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?
