Losing Myself and Gaining A Wife: Reconciliation and Regret Part 2
I will struggle for a while with not knowing how my ex-wife went from caring about me as she seems to again now, to verbally and emotionally abusing me, and then abandoning me for somebody else because she thought he was better. How she was willing to just bring him into our house and replace me. I will struggle with the thought that Teresa wouldn’t do that to me. This will have me comparing them until I can properly get over Teresa, which I don’t think I can without getting back with her. I’m starting to feel suffocated and pressured.
That was what I wrote after I told me ex-wife I wanted to end reconciliation and she made me feel like it was silly to do so this early.
Doubting and Defending Myself
I started feeling anxious again. Sleep became a struggle. I was scared to discuss the future, the inevitable moving in together, combining finances, and spending time with her family because I felt like I had to either hide my feelings or risk pissing her off.
I still didn’t understand what allowed my ex-wife to treat me like she did the previous year. One Friday night, we went on a date and walked along the coastline. We had a shared nanny who was a teacher at my son’s school before it closed down for Covid. We hired her so we could work during the day (schools were still closed). She gladly babysat the kids on nights like this, not so much for the money, but because she was cheering us on to get back together. Everyone was encouraging us and cheering us on. Except for maybe me.
My ex talked about how she got so tired of discussing the affair last year. That I kept asking about it. I did keep asking about it, because I knew there was more below the surface of what she had told me. I just didn’t know how far below the surface everything went. She was mad that I didn’t want her go to Palm Springs the weekend after uncovering there was an additional kiss between her and Donald…after she said she came clean about everything. At that time, the previous two nights I gave her a night off, she cheated and I was not about to take a gamble on a third night. The lack of awareness in this situation kept feeding my doubt on this reconciliation working out.
The previous year, my ex stopped appreciating me, told me I was a bad husband, cheated for months, called me names and gaslit me, lied about the lying, had me get a vasectomy while she was cheating, lied and plotted her plan with Donald to leave me while I was mourning the loss of my grandmother, watched me suffer through anxiety because of her actions, brought another man into the house I remodeled for her, refused to even discuss bringing him over, refused to even talk to me about reconciliation, got mad when I asked her back, wouldn’t tell me how long our marriage was “fake” or when or why she decided to leave me when she did, accused me of trying to keep the kids from her parents, and so much more.
And here I was holding hands with her now.
What If I Regret It?
I was worried that if I ended reconciliation, we might not be friends again. My therapist asked what was most important when talking to her about ending reconciliation: the objective, the relationship, or my self-worth. My self-worth was clearly at the bottom.
The relationship is what was most important. I wanted her and I to still love each other, even if it were just as family. I started to see a side that I saw on the night I found out she didn’t come clean about the first affair. While strolling on the date mentioned above, she got defensive and went on the attack. Seeing that I was still conflicted, she blurted out:
It’s now or never because I’m a fucking catch. It won’t take me long to find somebody else. Maybe somebody who lives in one of these houses.
I did believe she was a catch (for all the negative qualities that come out here, there are plenty of good qualities), but it made me wonder if she’s just scared to be alone. If she was the type of person who treats people (aka me) well when they have something to offer her, but can toss them out with the garbage if they don’t. When she “was 1000% sure that Donald was [my] soulmate and [we] would blend families,” she was so hurtful to me. When she realized that he wasn’t a long-term partner and that we were more compatible, she flipped.
I didn’t want to simply be the best option. But at this point, I almost felt like I didn’t have a choice. I wrote in the previous post that my son had behavioral issues at school that suddenly appeared during the separation, and then suddenly disappeared during reconciliation. I wouldn’t just break her heart, I would break my kids’ hearts.
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