Ok. So bit of a long one but here goes.
A friend has two children with her husband of 8 yrs. They’ve been together since they were teenagers. For the past 7 yrs he has been a stay at home Dad while she works in the city full time.
A few weeks before Christmas he says ‘he doesn’t love her anymore and, has fallen in love with their neighbour and their DD’s best friends mum’.!
I appreciate that being a stay at home Dad is lonely and that he would have to spend time with other mums to have any adult interaction, but, these two spent a LOT of time together for months before all this started, going to the cinema together and staying up drinking till the wee hours when she was 9 months pregnant with their second. When she asked, he would say ‘stop being paranoid or you wouldn’t worry if it was a man’
Here’s the tricky bit. He says he hasn’t ‘DONE’ anything and that as soon as he realised he was in love with someone else, he told her. Since then he has done nothing to make the marriage work.
When asked what he wants he simply says ‘I don’t know’ or ‘stop making me feel guilty’
He is the full time carer to her children so everyday she gets back from work she has to see him and when they talk he will say things like ‘ I still love her’ or ‘I miss her’(the other woman) this is so painful for my friend to hear.
Of course we are all vulnerable to ‘falling in love with someone else’ but surely you just remove yourself from the situation or don’t put yourself in it in the first place?
4 months on he still can’t commit to the marriage and she is waiting for him to make a decision but he says he can’t commit to her until he has fallen ‘out of love’ with this other woman... which might never happen! Financially he can’t move out because he hasn’t worked for years and she would need to pay for his rent and keep. When she suggests getting a nanny and he gets a job he says she is doing it out of spite as the children are happier and better off with him hugely she can’t disagree with but it is all frustrating for her. Has anyone had anything like this? What happened and what did you do?