I could use an email buddy. Let her know about me.
A year is not a very long time to recover from a broken heart. You need to work on yourself first. A new partner will come naturally when you’ve moved on to the point that you’re not projecting your ex’s shortcomings onto the rest of the female population. Hell…it took me many years to get over my ex, and I left HIM! I dated, but it was a long time before I felt that I loved someone else.
Take the advice above. Get into something outside your head. Take a class, join a club, get a pet, exercise, and think about how nice life will be when you’re ready to share your life again. It’ll come. Give it time.
Support groups can be very good for you, if they are the right kind - the kind that empathizes, sympathizes, gives you support and advice, and kicks your ass when you start wallowing too long.
A pet is a great idea, a dog especially. Dog lovers are a very friendly bunch, and just sitting on a park bench with a dog is bound to bring over other dog lovers who want to pet him and talk about their own pets.
There are also play groups for dogs, where a club of people meet so their dogs can all play together and you’re vitually guaranteed to find friends there.
Secondly, having a dog around the house really does take off that lonely edge. Nothing’s a bigger ego boost than coming home and having a creature litteraly jump for joy at your return. If you get one which has a calm temperment, you’ll have a couch buddy for watching movies. Just petting them reduces a lot of stress.
If you’re worried about the dog being alone while you’re working, there’s almost certainly a Doggy Day Care in your area. For a few bucks, you can drop your dog off there in the morning, and they spend all day romping with the other “kids.” In the evening, you pick up a tired, happy dog, and a tired dog is a good dog.
Some centers offer training during the day, so they could help you with obedience. The center near me has a pool, and both indoor (air conditioned) and outdoor play areas, and the staff has game time periods throughout the day where they throw balls, or shine laser pointers on the floor for the dogs to chase. My pups have a hell of a lot of fun there.
dmatsch, you’re not alone, buddy. To quote a tune, ‘You got brothers and sisters who care’.
And I know all about missing the ‘trappings’ of a person, even if you no longer have positive feelings for the person.
We’re here for ya, pal. Rant on if you feel like it, chat if you feel like it. We’re here.
Some divorce support groups really attract people who are trying to find someone rather than actually work on what went wrong and what they could do differently next time.
Don’t worry so much about a relationship but do keep yourself busy. There are tons of opportunities to volunteer out there. Your daughter could go with you. Friends of the Library, Art Museums, Soup Kitchens and Homeless Shelters.
And if you find some kind of physical activity you like there is a group out there for almost everything. Running, swimming, scuba, all manner of team sports. At least they’ll get you out of the house and with other people which will help with that feeling like you’re crawling out of your own skin.
And may I suggest a book? It’s called Rebuilding: When your relationship ends. Can’t remember the author but in terms of divorce books it really gives you perspective from both sides which will help you understand what happened and what you may need to do differently next time.
Good luck. Hang in there.
In the past year I’ve lost count of the number of rebuilding and divorce coping books that I’ve read. They all seem to say the same thing as all of you (great people) here have said. Get out. Be you’re own person. Exercise. Etc.
Been there, done it all.
What the books and support groups seem to glance over is the 3am wakeups when all of the ghosts come into your bed to haunt and torment you.
Not to mention the “what-if’s”. What-if I brought her one more set of flowers, what-if I brushed her hair when I said that I was too tired. You all know.
An above poster nailed the word correctly for me. Betrayed. On many levels of the marriage. This is the hardest thing to deal with.
Thank you all for your help and support. I greatly appreciate it.
I’ll get though this…
Eventually.
thanks, Lissa, but I’ve already got two cats (one for me and a little monster for my daughter). I don’t think I have room for another ‘animule’ in the house.
And I don’t think my feline overlords would take kindly to a new addition.
Ah, yes, the middle of the night visits from the ghosts of everything you’ve ever said or done in your life, and everything you’re currently worrying about. I’ve found that the best cure for these is meditation. Once you’ve trained your body to relax and trained your mind that you’re the boss, and you’re the one in control, you can actually stop yourself from going down all these paths in the middle of the night and just go back to sleep. My mantra for this is, “Now is not the time for worrying. Now is the time for sleeping, and that’s what I’m going to do.” And I do.
And yes, you will get through this. And if you learn from it and let it go, you’ll be a better man because of it.
I have to laugh about the “deal breaker” thingy. If anyone would have told me my marriage would have survived my husband being a drug addict and eating enough drugs to more than pay off our house, WHILE I WAS PREGNANT, I would have said it was a deal breaker. Our marriage, while shaky, has a better foundation now than it ever has.
However, I am still dealing with the knowledge of what happened. I am living with the 3am wake ups. The fear, the anger, the disgust.
What helps me. I have learned a lot about who I am. The kind of person I want to be, the kind of life I want to have. The expectations I have for those in my life, the kind of mother I want to be to my child. It has nothing to do with him. It has everything to do with me. I am the one who can change my self, my life, my child.
You have a golden opportunity to learn from this. Don’t project onto her. Invest in yourself. Find out who you really are. Learn to live within yourself, rely on yourself, need yourself. When you are a whole person within yourself, then you can reach out honestly to another. I don’t know if you will find another. I don’t know if my husband will ever use drugs again. But today, I was the best woman I could be. I was the best mother I could be and I was the best me I could be. (Ok, so letting my daughter eat sand may not have been smart, but it was cute, she’s not great at feeding herself anyway)
Your daughter needs you to be a whole person. She needs you to set an example of how to deal with life’s disappointments. Do not miss this opportunity to grow so that she can grow. Show her, don’t tell her.
I understand the part about enjoying being a spouse. I feel for you.
Word.
Nah - that wasn’t it. It was the fantasy of it. She never saw it as a betrayal because “it’s just a game”.
Each person defines betrayal differently.
All I can give you is my best wishes.
This is the way I spent each and every waking day of the marriage. On the way home from work I would ask myself “what can I do today to be a good husband to her?” and “what can I do to make myself worthy of being her husband?”
Oh, come on now. :dubious: Each and every waking day? And you never were thoughtless, hurtful, neglectful, pissed off? :dubious: IMO, it sounds to me like you are concentrating on HER faults and not looking at your own. Handy way to stifle growth and also a good way to never move on.
And if your marriage took this much thought etc, than what kind of a marriage was it?
I truly feel for you-since I am going through (in stop motion, apparently) something similiar, BUT. It is never one partner’s “fault” that the marriage failed. Perhaps you thought you were being a good husband, and she just wanted you to be Tom (or whatever your RL name is), perhaps you were so wedded(forgive the atrocious pun) to Marriage, that you lost sight of the female individual that was your partner. Perhaps she resented your projection of Spousehood onto herself, and picked a cruel way to express her hurt.
I don’t know. Maybe she is a bitch whore from hell–we only know what you tell us. I can see how someone would miss being in a partnership, residing inside a marriage. Life can be lonely as hell.
I hope you find your way, and don’t mean to sound harsh. I think you’d be better off taking it one day at a time, find some kind of social outlet that involves face time and continue to be a good father to your daughter. If these things aren’t working, I suggest some professional counselling–that can provide a different type of safe haven and can act as a safety valve when feelings threaten to overwhelm you. Og knows it was a lifesaver for me a few years back.
Best of luck.
You don’t know me, nor did you know my marriage. Yes, believe it or not each and every day on my hour-long drive home from work I would ask myself, “tonight, how can I be a good husband to my wife?” Laundry, cleaning, making dinner, massages, hair brushing, or simply giving her space. Yes, there were the times I was mad or frustrated or just plain tired from work, but in the end it was not something that I was going to leave her for. Married couples work through their differences and come out stronger. I was a VERY supportive man to her in each and every aspect of our lives.
You’re absolutely right.
Thank you. And good luck with your own situation. Feel free to email me to really get to know what kind of person I am, or just vent on your current situation. Really! I’m a great listener.
What do you want from us here, dmatsch? If you want us to sympathize and tell you you were completely right and she was completely wrong, well, we’ll sympathize that you’re having a hard time. If you want us to only tell you things you want to hear, you’re on the wrong message board. If you want us to give you the best advice we can give a stranger over that same message board, not knowing him or the complete circumstances, well, we’ve given you that already, and we’ll help you more if you let us. If you just want to vent, we can do that too, if you’re still at “angry” and not quite ready for “fix it.”
I understand your hurt, dmatsch; I’ve been there too. It’s hard, terribly hard. When I married, I understood it was for life and I was determined that, despite all the ways my ex-husband failed to keep his end of the bargain, I would stick with it. For lots of reasons, I finally realized that the answer was to end it. I was sick, so sick! for a while–sickened that the life I was living was a fraud, that I had chosen, accepted and was living a dysfunctional life (me, who thought she made great decisions and was always in control). It sounds sort of riduculous to say this out loud, now, but looking back at that horrible time when I was crying so much, not eating, losing weight, worried about my children, etc., I see it as a good period in my life. Why? Because, despite the pain of disengaging from that life, that very painful separation meant that I was becoming free! Freeing myself from that which was causing me so much pain.
I don’t know if this is making any sense at all, because it’s pretty hard to describe. What I’m trying to convey to you is this: I’ve come out the other side, and painful though the interim period was, I can look back on it now and feel good, because I’m in a better place now. That period of pain was necessary and, in retrospect, it was good.
First let me add my condolences and sympathy. I don’t have much to contribute beyond what’s already been said by some posters; I think Lissa has presented some really sound advice which I would only reiterate. But one thing you said struck me, and I’ll apologize in advance if my response to it sounds arrogant:
I really doubt this. How can I pretend to know what’s in your mind and heart? Obviously I’d be a fool to do so. But I’d encourage you to consider the possibility that even though this might feel like the truth, and even though you might really have needed or wanted this to be the truth at the time, it wasn’t and probably still isn’t. Given the strength of your feelings for your wife, given your dedication to the marriage, given your daily commitment to being a better husband, it simply doesn’t make sense that your love for her would immediately cease to exist. In my experience, love doesn’t work that way, not in the face of loss, in the face of death, or even in the face of betrayal.
You’re angry and have every right to feel deeply wounded. You’ve been betrayed and have every right to feel like there’s no way you could be in a relationship with her again, ever. You have every right to be cautious dating; I’d agree that bringing up marriage before meeting is premature, to say the least. When people talk about men being afraid to commit, they’re not talking about what you’re experiencing, of that I think you can be confident. We’re fond of thinking that there are two sides to every story, because it’s usually true, but it’s entirely possible that her transgression had almost nothing to do with you or the level of your dedication–entirely possible that you are blameless here, that there’s nothing to speak of which you did to cause this or might have done to prevent it.
But I think it would be better to recognize that feelings don’t simply vanish, that while love might take a backseat to anger, it doesn’t walk away. Personally, I’ve had the same reaction to betrayal, only to realize two years later that I was still so hurt because I’d never given myself room to mourn the loss. She hurt me, she didn’t need me anymore, and the only thing I could do at the time was to return the favor and not need her, not love her anymore. It was too painful to admit I still loved her; it was too embarrasing or even pathetic to face the notion that I still had feelings for her after what she did. Rather than being allowed to die a natural death, I buried those feelings alive–and that’s what fucked me up.
If I’m projecting my own experience onto you, I apologize…but I’ve seen this play out in many others, including someone who was hurt by me. But the sound of one’s heart slamming shut sounds all too familiar. It’s OK to feel deeply betrayed and still love the one who betrayed you. For me, I knew I was finally OK with it when it wasn’t painful to remember the good parts, the times when we were crazy in love and everybody around us could see it. I used to say the same thing you said in the OP, that I didn’t think that I’d ever be able to trust another woman enough to give her my heart. What I learned is that you don’t give your heart away to someone; when it’s ready, your heart gives you away.
It’s not impossible. My husband is that way. Every single day, he does something to show me how much he loves and appreciates me. I make the same effort.
Sure, he’s occasionally subject to bad moods and the like because he’s human, but he always says things like, “I’m sorry if I’m a little short with you but I’ve had a bad day.”
[quot=dmatsch]The discovery of her betrayal ended any feelings I had for her. Period.
[/quote]
Sequent has a point. You DO still have feelings for your wife. You wouldn’t still feel hurt if you didn’t. If you had no feelings for her, you’d be completely indifferent that she’s gone.
The reason I say this is because you do need to acknowledge that you still have wounds, and take the time for yourself to heal them. The only thing that will do that is time.
Don’t dwell on what went wrong, or what you could have done to change things. There isn’t anything you could have done. If your wife was willing to betray you, it was only a matter of time until she found a way. Secondly, even if there was something you could have done to keep her, would you really want to, knowing what she’s really like? Whatever the rights and wrongs of the sitiation, you two were just not meant to be. You had too much of a differing viewpoint on crucial issues and things would just have gotten worse.
Instead of looking at blame, be gratfeul that you now have a chance to find what (and who) will make you truly happy. You have endless possibilities now.
Well…I went though a similar experience six years ago. My mate of 20 years decided it was more exciting to find a lover online than to work on our admittedly failing marriage. So I divorced her, and suffered mightily for months, asking many of the same questions you’ve asked, and raising a 15 year old daughter alone.
No offense meant to anyone, but the thing that made a huge difference for me, suffering-wise, was that I found a woman who wanted nothing more than to just screw my socks off. Yes, it was crass, shallow, cheap, whatever you want to call it. But boy did it ever get my mind off my self pitying. There were no relationship strings attached and I was able to walk away from it after a few months with a much improved outlook on life. Of course, nothing works in every case for everyone, but for me, this was some practical therapy that really worked. YMMV.