You’re supposed to feel shitty, because that’s how getting dumped or breaking up is supposed to feel. She doesn’t owe you anything any more, so don’t expect her to do anything that makes you feel anything other than shitty.
Commiserate with friends; concentrate on your work and hobbies; ride it out. But don’t expect anything good.
This is why she broke it off. As a Mom, you want someone that will, ideally, think of your kids as their own, or at least, an extension of you and love your kids. Not just someone that will tolerate or not “look at the kid with an kind of disdain”. Come on, this is a seven year old, you will absolutely have an influence on this child’s personality.
Loving parents try to put people in their children’s lives that will enjoy the role, and be a positive force, not endure.
As for how quickly she “jumped back into the saddle”, she has been considering this since the first moment it was an issue with her kid, so it’s been far longer than 3 days.
I don’t really have any words of wisdom in this situation, so I’ll just offer you a virtual hug instead. If you feel like you’re giving up on life, though, please get help.
So it was the woman with the kid. You’re better off now. She’s just using guys, she wants no commitment. She already found a sperm donor, did you really want to be her puppet?
A couple of thoughts:
Very often, when people break up, they will give a stated reason that is not actually true. “I’m too busy,” etc., to try to smooth over hurt feelings. The stated reason is often not the true reason. This is standard.
Oftentimes, by the time a woman initiates a breakup, she has already made her mind pretty well and has already moved on. This is why she would be able to move on from you quickly.
I don’t disagree. But the Catch-22 of “You have to love my kid, but you can’t spend too much time getting close to my kid in case you bounce” leaves…what? My only chance of this working out was loving her kid at first sight?
Often people don’t actually know for sure why they want out of relationship so the reason they state may sound like a lie.
If you didn’t like the kid, I think this was for the best for all parties concerned. The mom probably realized this quite a while ago and just didn’t act on it.
I guess I made the mistake of thinking she would be different, but yeah, this is all probably true. She shouldn’t have strung me along when I had put my life on hold so I could try to integrate it with hers. She strung me along well into our breakup conversation, which opened with her saying “tell me what you’ve been thinking about and figured out and maybe it can save the relationship,” and then it seemed like she was amenable for about an hour until she finally dropped the hammer.
Yes, you are right. Honestly, all through the last month she’s been…kind of inconsiderate. While she was dumping me she had the gall to ask me to predict how many months would pass before we’d be friends again. Then even after the breakup she’d periodically text me random trivial things, which I thought was a sort of cruel thing to do to someone who was spending every waking minute hoping she would reach out to take it all back. The shampoo thing – I had to just block her after that.
Honestly, that kid sounded unbearable. There are at least two kinds of ways to screw up a kid, and both are equally damaging - authoritarian parenting and permissive parenting. Clearly, she fell into the latter camp and it would have only gotten worse from there. Mom’s behavior now explains a lot why her kid is like that. There is no way that relationship could have worked.
I think maybe it was! It sounds like she’s looking for an instadaddy. If it makes you feel better she’ll never find what she’s looking for: a guy that will put up with her and her kid’s crap while smiling, nodding and keeping his mouth shut.
You really were idealizing her and giving her more credit than she’s due.
You sound like a kind, genuine person who tries hard and deserves SO much better! When you pick yourself up (you WILL) I think you should go back on that same site and let your light shine. You have nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about. Nothing.
After a year of dating I would hope they would have moved past the “I don’t look at your daughter with disdain” and “I pouted and withdrew when I felt I wasn’t getting enough attention” stage. A woman looking for InstaDad would have moved him in and put up with his behavior, not broken up with him.
You may feel he’s idealizing her, but that’s no reason to demonize her now that they’re not a couple, particularly when we have the OP’s own description of his behavior and thought process to see what his role in this was. They were two people who didn’t work out. It happens literally every second of every day. No one has to be the total bad guy here.
Demonizing the woman here may feel cathartic, but if you do it too much it’ll get in the way of developing a stronger, more sustainable view of relationships that will help you heal from this and avoid this kind of pain in the future.
Most breakups are not caused by terrible people. Most breakups are caused by simple incompatibility. We all know people who are perfectly decent, loveable people who we simply don’t want to date-- our friends who aren’t out preferred sex, for example. Bob may be a wonderful person, but if you aren’t in to dudes, it’s not going to work. Should Bob feel bad or inadequate about this? Should he feel like he did something wrong? Of course not. Not being compatible with someone isn’t a matter of value or worth. It just is.
Even for couples who have a well-established relationship and have set out together to have a child, child rearing is HARD. A recent study shows having a child has the same negative impact on reported happiness as losing a spouse. Think about that. Having kids makes people miserable. It touches every minute of your life, often in difficult, expensive, inconvenient and annoying ways. There are good parts as well, of course. Amazingly transformative good parts. But easy it’s not.
What can make having kids even harder? Incompatible parenting styles. There are a million ways to raise a kid, and righteous backseat parenting aside, if you provide love, some structure, and basic needs, most of them work reasonably well. Most people who grow up in basically loving homes turn out fine. Chances are this lady’s parenting style isn’t 100% ideal, but also isn’t horrible-- which is the same boat basically everyone is in.
But our dear OPs parenting style is incompatible. In an established marriage, this is incredibly hard to deal with, but with enormous commitment and maybe some counseling it can sometimes be worked out. And people put that work in because they are committed to parenting their kids together.
In the OPs case, however, that isn’t there. The OP doesn’t seem particularly excited to be a parent, which is frankly a likely deal breaker right there. Throw in incompatible parenting styles and you’ve got a situation where it’s just not going to work.
OP, go find someone who makes you happy without qualifications. And don’t become a parent unless you really, truly, are 100% committed to being a parent. And let the woman find someone who can give her kids the love they deserve, who doesn’t make her feel like she has to choose between her kids and her SO, and who can be a complement to her parenting style.
You’ll both be better off after this all settled down.
Even Sven speaking the truth!
That said, I’ve dated plenty of women with kids. And none of them were as grating as the mother the OP describes.
But yeah, if your are going to date a mother, you have to accept the whole package. And in order to do that, you have to be at least somewhat agreeable on how to raise a child.
Personally, I would never date a woman whom has a “free range” approach to raising a kid. If you are not teaching your kid respect for adults or how to act properly in social situations, then you are probably not the right girl for me.
I don’t think he needs to demonize her. There’s a middle ground between idealizing and demonizing. In his OP he describes her as the kindest, most honest and decent woman he’s ever met. I think he’s put her on a pedestal, and a big part of getting over her is to realize that she’s human.
Thank you, that’s very kind of you. She IS looking for instadaddy, but I don’t mean that pejoratively. I mean that she really is looking for someone who will sort of slot right into her life because there’s a lot she won’t (or can’t) change. She won’t move geographically, she won’t budge on her parenting practices, etc. She slightly prefers dating childless guys because she doesn’t want her kid to have to share attention with another child – someone with one kid she’ll do, but any more is out of the question to her because she says her kid would be “outnumbered.”
I’ve tried to present her fairly. I read that book you recommended, and the part about rewriting the relationship to match your feelings about it rings true. For a while I was despondent because I thought I would never meet anyone like her again, but while I still think she’s basically a kind person, she can be really thoughtless and shitty sometimes too. Like everyone, I guess.
No, I wasn’t excited about it, and that was a big part of the problem. I always thought I’d like to have kids but the thought of it happening overnight (esp. when so many aspects like discipline are already baked in) terrified me. And there are so many resources for new bio parents and so few for new stepparents. That’s actually why I started my earlier thread. I knew that my day-to-day life would be dominated by a child, but what’s reasonable for me to be upset about and what’s not? Every minute while her kid was awake was devoted to her. Even when she was playing video games we would have to sit and watch her play. But was I wrong to be upset about that? I don’t know. I still don’t know. It’s moot now I guess.
Well you will just be miserable for several months. Then you will “come out of it” and get on with your life.
And thinking positive, if it were not for the bad times in life, the good times would not appear to be as good! (Gives a bit of contrast.)
Missed the edit window, but I realize the core issue is that I didn’t enjoy watching her play video games, regardless of what was the right or wrong feeling, and the right person would have enjoyed it.
You need to stop fretting about what’s “reasonable” to be upset over. People break up for all sorts of reasons, some of them much more shallow than what you were dealing with. Bottom line is that she was not compatible with you. Maybe someday you’ll meet a single mother whose kid you adore and get along with. Maybe you’ll meet a woman who doesn’t have kids at all. Anything is possible.
I agree; I was trying to point out that the OP was on one end of the pendulum, and several members of the crowd were on the other, and neither was useful.