She's Gone Again - 10 Years On

[MrBrside]

this is the second time she has left in 10 years, that hope is almost gone. Why would she come back to somebody she sees as a loser a second time?

You missunderstood my take.

By hope i meant you - You cannot control your WW, but you can control your actions and the outcome of your life.

Put the effort in - real effort - Not to win your WW back, but for you - to live the best life you can.

My WW cheating was the best thing that happened to me.

Seriously? And you was able to get over it and not hold it against her?

Get over it - yes. I love my life and i have an amazing relationship with our children.. Better than WW has with them IMO.

Hold against her - I'm grey rock. Interaction is to a bare minimum and i want nothing to do with her.. No so much because of the cheating, but because of the manipulation of our children.

I fought to save our relationship, and it wasnt bad. But i'm a lot happier now.

There are several good books out there about understanding how women work, and how given emotions can sway from minute to minute.

Can you recommend any MrB?

One i read last week was "get inside her - the female perspective" - by Marni Kinrys.

That was written from a female perspective, which was interesting to read. Ironically, i found a lot of the content alligned with what a lot of male writters such as Robert Glover and Corey Wayne in relation to Alpha tendancies.

[Thornton]

I can relate to how you're feeling, Smilie.

Mine left when we were looking at houses to buy. It made zero sense to me that she was thinking about pulling the plug. I obsessed over the reasons why it happened for months on end.

The anxiety was the worst part for me. Feeling light headed and nauseous all the time was crazy making.

For me, my saving grace was the gym. I hit the gym hard and still do to this day, it's became my therapy.

You can also watch vids on YouTube about letting go etc. There are several good Ted Talks you can find online that I think would benefit you.

[SteveLW]

smilie, I saw your question to Mr. B (great work here by the way!) about getting over it. I think one of the realizations a lot of LBSs come to at some point is that the MR they are trying to save wasn't all that great. We have a tendency when we get BD'd to romanticize the MR. "It was the best MR ever!" "He/she were the best spouse ever!" Etc.

At some point reality sets in and you realize that reconciliation or not, you do NOT want to go back to the MR as it was prior to BD. I know this was the case in my sitch. Immediately after BD I was thinking about how was I going to let go fo a MR that I enjoyed? After a few weeks I remembered that I spent a lot of time thinking that I couldn't wait until my daughter turned 18 so that I would have the freedom to decide whether I wanted to stay in a MR that was pretty stagnant. Now a lot of the stagnancy was my fault. I had fallen into some pretty awful patterns that were contributing to the state of the MR. But the overall point was that in the days/weeks after BD I had in my head that my MR was the greatest ever and that I had to save it all costs.

We have a saying around here: You should be working towards MR 2.0, whether that is with your WAS or someone new. You want to improve to the point where your next MR will be successful! As someone above stated, there is always plenty of blame to go around in these sitches, your goal should be to become a man only a fool would leave.

[smilie]

Its easy to figure out

Anything you think or the average person thinks,
the opposite will be true.

If you think left then it is right, and vice versa.

All that being said,
I agree don't try to figure it out.

Brilliant! So basically I'm Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party then?! You made me smile :-)

[MrBrside]

So basically I'm Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party then!

Spot on..

A rollercoaster !! - you just need to decide if you want to find your feet and move on, or stay on the crazy ride.

If and when you do speak to your WW, she will probably put it back on you...

Just remember - Cheaters rewrite history to espace accountability for their actions !

[smilie]

Sorry man, I can relate. In the thick of my sitch I can remember the "WHY?" moments and, looking back now, the panic attacks. The shortness of breath, the rapid heart rate, the feeling of powerlessness.

I think it's the powerlessness that is the hardest to crawl back from as your power has been taken at a moments notice. Not only that she ensured that I couldn't support myself or instruct a lawyer by taking the savings. Thank god for Bitcoin, that's all I can say, only had a tiny bit, cashed that in and hired a lawyer. That one thing alone, helped me grab that tiny bit of control back.

Pounding heart, shakiness, cold tingles and lightheadedness - the worst!

What I can tell you is that it does get better. As you learn to accept that you have no control over her, her actions or her choices you will get better at letting go. Ironically, letting go is what sometimes gets the WAS to start questioning if the choice they are making is the right one. I can't say it will happen in your sitch for sure, but holding on for dear life certainly doesn't help!

Letting go is the process I am going through at the moment and after 19 years, it's painful. God knows how people manage being together longer. I notice from the start that I can't control, nor would I want to control her or what she does. All I have ever asked for is respect and fairness. I suppose it's natural to want to cling on to this white-knuckle ride, but 'overrn' has already suggested letting her go in, in my mind at least.[/quote]

Lots of WSs in particular want their cake and eat it too. They want to go off and do who knows what with who knows who, but have the LBS waiting in the wings in case they change their mind. When you start removing yourself as Plan B, sometimes they realize that Plan A is all that solid!

She will see this start happening over the next few days. I need to email her later agreeing to her suggestion to come and collect her things on 10 July (she never took anything with her). That will be 7 weeks since she left. I shall be pleasant, short and to the point.

My lawyer will be sending a letter to her lawyer paving the way forward over the next day or two. She wants to know if the wife will be filing for divorce and if so to submit a draft petition. She requests the remainder of the funds that were taken from the savings account (which was a legal claim money from a rogue dentists I saw) be returned immediately. Also she is to pay me interim expenses seeing as I haven't been able to work for 7 years and have been reliant on her income and that is to be a paid from 1st July.

So perhaps she'll start thinking differently knowing that she has to pay out almost the same as if she was living here, plus funding her new life. Who knows, I'm not expecting anything and the good thing is at this stage, I'm not threatening divorce and she is being invited to submit a draft petition, if that's what she wants to do.

[LH19]

So perhaps she'll start thinking differently knowing that she has to pay out almost the same as if she was living here, plus funding her new life.

Logic NEVER wins out in these cases.

[smilie]

Put the effort in - real effort - Not to win your WW back, but for you - to live the best life you can.

Ok, get you. Yes, I need to start thinking like a single {solo?} person again and start to create the life I want without her in it. I suppose that's the angle I need to take seeing as she's gone now anyway.

Get over it - yes. I love my life and i have an amazing relationship with our children.. Better than WW has with them IMO.

Hold against her - I'm grey rock. Interaction is to a bare minimum and i want nothing to do with her.. No so much because of the cheating, but because of the manipulation of our children.

I fought to save our relationship, and it wasnt bad. But i'm a lot happier now.

I took it that you had got back together. After reading this it sounds like you're not anymore?

One i read last week was "get inside her - the female perspective" - by Marni Kinrys.

Now there's a title! I'll see if I can give it a look.

Cheers for your time, very much appreciated!

[Traveler]

Good morning, Smile.

So, it looks like she has set up home elsewhere and didn't divert the post via the postal service as this can be traced and I "may" be able to find out where she is. So calculated and planned. I think that's it then. No hope.

Been there, done that. When my long-term XGF left, the first shock was her leaving, the second shock was discovering that in contrast to her words she'd planned this enough to change her D's school district before moving out. The second shock was the realization was there was no easy way out, no shortcut home.

"No hope" is a thinking error. She doesn't plan to return to you. That doesn't mean she won't change her mind. As others have pointed out before, at one point she was completely uninterested in you, then she wanted to marry you, then she wanted out. She's changed her mind before. It could happen again in time.

As a reference point, my long-term XGF and I reconciled.

[smilie]

you just need to decide if you want to find your feet and move on, or stay on the crazy ride.

Think I'd prefer to find my feet at this stage as I'm not sure I could handle any more of this emotion and I need to get sorted.

If and when you do speak to your WW, she will probably put it back on you...

I remember this from before. She brought something up from years back just as we got together, trying to say that I had been chasing another woman just because I had sent her an email. I was an IT support guy for peaks sake, I sent loads of people emails! But that was litterally about 8 years prior to her going the first time! We got married since. AND then she brought it up again just before she walked out the door 4 weeks back. So that's 18 years ago! Mad.

Just remember - Cheaters rewrite history to espace accountability for their actions !

And probably tell everybody else what a bad and abusive guy you were, no doubt.