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Lol such modesty Tryhard smile I’m not sure it’s ‘much better’ but we’ve navigated 3 days together with less turbulence than the previous week so we’ll see how things go. I have IC next week and I’m keen to keep working on my own stuff. Tomorrow and Tuesday I have stacks of work to do but will also hang out with ds2 as well. In the meantime the weather is gorgeous and it’s hard to be upset about anything.
Btw, the running and cycling yesterday, they were both planned activities by both of us. Dh has also taken up running since he left, which I find ironic as he keeps saying we have ‘nothing in common’ during any R talk. Erm, other than my main hobby and now his major form of exercise which he says he misses when he’s injured! The man is a moving contradiction.

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Oh and Tryhard, your commas are just fine smile

I was watching a tv show last night and something a character said really resonated with me. ‘This is your life you’re living right now, you’re in it’. This is going to be my mantra from now on when my thoughts turn to the future. I can’t control the future anyway. The other thing I was thinking is that the longer I stay married the better off I will be financially if it comes to D (I think, assuming everything we have is split 50/50). So if I get impatient and want to push things, maybe I should remind of that.

I’ve decided I need to take more action on socialising. I’ll start by looking around for more events to go to. This is the life I’m in, time to make the most of it.

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I like that phrase. Something that has come to me over the past few weeks is that I've been waiting a long time to enjoy my life. It's always been, 'I'll be happy when I've got this promotion,' or 'when we've moved house' or 'when the kids are out of nappies' or whatever. The last couple of years it's been 'when my marriage is better'. Actually, I just want to enjoy my life today because there's so much good in it and I deserve it and you do too. I like the idea of socialising. Do you mean dating, or just getting out and GAL with others?

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Ready to change has a great list of additional books after the great MWD books . Men are from Mars ..... is a good one ........ I am sure someone as educated as yourself has come across it , have you read it recently?

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I would add The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*** to your reading list. Hard to describe but it makes you look at how we measure our happiness.

Socialising is hard purely because at the start it is forced. It feels orchestrated and fake. A part of us also keeps checking to see if THEY have noticed and what effect it is having on THEM. But stick with it. Make the effort with other people, stay out a little longer even if what you really want is to go home and crawl under a blanket. It pays off. I had my first birthday party in 20 years last year. I booked a cocktail making masterclass, invited some of the mums (even though I didn't know them that well) and had a brilliant night. I also organised birthday drinks after work with colleagues past and present. I took all the birthday cards I received and lined them up like soldiers on the side. They were up for about three weeks. Every time I felt down, I looked at those cards and thought "I can do this" **.

** I normally only get five cards (D9, D12, H, MIL and SIL).


W40 (me), H40
M14, Together 16
D12, D9

BD Oct 17
Moved out Mar 18

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Alison: that sounds very much like my dh, whereas I’ve always been a ‘live in the moment, don’t bother planning’ sort of person, last year Ds2 and I went away and we bought maps on the ferry and changed our minds every few days, it was wonderful... This crisis has turned me into a planner! I prefer my previous spontaneous self I think. Things mostly turn out ok if you don’t plan and sometimes those are the most memorable times, maybe I need to make the most of dh not being around given he’s the one usually obsessed with the future and with planning smile

The socialising is not dating but just doing stuff with other new people. I work at home and it’s super isolating so I need to organise social stuff I think. I’m not good left to my own devices. And meeting new people energises me, though I hate too much routine. I’m pretty good at chatting to random strangers (I just went to the pub and bumped into a random Irish geezer who bought me lots of drinks last time I was there, funnily enough he wasn’t so friendly when I was there with my teen). So I think I need new people and structure in my life at the same time. I don’t think this was what my life was lacking before, the whole GAL thing perplexes my IC because as he points out I’ve always had a very busy and full life. Maybe I even used that to distance my dh? I can see how my mum does that though I’m not as extreme as her. So I’m remaining open to new people, sticking with my friends and yet still reserving space for my dh, it’s a juggling act. So I’m not sure I’m that similar to you FS in terms of socialising. I admire you so much though for organising your birthday bash! That’s fantastic smile And I’ve realised celebrating is something none of my family (either birth nor with dh) has done well and is something I’m planning to do a 180 on. I started by organising ds2’s birthday shindigs and ds1’s birthday dinner, both memorable occasions. More of these to come. Though our 25th wedding anniversary is the next one. Awkward! Maybe I’ll organise a party with all our old friends anyway and hope dh turns up lol. I’ve realised that dh and I have been awful at seeing joint friends over the years, it’s been my friends or some joint old friends but never truly joint new friends, I’ve been better at making new friends than him but he’s tended to shun my friends until recently. His friends are long-standing but also socioeconomically inferior which is weird. On the one hand loyalty is good, but on the other how sad not to trust colleagues. With great power comes great isolation.

I’ve not read either of those books but love a good self help book, I even listen to a podcast where they live By The Book and give their verdicts, sadly they hated your recommendation FS! I’ve read a book with a similar title though which I loved...

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There's probably a happy medium between planning the life out of your life, and going with the flow - especially when you're sharing a life with someone else who is at the other end of the spectrum! I know I enjoy planning and structure, but I also tend to defer leisure and pleasure until some imaginary time when I've 'earned' it and I really want to stop that. I'm not so good at socialising, but I tend to crave time alone rather than company, and prefer one on one company to parties etc. I am making sure to be in contact with a friend every day (I work at home at a lot too) and I think that is doing me good already.

When is your 25th?

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That's a good goal to have, Alison, having daily contact with a friend. I don't think I quite have that, because my friends work odd days and travel and so on. Funnily enough the school holidays are the hardest for that sort of thing because the teens aren't very talkative and my friends are off with their families. So now the kids are back to school tomorrow it's back to normal. I have IC tomorrow, a big work deadline, then meeting a friend for a run on Thursday and another on Friday, dh is coming home Thursday night to see ds2 in a school performance. I'm thinking about just heading upstairs to the sofa bed and not even bothering asking him if he wants to share a bed. I feel the need to pull back a little but not sure why, I think because I haven't seen that much progress from him lately. Our 25th is in July, it would be nice to celebrate it but who knows. I have been thinking hard today about how ambivalent dh has been about our whole family for quite a long time now, it's really very very sad. I don't know how much of it is his work taking over his life and how much is damage from his past, but either way I wish I had shown more compassion earlier and maybe forced him to take action earlier instead of thinking things would improve. I don't know whether that would have worked though. Working out how much of this is me, how much is him and how much is us is a very tricky task I think.

Dilly 2.0 progress: I backslid on the wine the last 2 days, because there was some left in the fridge by dh. I should have poured it away. I've done some work but not enough, I have felt very distracted. Emotionally I have been a bit fragile but maybe that is as a result of spending quite a lot of time with dh over the last 10 days, far more than actually for 2 years I just realised? I also got my period today so that might also be a factor, these things turn up in mysterious ways nowadays and I never know when to expect one or not. Considering the hormones I've probably been remarkably calm actually, because the hormones have hit me like a truck the last few months. I'm going to yoga tonight so that will help a lot, then tomorrow I will throw myself into work big time to meet this deadline. I'm doing ok all things considered, feeling fairly patient and accepting but also not sure how long this will last. I feel like I'm holding on tight to dh again right now, not sure why. I feel like if we can get through this we can have a much better marriage, but I don't know whether he's capable of putting the work in. That's beyond my control, and something I really do have to accept.

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If you had forced him to take action earlier, what would that have looked like, Dilly? Do you mean an ultimatum?

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I don't know but you can't change the past anyway. He did have a mini BD a few years back, he had this huge thing at work and he couldn't handle it at all and was unbelievably horrible to live with, he moved into a hotel for a few days but only round the corner and then we made up, and I let everything just get swept under the rug. If I had ever realised we would end up here I would have never let him come back. He still tells me he resents the way I behaved about his work thing (it took years to resolve and was very, very stressful for him, but I thought I was being SUPPORTIVE in telling him that no matter what it would be ok and even if he lost his job we would be ok, I thought I was showing unconditional love but apparently I should have...I don't know, validated? Who knows, I still don't know)

Going back past that, we have had a turbulent relationship for longer than that. He is very hard to live with (and I probably tolerated much more than I should have). I spent a few years planning to leave him, I even had the bank print out the last 6 months of statements so I knew where our financials were. I had a sort of EA about 7 years ago (which I have never told anyone about, not even my IC) when I was going through a big midlife transition thing and after a few months I met up with him and kissed him and it felt horribly wrong, then I realised what a huge mistake that would be and cut off all contact and put much more effort into my marriage. I felt so guilty and awful, and realised that looking elsewhere was a stupid mistake. It did show me what my marriage was missing though: respect, interest, attention, intellectual stimulation. These are things my dh could give me if he chose to, and to some extent he has been more since he left. But these are things I should have been demanding from him long ago, instead of putting up with a long slow slide into resentment on both sides and anger on his and distancing on mine. His behaviour was pretty intolerable at times, but instead of being assertive and putting in boundaries, I complained to my friends and just dissipated the energy that way instead. And then things would improve a bit, we would go on holiday and reconnect and enjoy each other's company and sex and stuff and I would think 'well no marriage is perfect and I love him despite his imperfections' and then the whole cycle would go on again and getting worse all the time. I did see an IC a few years ago too when things were really bad between me and dh but I didn't let my guard down with her, I either warmed our relationship up enough to make things better or dh just got less stressed at work and so didn't bring that home so I stopped seeing her. I guess I got complacent and lazy. I always thought he had the problems so I didn't need to work on me. It's only since BD that I've realised my attachment style is NOT secure and that I need intimacy and affection and attention and I've been shutting those down all this time. It's painful stuff to learn, but then this whole time has been painful. Some days I wish I could just put this pain down for a while and forget about it.

But anyway, that's not possible. So instead I will keep chipping away at my stuff, work super hard at putting in boundaries with dh (I think I did ok with this on the weekend, I don't believe he wants to be critical of me any more than I want him to, I do believe he wants to be a better person and is struggling with knowing how and overcoming bad habits) and hope he works on his stuff. Patience. And more patience.

Last edited by dillydaf; 04/23/19 05:48 PM.
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