Perhaps apathy is a better description anyways. I know that is the word she has used occasionally.
I would drop around sometime and tell the other guy that you are fucking her. Things will sort themselves out faster than you would believe. Keep your left hand up and try to bob and weave.
(bolding mine)
Well, I have to say this adds a whole new level to the thread, which I’ve been watching and thinking on but not saying anything until now. Bear w/ me if it seems somewhat ‘stream of consciousness’.
I assume STBX means ‘soon-to’be-ex-wife’, right? So, you’re still legally married to the mother of your children, though not living w/ her and the kids live w/ you both on alternating weeks. And you’re dating/having sex with a woman who’s living w/ someone else you haven’t met and whose status you have only her word to determine. I won’t make any assumptions about why your marriage broke up, but on the off chance you left your wife for this woman, thinking she’d leave her guy for you in exchange…you, sir, have a lot to lose and lose it you will. Good character counts for a lot and your children are watching you. If they were adults right now, would you be unashamed enough to tell them your current situation?
My advice would be to wait until your divorce is final before getting fully immersed in the drama that is the girlfriend living w/ the other boyfriend but claiming to be abused by him. You have no proof of his abuse whatsoever, right, besides her word? Any police reports or corroboration by her friends? Have you met her friends, by the way? Or have there been times in the relationship you felt like a dirty secret…
Love does NOT conquer all, Mr. I Lead W/ My Heart, nor does it knit up the fabric of lives it tears apart. The only organ you should be processing ideas w/ is your brain.
I wish you luck and the words of a good counselor in the future when you’re racked w/ pain and disappointment.
Oh, and Happy New Year.
Okay, I didn’t see this before.
Do you (or anyone else?) find it awfully fishy that, in the past 8 months, she’s been seeing a guy that her other fellow doesn’t know about, and the abuse has simply stopped? Red flags, bells, whistles, ALARMS are going off in my head. I came from an abusive relationship. The abuse does not just “stop”, and certainly not for 8 months, broke up or not - if they are living together, the abuse would be going on. If he hit her once, he will hit her again. And again. And again. He doesn’t know about you, and so wouldn’t realise she might have a “protector”.
Something tells me she is lying about the abuse to gain your sympathy.
This is not a direct accusation, I am only going by what I am reading here and playing armchair “detective”. But this smells entirely too fishy to me.
Tread carefully. I hate my words to sound so mean and accusatory, as someone who’s been tangled in this web before myself, I understand that it all sounds harsh and hard to take. It’s tougher to see when you are the one so deeply embroiled in the situation. You want to be hopeful, you want to believe in love. I know, too well. And I hate that you have to go through any of this, I really do. I have immense empathy for all players in this situation.
I will say though, that in my situation, though we all came out of it shattered - I still believe in love. Real love, not infatuation, not obsession. And it did teach me the difference between the two, and the value of* real love*. I only mention this because you have mentioned how much you believe in “love”, and I want you to know that as heartbroken as I was, we all still came out of it okay, just on separate paths - all a little wiser. So you don’t have to give up on love. Hell, I’m not even saying you have to lose her forever, and if you back out now, there could be the possibility for a future between you two down the road, after she shakes off her past responsibilities, after she learns to love herself, after she leaves this guy for good and forever - if you get out now, the chance still exists. Not a guarantee, but certainly a better chance than things are now.
As always, I wish you all the best, all views expressed here are just my opinion, take it for what it’s worth. Sorry if I’m all over the place with this. I’m just having some flashbacks. 
Wow, some food for thought here to say the least. She has actually suggested a time out until things settle down an alternative I figured to be a gentle kiss off. Kind of like being laid off, “Your not fired, we just don’t need you right now.” Truth be told I am beginning to see that this may be necessary in the interim until she is able to make that break cleanly. It may be the best defense for my sanity and if the love is genuine and pure than it will sustain regardless of the time.
Suffice it to say I have some deep thinking and soul searching to do…like now!
nuke8, are you a masochist? or what dude?
How a man can be married for ten years and have three kids and NOT know all the stuff that’s already been posted, is beyond my comprehension…
Geez! This thread has been like a trainwreck; I know it’s wrong, but I just can’t stop reading it.
I am a man and therefore glutton for punishment.
I’m not stupid though and yes much of what has been said has crossed my mind a number of times. I am using the board as I believe it was intended…as a sounding board.
Actually, I think the purpose is fighting ignorance. Its taking longer than we thought. The fight has been on for 33 years now, and we’ve lost less civilians than that “other” war.
It still feels weird; your story. Is this for real, are you being honest with us. Its sound mildly implausible.
Yeah I may be a newbe but a disingenuous one? I think not. Where do you see the implausibility? The fact that a man can love so deeply? The fact that he can believe in the capacity for good to come from adversity and that despite the odds somehow come out smelling like a rose? Or that anyone would subject themselves to a relationship that isn’t cookie cutter or blessed with simplicity? Perhaps if you knew the principals it would be easier to make a rational assessment. I suppose you will have to take it all at face value and go from there.
Call me idealistic, call me naive but ignorant I am not.
I’m not sure I see love here as much as infatuation coupled with self-esteem issues, with some denial and cognitive dissonance thrown in. Or, more simply, the fear of being alone.
But, hey, anybody can play armchair psychologist on an anonymous medium like this. We might be wrong, but nothing about this relationship says mature or functional to me, and I don’t think this girl is as pure of heart as you make her out to be for the reasons already stated in this thread.
Tread carefully and be well.
As a parent who has treated his child poorly when his head was not in the right place, dude, get your head checked!
Having your heart ripped out will have a direct and negative effect on your kids.
Suggestion: Go back and read this thread start-to-finish, not just the updates. Read what you wrote, read what was said.
You have got a few major hurdles to clear to make sense of this:
- Abusive relationship that stopped once you were in the picture.
- Not moved out for 8 months though gainfully employed (?).
- With a guy that for all his meat-and-potatoes is OK with celibacy.
- You are not even divorced yet.
Don’t run…just walk very calmly and with a lot of good intentions to the nearest licensed psychologist and have a few chats about how you approach love, responsibility, intimacy and caring. Really.
-Tcat
Regarding the girl’s “purity of heart” – at the very, very least she has been lying to the man she lives with for eight months. “Purity of heart” seems to me something you’d find in someone who would have done the honest thing from the beginning.
Like everyone else has said, back up and look at all this. Get someone impartial to look at it too.
To be totally honest, you’re talking like someone took a high school student’s poetry notebook and tossed it in a blender with a Harlequin romance novel. “I lead with my heart” seems to me, in this case, to mean “I do what’s dramatic and ‘romantic’ no matter what the consequences”. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh; I have nothing against you and I hope stuff works out for you.
But you need to get your head straight here. You know what’s important in this situation? It’s not the girl. It’s not her maybe-abusive maybe-ex. It’s not your craving for female companionship. The important thing is your three children, and their mother to whom you are still married.
Read that again. Forget your flowery words and your dramatic relationship for a moment. You owe it to your kids to set a good example. You owe it to your kids to show respect to their mother (she owes it to them to show respect to you as well). You also owe it to your kids to be a grown-up. And you definitely owe it to them to wait until the divorce is final before you get involved with anyone, much less someone who, from all appearances, has a lot of issues.
Take. A break. Focus on getting over your marriage. It’s not the sort of thing you get over in a day. Rushing into a relationship like this is not helping; it’s just stuffing the hole rather than making the hole go away.
Be single for a while. This is not “living without love”. You have love. Your children love you; your family loves you. Learn to love yourself. Learn to not depend Having A Relationship to feel whole. If this girl really loves you, she’ll still be there in a year or so when you’ve gotten your head straightened out.
I second the recommendation for therapy. It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or that you’re mentally ill. It sounds like you’re going through a tough time with your own divorce and this other, troubling relationships. Being alone is very scary, I realize, but you can come to love it.
You owe it to yourself and your kids to get your head cleared and start to assuage all the hurts and sadness you’ve been dealing with lately. Put this other relationship on hold indefinitely, until she figures her deal out and you yours. You’ll be glad you did.
Take care, man. You’ll be all right once you get some perspective on all this.
Incidentally, I know it is not going to be easy for any of you to fathom but my children are #1 in my life and the only reason I am still married to their mother (a relationship and love that ended nearly 3 years ago) is because of her propensity for torturing me and dragging out a divorce that should have been cut and dry. I am not exactly fresh out of one love and headlong into another. I haven’t loved anyone but my children and family for the past 3 years and while this woman I fell for is complicated and the situation tricky I know this much; neither of us ever thought we would love again but by some cosmic twist of fate we found each other and while she has been slow in coming out of her situation, I can’t help but feel that it is only through mutual strength that either of us will make it to the next level.
I guess I just don’t want to walk away just because it is difficult. Anything worth having is worth fighting for and deep down we all want to believe that it is possible. That somehow despite all the “red flags” and other warning signs that this can work out. That love can survive.
The problem is we have all become so cynical to love. Pop culture has cheapened its meaning to a sound bite of Madison Avenue fodder and reduced the power of its utterance to a puff of impotent air. Ditch the word. Find a new one. Or don’t even bother. Just let it exist outside of yourself. The truest form of it transcends the individuals it empowers and becomes an entity unto itself. Call it “blended high school poetry and harlequin” drivel, call it insanity, call it whatever you like but admit that we all yearn for it. It is as essential as our quest for God himself.
Finally, well wishers, rubber neckers and doomsday prophets, I want you to know that I have read, reread and committed to memory much of what has been written in response to my query and it has served as a catharsis for what seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. For now I will leave you with this; I have decided to wait it out with guarded diligence, serving my children’s interest primarily and give the impossible a chance to favorably unfold.
Stay tuned. This just might be the best romantic comedy ever told!
See, thats what bothers me. Stay tuned. Its llike you made it up for us to read. If not, your “stay tuned” seems quite like a commercial preview.
If what you’re feeling for this woman is True Love, counseling won’t destroy it. If what you’re feeling for this woman is something other than True Love, couseling will help you see what it is more clearly.
Dude. In addition to twickster’s and Dragonblink’s most excellent comments above, I can only add this in response to your last post:
Love is not enough. It does not conquer all. It takes approximately one hundred other qualities in both individuals to make a normal relationship work, much less one that is fraught with all kinds of bullshit as you have here; quite frankly, I don’t see those one hundred qualities in her based purely on the circumstances you’ve described.
I know you’re in pretty deep emotionally and odds are you will not deliberately put an end to this situation until you’ve hit rock bottom and are hurt deeply, but do take a moment and think about what your kids see when they see you in these exact circumstances. Think about how you would view your own father as a youngster (“Dad took up with some unstable woman just after the divorce and she was living with some guy… no one knew exactly what was going on there. Dad was really infatuated…”)
I got very, very tired of dramatic situations like this in my life a long time ago; after learning to avoid it, it was the best leap I ever made. I truly wish the best for you, and good luck.
I think I will, actually.
More like a dark comedy, and neither you nor your girlfriend is being one of the good guys here.
If you love your children so much, it’s time to start setting a good example for them: not just by waiting before jumping into a new relationship, but by not allowing your chain to get pulled like this. Your girlfriend is a cheater and a liar.
I think you need to respect yourself a little more. You should have never tolerated dating a girl who lives with her ex in the first place, especially not without him even knowing about it. There’s no correcting that mistake from the past, but you can get it all out on the table the next time you see her. Either she moves out within X amount of time, or you’re moving on to a normal relationship with a more honest person. “Trying to have faith in love” is similar to saying “refusing to acknowledge reality.”
Nuke, i am so curious as to what happened. As i am in a identical situation,