Hi, Hope:
I really appreciate your thoughtful reply. It’s both nice and frickin’ tragic to know that there are plenty of folks going through this as well. In any case, I think your response makes a lot of sense.
As I’ve said, it’s the “letting go” part I have so much trouble with. I’m a professional holder of grudges... although most of the ones I’d hung onto for so many years got nearly obliterated by what my ex did. The events that caused the grudges are still in my mind, but now they’re more like “things that happened” than “things that hurt.” The “grudges” I hold now are against my ex and Beelzebub.
I think you’re right about the inability to make sense of it. While I can understand what my ex did and, to some extent, even why, I still can’t wrap my head around how, except to the extent that she’s so mentally ill. And, not being nearly AS mentally ill, I still really can’t understand how. And while I’ve felt aware enough to think that I’m way more cognizant of the damage my ex did than she ever could be, I also think that there’s more damage, perhaps way more, than I’ll ever really understand -- such as the damage she continues to do to our son. While she was spending 10 years of her childhood getting raped, her parents pretty much left her to fend for herself, emotionally. That’s what she’s doing to our son now -- without the rape component, thankfully. But I can’t really understand it because my parents never abandoned me.
I think that, to some extent, because love so often involves pain, it might be not be easy to see where one leaves off and the other begins. (Similar, though probably irrelevant, thing with love and sex: My “theory” is that in expressing nonsexual love, we do physical things -- kissing, caressing, cuddling -- that we also do as part of sex, so often it would be only natural to confuse the two.)
You mention the unforgivable things your ex did, and I’ve come to think of the things mine did as unforgivable... and yet I feel this need to forgive HER (though not the things). And so far, I just can’t forgive her, and it eats me up because it feels as though if I can do so, this stuff won’t plague me nearly as much. Then again, it’s equally possible that if I can accept NOT forgiving her, that could make it easier as well.
In mentioning your husband’s appearance, you bring up two things. First, starting a couple months after she left, I was surprised to notice that my wife looked less and less appealing every time I saw her. For one thing, she cried EVERY time I saw her for months. Also, she did NOT have the glow of A Woman In Love. Indeed, when she deigned to let me take her to dinner for her birthday after we’d been separated six months, she looked as though she’d gone out of her way NOT to be appealing (which, certainly, is possible). I saw her maybe half a dozen times after that, and she continued to look worse. I hoped that meant I had become less attracted to her, but… no, I think it was her just not looking so great.
The other thing is, I would think it was only natural to see one’s attractive ex-spouse and still think “Yum!” Most likely you were together, at least at the very beginning, because of mutual attraction. We can talk about appearances being superficial, but they certainly are how we judge people, particularly at first, and usually we don’t become physically attracted to people we don’t find physically attractive.
In saying we didn’t have a good marriage, I don’t mean that we had a BAD marriage. I never thought it was bad, and I still don’t. We didn’t have the necessary level of communication, in part because I was so afraid to lose her that I held my tongue a lot; and she held hers because she was afraid to devastate me by leaving. We always got along well, though, as I’ve said, that extended to rarely arguing and almost never fighting, which was kind of scary.
I do indeed have a better relationship, and most parts of my life are better than when we were together. The main difference between now and then, I think, is that my dad’s gone, and I miss him terribly, but in general, it’s hard to complain about my life (or should be). I am indeed thankful and grateful for so much, and that includes the support I’ve gotten from friends, family, even strangers.
My girlfriend, meanwhile, has no reason to think I would ever dump her in favor of my ex (or anybody else, really) or that she’s somehow in my ex’s “shadow.” She knows I’m no longer in love with my ex -- having also known me while I was, during the separation. The friendship my girlfriend and I had for a year before we started dating was far more “real” than the friendship I believed I’d established with my ex, which was more a case of us both being part of a GROUP of friends than actually BEING friends.
Again, thanks so much for your words of wisdom and kindness.
