrode the writing in my bones. 

Is that really easy?

Day 4-- Choose Me

For my last two major relationships, I have chosen men who are unavailable, and worked to make them choose me.

Jan, when we met, was at the tail end of a live-in relationship with a woman he did not want to marry, but for whom he felt responsible. We were friends first. I wasn't very attracted to him initially. I was fat and unhappy, recovering from my mother's suicide and in a relationship I didn't want to be in-- a lover who was much more serious than I.

I used Jan as a way to pull myself together and get myself out of the relationship-- initially it seemed a safe way. I can remember I had to push myself into finding him attractive. I had to work to become enough of his type (slimming down, changing my wardrobe) so he would find me attractive.

I wasn't his type at all. His type is a tall, athletic, young brunette-- not terribly pretty or smart, but outgoing and fun. Not me. Not even a little bit. Our sexual relationship grew up *despite* that-- In all our years together, he never let me forget I wasn't his type. I was very very good at making him happy, to which he was vulnerable. (relationship with his mother, etc.) So he chose me.

Our whole marriage ran at a deficit. The whole time.

Once at our happiest moment, he announced I had become his type. I was overjoyed, but looking back, it seems to me it mostly shows that type was still on his mind. Reassuring himself as much as he was praising me.

No wonder he was so angry when I couldn't give him children. Our whole marriage was based on my ability to provide what he wanted in return for his willingness to overlook my "type" failings. When I failed to live up to my end of the bargain, he no longer felt bound by his. Worse, he felt cheated.

Naturally much more complicated than this, but something very close, I guess.

And then Patte-- I remember the moment I realized I was in love with him, or something close. I remember our first kiss. If I'm honest, that first kiss wasn't so amazing. Sex was enthusiastic and athletic, which appealed to me, but it took me months to be able to respond sexually with my own pleasure. It became wonderful once he got comfortable with his own body, but nothing instant.

I was his type, though-- so different than it was with Jan. But I did the same thing. Gave myself a makeover to appeal to him. I'm quite good at sensing cues.

I often come close to calling Patte by my husband's name. I tune him out quite a bit. We've had crises before, but I never stayed upset for long. Was that because I knew it wouldn't last? Am I more upset now because I really care about losing him, or because I feel this time he's chosen someone else over me? (his wife) The other times we nearly broke up it was because he wanted to choose his wife, not because he had done so. Did I panic because I'll miss him, or because I can't stand he might not choose me?

He's very very good looking. He's very good in bed. He's so masculine he doesn't find me unfeminine or threatening. 

On the other hand, he's faithless. He's got major emotional issues (I know-- pot/kettle/black). He's often pompous and silly. He is very very bright, but often chooses not to articulate his intelligence. His thinking is limited by his fear of emotions, which makes him distrust intuition. I would *never* accept how he prioritizes his time, which his wife accepts. (Perhaps why she rejected him sexually for so long? Anger?)

He's beautiful, and a lovely object. But am I really in love with him? Or is he just a good option? A simple prop-- Michael Stipe's "one I love"? 

Or is this sour grapes?

Am I in love with him, or am I in love with what he can and does provide? What he could have provided if we'd ended up together? I felt in love with him at some point, didn't I?

In both cases, these were partly available men who represented challenge. Even if you overlook their relationship status as a factor, they both presented large warning signals. Still, I chased both as though my life depended on it.

Have I always pursued unavailable men? If I look back at my romantic history, there has been some of this, but not (at least) in the same way.

This started after my mother's suicide, I think. Somehow I lost my ability to trust that a man could really be smitten by me. But if I remember my past, my three most important relationships of my youth were all with men who were available, interested, and pursued me as much as I pursued them. 

Did I just lose confidence? Did I start seeing too much value in "converting" men who would not otherwise love me? Is this a way of working out my mother's rejection? 

Do I think at my age I can find a man who will still react that way to me? 

When I was younger, I seriously distrusted men who were attracted to me. I always had trouble feeling they saw me for who I was as a person. Was chasing unavailable men a way of asserting control over a situation? If I made them love me, then they would love what I wanted them to love? What do I want them to love?

I was briefly involved once before with a married man, when I was quite young, was that part of the pattern? I'm not sure. He was in a position of great power over me, and I looked up to him and was quite naive about believing him. Was that the same thing? Or did this pattern really begin after my mother's suicide? And if it did, what does it say?

One thing's for sure, I have a long history of using one man to get over another, and there's generally an overlap. This will be the first time in many many years that I'm really on my own for any length of time. I wish I could feel that as good for me instead of terrifying. 

Did I ever love Patte? If I did, then why did parts of my emotional landscape feel so blank? If I didn't, then why was I so desperate for him at times? How bound up were my emotions for him in my painful divorce and the idea I had he might rescue me from that mess?

I love him now, but that's a choice. Part of how I'm put together is to look at love as a decision, and stick to it. But really? 

I assume time alone will let me more properly evaluate my emotions for a new person. Again, that doesn't make me as enthusiastic as I suppose it should do.

Enough. I need to try to go back to sleep.

Day 1-- My Husband

I found out about my husband's affair one day after a long business trip.

After 13 years together, he was leaving for a woman he met in a bar and with whom he had been having an affair for nearly six months. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could easily find pictures of them together on Facebook.

He blames me for not being able to have a normal Dutch life. I am barren. Unable to carry to term. Childless. Infertile. A broken copy machine.

He says he might have been able to live with that, if I had compensated by showing more interest in having the kind of home life he wanted to have. He's never been able to define what that home life is-- he's only been able to say it wasn't any of the things I did.

The woman he met in a bar stopped sleeping with him ten weeks after he left me, so he came back and wanted to try therapy together. During our therapy try, he went to a dating site where he met and wooed Wendy the Wine Girl. I ended the therapy after I found out about her. I still have no idea why he bothered with the therapy.

Our marriage had been largely sexless for a year before he left-- his choice. He told me the stillbirth had ripped me up too much for him to take sexual pleasure from me anymore. He reminded me repeatedly I was never his type.

When I ended the therapy, the therapist sent me an apology letter for being part of the deception unknowingly. Jan complained bitterly I was setting unreasonable demands, and if I could show I could be the woman he wanted, then there would be no Wendy the Wine Girl.

He believes deeply that I deserve everything he's done. He has no pity or remorse.

Day 1-- Patte

Even before the affair, he & I were too close.

Some of you reading this may get angry, but I feel no real guilt for starting the affair.

(though I question how clever it was. different question.)

His marriage had been sexless for many years, with very little communication.  Her choice.

(I know the conventional wisdom is here, folks, but he had told me that over whiskey one night during a training course long before there was a question of love. We were sharing burdens about our faltering marriages, each by each. No reason to lie.)

I ended it because he was sexually intimate with H. again over the holidays.

Once I found out about it, everything after that point felt like cheating in a way nothing had before. Even emailing him was too much. That would make me guilty.

He never would have begun with me if he had a romantic relationship with his wife. He loves her. That's true.

She pushed him to the point where he very nearly stopped loving her. That's also true.

He loves me. I know this is true too.

But I know his first choice has always been his wife. If he can get his life back with her, I am overjoyed for him. True. He's a great man, and deserves his happiness. A life with me would never have been more than second choice.

And because he is in love with me, does love me deeply, there's no place at all for me in his life. None. For his sake, for my own dignity. I have to walk away completely. Now.

*****

My situation is different, so that naturally sucks. Sucks HARD.

But I'm kind of proud of myself I don't want his life to be a ruin just to make mine a little more bearable.

Wish that made it less painful too.

Alas.