To date I've three threads, and been active, on the newcomers forum and have popped over here to see if there's anyone out there in the same predicament. My threads are:
As my first thread title suggests, my W (of 24 years) had a FB request from her first love in late March 15 and in mid-May 15 she moved out, after a big row, to live with him, 250 miles away on a trailer park; our marital home is 3,000+ sq ft in size, so you can see this is a big shift. We've been in very minimal contact and she's already filed for D and according to my L is keen to get things finalised ASAP, apparently she wants to buy an ocean going boat with him (don't know the size). This is someone who's only been on cruises with her parents when younger (and hated them) and, almost to a point of obsession, showed disdain for small river boats when we were together.
My grownup S has said that he won't talk to her again and my grownup D is still talking to her mum via email and FB but has only seen her once (very recently) and that was because my D put herself out to go to the area where my W is living; she wasn't shown the trailer or told exactly where it's parked.
Having spoken with my D since it seems it was a very unsatisfactory encounter and she told her mum a few home truths. My D is however scared that if she drops contact my W will take the opportunity to leave the country and in effect disappear.
I fully appreciate that the relationship my D and S have with my W is for them to work out, but it does hurt that neither of the kids really feel like they have a mum and haven't done for along while as my wife was a workaholic. I am simply working hard to be their rock and so far am doing a reasonably good job.
I have been working on myself and seem to have reached a reasonably detached from my W place but as its only been 4 months since she left I am conscious that there will possibly be some slips backwards at some point in the near future.
I do fundamentally believe that life is an experience to learn from and have turned quite a few significant corners in quite a short time; my signature tag should give you a hint of where I've come from.
Apparently my W simply keeps on saying to our D that "she's happy and feels like she should have left me a long time ago". Apparently a big fight we had 20+years ago where we both got low-level physical with one another is something she can forgive me for. She has struck me a number of times and I have much to my regret retaliated, NEVER have I lashed out first although I know I've been intimidating sometimes. All I am saying is I'm no angel but don't consider myself an abuser, more abused if I am honest. Maybe this is something I need to analyze further.
The reason for posting here is to find out if anyone her any experience of their S leaving them for their first love and whether you think this had any bearing on the duration of the A or an effect on the outcome? Not looking for miracle cures or spells or anything like that.
I've kept this intro short(ish) as its my first post here as I am respectful of you all, feel free to probe for other details as you see fit.
I am looking forward to getting to know you guys and to some really enlightening exchanges. I'll do my best to help others where I can but I am a relative newbie so forgive if I say a few things that are a bit naive. Oh and I can be a bit direct, so I ask that you don't take this personally and pull me up on it when it happens.
Avanti
- Nobody has ever learnt anything important from happiness and success; problems make us grow - Consult your plan, not your feelings - If you haven't set goals, how can you expect to achieve anything?
Did something happen 18-24 months prior to the bomb drop (BD)? From what you posted, it sounds like she had been detaching gradually from you and the family for quite some time.
I had to chuckle at her living arrangements because many of them "down size" when they run. Sounds like she's living out her fantasy of being on the open seas w/no responsibility. She's reliving much of what transpired during her childhood.
She's gone back in time to revisit it one more time. She thinks she's missed out on something back then and she possibly did. She was emotionally stunted at a young age and now, she has to go back and face those issues, accept those things that she had no control over and grow up.
First loves have a special place in the heart and memory, so she's trying to relive her life w/her first love for now. Wanting a divorce very quickly is not uncommon because she sees you and the relationship as being the reasons she's so unhappy. In her mind, the first love will make things right and rescue her from all of her unhappiness or it could be the other way around...but time will tell on that one.
BTW, if the first love had not been available, it would have been someone else.
Your wife, like most of the MLCers, will bring up discussions, disagreements or something that happened many years ago, as if it happened yesterday. Take what she says w/a grain of salt when she states that she should have left long ago. Trust me, if the marriage was that bad, she would have been gone a long time ago. It's the MLC/depression talking.
Keep the focus on you and your family. Allow the man upstairs to watch over and take care of your wife. She's got a long ways to go in her crisis.
Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to. The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
Nothing in particular 18-24 months ago. You are right she has been detaching from us for quite a 4-5 years. She chose to work 12+ hour days, 7 days a week (even though I consistently earned 3 times her income and worked 5 days a week 7-9 hours and a very occasional day at the weekend) and the kids and I were pretty much left to our own devices. In many ways I was her career coach but forgot to be her H by not working with her to rein things in..
She has said to our D that she was always there for them and was told "no you weren't mum, you were in the room but not with us".
She is reliving her past because she says that her parents finally made her break off her relationship with OM when she was 17 after 18/19 months, which was the second time she had broken up with him. There were 2 more boyfriends between me and him, plus her best mate made a play for the guy at one point too, so he's a bit of a magnet but ultimately can't hold relationships together for long. I am not concerned by him or fear him as being better than me, in fact writing that made me laugh.
He is a real catch it seems as he's not had just one but two failed marriages already. Maybe they are both thinking it'll be third time lucky for him, actually that's probably what they ARE thinking. How deluded.
You are also right in that she does see me as being the root of all her previous unhappiness, what an ogre I am. :-)
No of my kids are telling me that I am better off without her and apparently all of my D's friends are telling her, her mom's a bitch. My daughter, in quiet moments, tells me she thinks the same but doesn't want to lose her mum and that makes my heart ache.
My ethic at the moment is to be patient with myself and the sitch and allow the steps to the D to rumble on, her latest bombshell was to say that she doesn't want to do face to face mediation as she doesn't want to drive a 3 hour round trip a few times to reach the mediator, she would rather keep it with the L's which simply drives the cost up (she said she wanted to keep it all low cost) and slows things down =). I'll have a conversation with my L this week and take things from there, once she understands the implications of what she's decided, I expect her decision to change, again.
She's a very smart woman who seems to have been struck with a dumb stick all of a sudden.
What I guess I was trying to get an idea of was whether the A being with a first love has any impact on the length of time that a MLC takes to play out?
- Nobody has ever learnt anything important from happiness and success; problems make us grow - Consult your plan, not your feelings - If you haven't set goals, how can you expect to achieve anything?
Hi Avanti, welcome to the MLC area of the forum. I follow along and post from time to time in newcomers. But from what you post, it certainly sounds as though your W may well be in MLC. I had to smile about moving from the nice big family home to the trailer, plus escaping on the sailboat. It very much sounds as though she needed to step out of life for a while.
It may well be with the long work hours that there was some running away already and one of the things that comes from this current experience may ultimately be getting some more balance in her life.
Does the OM being 'first love' make a difference to MLC? I have no idea!! I can see the wistfulness associated with a lost first love. And a feature of MLC is going back and having 'one more go' at parts of your life. I would think that with this - as with any A - it will likely fizzle out at some point. The wistfulness of teen romance is very different to coping with ex-partners, kids from each previous M, a caravan etc. If their R is able to develop into a supportive and loving partnership, I will be very much surprised.
Anyway, you already know much about the DB approach and are off to a good start. However, this part of the forum does provide particular insight into the journey that MLC takes us on, which is helpful. You may find it useful to have a read of Cali's threads if you haven't already. He and his W are reconnecting after a couple of years apart.
Good luck to you my friend xx
T 13 M 7 Me 48 H 46 SS 15 BD 7.14 PA D final 5.16 (H filed)
We receive & we lose, and must try to achieve gratitude & embrace with whole hearts whatever of life that remains after the losses - Dubus
Avanti, Whether your wife is having an affair w/her first love or the pope, the length of her crisis depends upon her. If the first love breaks up w/her, she will mourn the loss and very well may take up w/another individual. The person they have the affair w/is only a symptom, or as we say here a band aid.
The crisis is based upon her childhood issues and she does have to work through those issues. She is the one that determines how long she stays in crisis, not the person she's involved with.
Also, she chose to work long hours and became a workaholic and it could have been her drug of choice in the beginning. She may have been attempting to compete w/you salary wise or she may have had it in her mind to work all of those hours to have extra money to stash away...but my guess...it was her drug of choice to self medicate herself and make herself feel better.
Mlcers usually spend a lot of money, love to travel a lot, find their "soul mates", party, drink, do drugs, gamble and yes, even right down to being workaholics. It's a time where they go back to do it one more time and they do experiment a bit more at midlife. Bottom line, they are like teenagers pushing the envelope on life to see what is out there and if they can do everything before mortality hits. They are scared of dying.
If she's been detaching 4-5 years...what happened back then?
As for her not wanting to do face to face mediation...that's guilt talking. She knows that if she has to face you, then she's got to face what she's done and she doesn't want to do that. If the lawyers handle things, it's not going to be personal and she won't have to face you. As for her changing her mind, I'll be surprised if she does. They really do not care how much it costs or how much it inconveniences us when it comes to settling w/a mediator or w/lawyers.
Actually, she was a very smart woman and the woman you loved is gone for now. She's going to eventually become the mirror image of the woman you knew (exact opposite), so please do not assume anything when it comes to her way of thinking and behaving now.
I do hope that I've answered your question about the first love and the impact on the length of the crisis. The answer is, he won't have anything to do w/the length. She's the only one that can determine how long or how short it will be.
For now, keep the focus on you.
Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to. The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
Sotto mentioned Cali's threads. We call him Cali, but his poster name is CaliGuy. I've taken the liberty of posting his first posting in the MLC Forum for you.
Cali has been doing a great job in dealing w/his wife's MLC. Unfortunately, at this time, he's unable to post as frequently as he has in the past due to user activity on computers at work. He does update us periodically on the progress and it looks very promising for him and his wife.
Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to. The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
That's pretty bleak job, one success story and so many LBS as a result of MLC. There does seem to be a sticky thread featuring other success stories but a lot of them are now no longer available suggesting the number of success stories has warned, is this true?
I've tried a good number of what is available quite recently and time is a big feature with change happening at unexpected and sometimes points that are to late as the LBS has moved on.
What it has brought home to me is that working on my healing and development sounds like it's even more important than I thought. The reality seems to have greater odds of my finding, at some point, an R with someone else than my W. Which is sad, but if that's the way it is, that's the way it is...
Frankly, if my W ends up with a subsequent OM, that will be a step too far over a boundary and the door to her will be forever closed. She did say that if it all goes wrong with her first love that she wouldn't come back to me, she'd find someone else, it was definitely over between us, but I know the rule of believing nothing a WS says.
I will check of Caliguy further, although I was aware of him and had briefly checked his sitch before.
I said 4-5 years ago, she started to change, but looking back it was way before that. She has always (since I have known her) been competing with her sister, to earn more, be better educated anything so that her mother would see her as the best.
Her sister is now running a very successful business that is in a similar field to her own yet even though she is more educated than her sister (she studied part time to get a first class honours degree), her mum sees the sister (who has no degree) being way ahead of and working harder than my W. This I know really hurts my W.
What your question and comment about competing with me brought home was that she really has been even though I didn't see it.
She is by far the most intellectual and qualified of the two of us and yet I slowly but surely accelerated away from her from a salary perspective and also ideas for investment of our money so that we have income above and beyond our what our careers provide - neither of us is working at the moment yet we are still making a good sum from investments, it pays all the standard bills and more.
She was also competing with everybody at work to be the best she could be. She needed constant top level appraisals, anything vaguely average was something she could not cope with. The more she worked the more they asked of her, so she worked harder, can you see the vicious cycle she thought she could break by working harder?
She is great at managing our money and earned way more than the average salary but her reserved and constant analysis meant she relied on me to go ahead and make decisions and take action with investments, even though it probably rankled her.
I think she also used to compete with me to be favoured parent too. I have to admit to being what she called a "super dad" that was ultimately a result of my being a (now reforming) mr nice guy, which I now know is not the best thing to be. What this meant was that she probably felt she was never going to be preferred over me when ultimately our kids needed both of us to be strong for them in our respective roles.
Thank you job for the guidance regarding what to expect of her thinking and her becoming the inverse of what I once knew, that tip will come in very handy to ensure I remain calm and composed.
- Nobody has ever learnt anything important from happiness and success; problems make us grow - Consult your plan, not your feelings - If you haven't set goals, how can you expect to achieve anything?
There have been a few that reconciled, but don't post here any longer, so their stories have not been completed here. Others do pop in periodically and give updates, but don't judge the success rate by what you read on the forums. Okay?
Yes, it is very important that you need to work on your own healing and development, there is no guarantee that she'll return or that you will want to reconcile w/her if she comes out of crisis. But again, we don't know what the future holds for any of us.
It sounds like your wife's parents may have demanded and/or expected her to be perfect in everything she did. She needs to feel successful and the only way to be so is perfect and this gives her the attention and admiration that she craves. Yes, she's on the wheel of perfection and it's going to drive her nuts or kill her if she doesn't learn to accept that no one is perfect all of the time. Again, she's looking for her mom's approval because the mother is still doing the comparison of the two girls. Again, I think this stems from her childhood and how her parents dealt with the two girls.
Hang in there! Be sure to take care of yourself. It's a long journey and one that you weren't invited on...but ultimately, you will learn more about yourself than ever before. You may decide to take up some of those old hobbies and sports that you use to like to do before you were married and don't be afraid to ask for help. People are always there to help if you need it.
After my husband of 24 years finally left me, I dated a lovely man for a couple of years (it was long distance so not quite ss serious as that sounds; we saw each other every couple of months but talked almost daily). Anyway, he dumped me for his old high school girlfriend who found him on Facebook.
Not comparing my situation to yours, obviously yours is much more painful and serious. But I did have some insights at the time. One thing, being with someone who knew you when you were young, they still see you as that hot young thing you used to be. And in my friend's case, he was kind of broken, but the old girlfriend knew him before he was broken. I really couldn't compete with that nostalgia.
That being said, he and I are still friends several years later, and I have a fantastic boyfriend now who is a better fit anyway.
As to your wife....sounds like there's a lot of complicating factors here. Was she by any chance approaching 50 or entering menopause? These things can set off MLC. Did anyone close to her die or have a life threatening illness?
The bottom line is, you really can't control what happens to her. You can choose the high road, focus on improving yourself and being the best dad you can be. Protect yourself financially and keep the divorce negotiations to business only.
With any luck, she'll soon figure out that the reality of the old boyfriend today doesn't match the fantasy she's held on to all these years. Hopefully she figures it out before he spends all her money.
Meanwhile focus on new adventures for you and your kids: live a life she'll be envious of and want to return to.
Also, do ask yourself, why did you tolerate her abusive behavior? Even if you don't get back together, you need to figure this stuff out so you don't repeat the same mistakes in future relationships.
Thank you job. You've dealt with each of the points excellently.
- Nobody has ever learnt anything important from happiness and success; problems make us grow - Consult your plan, not your feelings - If you haven't set goals, how can you expect to achieve anything?
