My ex-DP and I were together for 10 years. We had an age difference of 20 years, so I was 16 years old and he was 36 when we met. I met him as soon as I left school, and was persuaded by him to not take up a job that was waiting for me in Manchester after school and to go and live with him in a village in Cornwall.
While the relationship had its many good points, I feel like I lost out on 2 things over that ten years: 1. I never was able to have a career. Without having worked before and having given up the job I was qualified for, I couldn't find anything in the Cornwall countryside to do. I worked in shops for minimum wage and in work areas that I wasn't qualified in for a low salary and all money was ploughed into the rent of a house for the two of us, which which he paid half of, on his much higher salary 2. I wanted to get married and have children, but he always said no. Over the course of the ten years he said he could maybe be persuaded to get married and have them eventually, but that due to aspects of my personal development and my "selfishness" (either something he thought I was doing wrong, didn't do enough housework, didn't earn enough money, responsibilities or whatever) it wasn't possible. He pressured me a lot to make more money, but I found it very hard, as I was unable to work in jobs that I was qualified to work in, living where we were living in the middle of the countryside and being minimally qualified.
I asked him if we could move to manchester where I had many career prospects, but he said if you want this relationship to work, you stay where I need to be. I said maybe I could live there part time and he said that he wouldn't stay with me if I did that. I said maybe we need to break up then, and he said if you leave me, no-one will touch you again because you have some serious flaws that only i can put up with. I talked to ex-DP a lot about this whole thing and the feelings of frustration I was having, but he brushed them aside and told me it was my problem, my "selfishness" and "greed" yearning for a more materialistic life. In our 7th year I asked -exDP to go to relationship counselling for us to work through our problems, but he refused and continued to refuse until the end.
We became very close friends with a group of people who also used to live locally. Ex-DP used to take the piss of them a lot for being village idiots, but in my twenties I sought a lot of solace with them because they were fun and they were my social life. Some of the women I became very close to, told them everything I was feeling and thinking, we used to have the keys to each other's houses and be with each other all the time and they used to take trips with me to the bigger towns and we used to go to the bars there.
Fastforward to my 27th birthday, I suddenly realise that I have wasted my entire twenties with a man who does not want to marry me and a career that has never been given a chance to take off. One day, my body just packs up my car and drives me out of the village, leaving everything behind. I called Ex-DP and told him it was over and also went to confide in one of the close female friends in the village who - at the time - was very understanding. Ex-DP went into denial. The second night I got there I had a ONS which I felt a huge amount of guilty about and found myself drunk and crying and feeling very alone.
Two weeks after I had left and set up in Manchester in a new job, the first reaction of ex-DP and everyone else was 'you can't do this.' As in, they said I literally couldn't, that it was impossible, that it was mad, that the town in which we lived was my life, I needed to be committed or on drugs for making such a sudden move. Did I not even want to work it out with ex-DP? Was I going to abandon him like this? They were right, the village WAS my life, but I didnt want it to be.
As I had no other friends (school friends were long gone) I was weak, resigned the job, and I moved back, influenced by the pressure of them all, apologised for my impulsiveness, apologised to ex-DP, asked him to take me back, which gave even more fuel to his fire about how I wasn't coming up to scratch, how I didn't deserve marriage and kids until I had proved myself to be consistent. However, I only lasted a month - My body kept walking me out of there like a zombie. I started to get hives every time I drove back into the village.
In the end I just had to leave again, and this time it was not taken lightly. I told them all I loved them and wanted to stay friends, but I just had to make a life for myself where I could get married and have kids and have a career, but that I would come back to see them. I've been gone for six months and since then their contact with me has been very difficult.
My female friends who I was so loyal to have betrayed me, told ex-DP all the things I said about him and our sex life to them, called my parents and told them stuff I used to complain to them about them, basically they have shunned me from their lives. They won't see me, and they are now friends with my ex-DP who has sent me endless angry messages and emails and phonecalls about my "selfishness," how I have committed a fatal flaw in leaving him and how none of them will ever forgive me. He has gone crying around the village and they now all protect him and agree with him that I fucked up his/their lives for taking friendship and relationship "so lightly."
I started seeing another man about 2 months ago, one of the women from the village cottoned on to this over facebook and, by mistake, sent me an email meant for someone else talking about me. She had found out his name, his job, the registration of his car...and sent them to my ex-DP- real stalkery stuff. When I confronted her about it, she accused me of betraying my ex-DP with this other man and how I must've been "seeing him all along and taking ex-DP for a ride for 10 years." Which is obviously not true. They have invented a whole alternative story.
I have tried to go back a few times just to keep up the friendship with them all (one of them even said to me - "don't tar us all with the same brush, we ARE separate people" - but that doesn't ring true.) I get ignored when I do go. If I don't go I get messages saying "so you think you're better than us now?" If I do go, I get ignored. It's real League of Gentleman stuff...
I'm devastated by this and feel a tremendous amount of guilt. It WAS my life for 10 years. I did the village plays, catered the village fetes, babysat all their children, did fundrasiers for the village school, talked to their moody teenage kids about boyfriends etc. We were all so close-knit. Ex-DP is saying that I have wasted 10 years of his life and is telling everyone I have left a "poor old man alone." But I gave him the best years of my life! And if he had been prepared to compromise with me needing to develop, needing something to change, I would've stayed. But no-one is willing to hear my explanation.
This would be different if it was just me and one other person (my ex-DP) wrangling over a break-up, but I now feel I am working against a crowd of people who all think the same thing and all hate me.
I suppose I just want you to tell me:
- what you all think of this and what I should do now
2., whether you think I could've done anything differently
- how I can get rid of this guilt?