Jilted at the alter...is there ever an "excuse"?

[ConfusedLady8]

I posted in MI too for a more medical perspective on this, but please ladies can I have an emotional viewpoint on this also. I am so confused.

My DP of 3.5 years and I were in a very happy, loving relationship where I really did feel like I had found my other half. We just got on really well and and enjoyed being together and there was still sparks flying all over the place. He proposed, and our wedding was due to go ahead in October.

In September, he sent me a text to say he was sorry but couldn't go through with the wedding. He moved out of our house and would not see or talk to me to even discuss it. I was completely devastated and still am. I cry all the time and can't seem to let go.

Before this happened, he had previously been kind, thoughtful, unselfish, loving, supportive and dedicated all the time really. I wouldn't have had a bad word to say about him. I had no idea why this happened at the time but I suppose I had presumed there was an OW and I had just been blind to it.

It transpires now, 5 months later, that he has a stress induced nervous breakdown. He was very stressed out in the months before the wedding because my business had failed leaving us with debts and he was worried about the wedding costs. He took on a second job to help with costs and he was tired and frazzled. He's under treatment for a major depressive episode right now.

After treating me like complete crap for 5 months, he has now contacted me and said he is coming out of his depression and realises he made a massive mistake. He said his actions weren't "him".

Does anyone think that being MI is an "excuse" for saying nasty things, behaving very coldly, emotionally withdrawing, behaving very selfishly and causing a lot of pain to others without seeming to even care? He wants me to give him another chance.

I am so confused.

Half of me loves him still as much as before, I miss him, I can't imagine being with anyone else and I do believe he has had a breakdown as I know from friends that he has been signed off work and has not really left the house for months. I want to try and remember him as the man I thought he was and I really want that man back in my life.

On the other hand, months have passed, I have started to move on and gained some acceptance and I am terrified of being hurt any more than he has already hurt me. I feel like (MI or not) he did something really unforgivable to me and caused me so much hurt that I feel like I am no longer confident of his feeling towards me and also feel like I don't know him.

Please tell me if how much of a role an illness like this can play in relationships, and if you feel taking him back would be a bad idea. I am very, very confused.

He has said he will fix the humiliation by writing a public letter to all our friends and family to say he had a nervous breakdown and stuff but I still feel embarrassed when I see people. A lot of people don't even know the wedding never happened and they keep congratulating me.

Please help and try and give a balanced view. I am a serial lurker on here and know there is a lot of LTB advocates here, but please consider that we had an otherwise great relationship and I really wanted to marry this man. if there's any way to excuse his behaviour I'd like to do that but don't want to marry a man who doesn't love me as much as I love him.

The reason I am worried about this is because he said and acted also like he didn't love me anymore during this situation!

Also, if the OP's ex had cancer than she would need to similarly decide is that was a journey she was willing to embark upon with a man who she is not married to, does not have children with and is not even dating at present.

But if all you have holding you together is proximity and your fondness for one another can't withstand some time apart for both of you to heal, then what have you got?

Not sure I agree with that. I think most relationships would be in danger of falling apart with 18 months completely apart living separate lives.

Although the rest of your post is right. All I want is to turn back time really and I am bargaining for a way to do that in my mind :(

On that basis, my best advice is this. Don't try to help him. Be kind and be his friend, but leave the recovery completely to him. See what he is made of. And I wouldn't hide your anger either. If there's one thing I know that heals, it is to be yourself. Nothing is left festering then. Let him do his stuff and you do yours. Aside from that I would let time pass and see what transpires.

That sounds like really good advice.

FixItUp...I don't really agree with any of this. If you love a person enough to marry them, that's a lifetime commitment and you take the good with the bad and that's what I signed up for. If he's sick...I'll help him. If he wants me.

I'm struggling to articulate this, so please bear with me everyone!

Basically, with mental illness I think there's a difference between the illness and the personality of the person.

My ex was mentally ill. He had depression. He was also, by personality, a spoilt, immature, lazy manchild. It meant that when he got ill, life became intolerably tough. He was already unreasonable, and he became aggressive and violent too. After years of putting up with all kinds of crap, I left him.

With my DH, it was different. He is by personality, mature, caring, loving and responsible (when we started seeing each other all I heard repeatedly from EVERYONE was 'He's an absolutely lovely guy'). He had an episode of acute anxiety, which he couldn't handle. It sent him into a tailspin and he had no practice at talking about it, so he panicked and freaked out. With help, he's back to his former self - but with the difference that he has a bit more self-knowledge know, and support mechanisms in place should he need them again. I was prepared to put in the effort (emotional and practical) to see him through, because he was worth it!

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that blanket statements about mental illness aren't necessarily that helpful. This isn't a criticism of those posters who are urging caution - I believe they are trying to look out for the OP just as I am! It's just that mental illness means too many different things, and it's a different experience for every individual, and (by extension) every couple. Yes, it adds an element of difficulty and possible recurrence BUT so do all kinds of other practical stresses and strains (financial woes, addictions, imbalances in attitudes to housework, unequal roles in childcare etc etc etc). Every couple has these!

*now, not know. Oops!

I think at the moment it's too early to be certain it was just illness that made him panic and leave the relationship. Lots of people get depression but very few walk out on their partner telling them they don't love them and refuse to talk to them for a few months.
You need to give things time and it sounds as though your own unhappiness and neediness is clouding things.
You don't have to take the bad with the good any more in relationships, that's why we have divorce so if someone tells you they don't love you any more you aren't stuck in misery for life.
He may be depressed but he also had a personality that made him shut down and run rather than discuss his problems with you. Maybe you were too wound up with big wedding plans to see his unhappiness and to listen.
There's alot of work to be done to get this relationship to work again, it's not just how much you love someone. You have to give them space and listen to each other as well.

Thanks Struggling x

2rebecca....your fist sentence is right. I won't know until later I suppose. One he is better and knows for sure what he wants is when I will know. It's finding a way to cope with that uncertainty for weeks or months that I will have to try and find in myself.

He may be depressed but he also had a personality that made him shut down and run rather than discuss his problems with you

Definitely true, and he identified this all on his own. Recognises he has always done this and is going to get help for it.

Maybe you were too wound up with big wedding plans to see his unhappiness and to listen.

This has been a hard thing to admit, but it is true. I think he did come to me subtly a few times to tell me he was all right and I think I didn't understand because firstly he has always been so "together" and secondly I didn't know much about stress illnesses and didn't know stuff like this happened. If he seemed stressed out, I made him a nice dinner and lit some candles and had a great night of sex and laughing. I was trying to take his mind off it. I was getting it all wrong and what he really needed was for me to properly talk to him and draw out of him the fear he was feeling about life. Learning experience for me too.

I have apologised to him for not seeing, and not working out what the signs meant. He was very sweet and told me it wasn't my fault that he didn't communicate more directly.

"If you love a person enough to marry them, that's a lifetime commitment and you take the good with the bad and that's what I signed up for."

But it isn't what you signed up for.

That's the point - you haven't "signed up" for anything with this man.

Your wedding didn't happen. It was cancelled. Your fiance disappeared, broke off your relationship and stopped all contact with you.

There is NO lifetime commitment here.

You once loved him enough to agree to marry him and you are still devastated that the engagement was called off.

But it WAS called off.

If you start into a new relationship with him on the other side of his jilting you and having a breakdown, you don't START OFF with a lifetime commitment.

You start with "let's see how we go".

And you don't even start that until you are far less needy and unsteady than you are at the moment.

You don't owe him ANYTHING.

He's not your husband. He's not your fiance. He's not even your boyfriend.

He's a man who broke your heart and whom you still aren't over.

All he's asking for is a chink of hope that maybe one day things might work out between you.

Given the effect that tiny request has had on you, I'm starting to agree with the PP who said that it was unfair of him to have made that request.

So many typos in that. Sorry, crying this morning!

"One he is better and knows for sure what he wants is when I will know. It's finding a way to cope with that uncertainty for weeks or months that I will have to try and find in myself."

Please, please don't spend months and months waiting for him to decide what he wants.

YOU also need to use this time to heal and to fully explore what YOU want.

THAT's how you deal with the uncertainty - by embracing your own openness to what live might bring, including different lovers and different futures in different places with different people.

If you keep the same dream in your mind and just press the pause button for him to come back and start it up again with you, you will make yourself extremely vulnerable.

Join, I know what you are saying is correct, but the commitment was made emotionally and mentally by me long ago and it's something I haven't let go of yet. Once I let go of that, there's no going back for me. It;s a mental snap and if I let go of it, it's just gone.

I recognise it is probably (likely) misplaced at the moment and I think this is what everyone means by telling me that I need time and space.

It has had an effect on me. No doubt about that. The mind is racing with possible futures and how things could go and half the time I come up with some sort of rosy picture where everything is better than before and the rest of the time I come up with a disaster where what we had is just
broken and can't be fixed.

It's good in a way that he can't really talk to me too much, or we'd just fall back into it and end up messed up beyond belief. People are right that what happened can't be ignored or glossed over.

I just still can't really accept or believe it happened if I am honest. Maybe a big part of that is that we've never actually had an argument, a problem, a fight, a discussion...he was just gone.

It's such a weird thing to deal with.

Join in your second post what you're talking about is letting him go.

From where you are coming from, for me I know there's no going back.

LIste, you think you know him. But he is 37. You have known him for just over three years. A tiny portion of his actual life. It may well be that that the person you saw was the real him, or it could have been the abberation, and he is actually not your real love at all. You can't pause your own life till someone else figures out who they are.

We were friends for 11 years before we started dating oranges so I know him pretty well. Have seen him go through previous relationships before and stuff and know his character and nature really well before we were a couple. None of this is anything like him at all.

I have only read the first page.

I am disgusted at some of the attitudes towards mental illness and peoples unwillingness to forgive.

I only hope those people never get mentally ill themselves or their family members.

If you applied the same principle as 'what happens next time' to a new mother with PND being disinterested in her baby and delayed bonding you effectively writing her off as mother.

I shall go now and read the rest of the thread.

It must be a terribly weird thing to deal with :(

You seem to be doing really well in dealing with it, though. Far better than many people would manage in such a short time, I think.

But it's still early days for you and you are still quite obviously still very distressed by what has happened to you.

I don't have any strong feelings about whether you should eventually forgive him, or whether you two could end up happily together.

But when I read your posts I feel terribly protective towards you. You seem terribly vulnerable right now and like you need some time to get your own strength back.

And I can't see how you can do that if you are sitting around hoping he will choose you and waiting for him to be ready to go back in time with you.

"Once I let go of that, there's no going back for me. It;s a mental snap and if I let go of it, it's just gone."

I think if that's true, then you don't have much chance of having the happy ending you are so invested in right now.

You would need to let go of the old commitment that was shattered and build a new one based on your (plural) new reality. You would need to heal from the old hurt and open yourself up to him again.

I wish there was a shortcut through this, but I don't think there is one that won't lead to more pain down the line.

Sorry, I worded that wrong.

I do think you should forgive him, whatever happens.

But I'm not sure whether you should build a new romantic relationship with him.

I think Join makes important points.

OP, I still think that your posts are worryingly all about your ex-fiancé, what he feels, what he might want, his recovery, what he might decide in the future. You sound rather like a nervous candidate at her first job interview, terrified the interviewers might dismiss her as unsuitable without even thinking about the fact that you are also assessing the position and workplace for your own needs.

Please, whatever happens, focus on yourself, your recovery from a traumatic experience, the rebuilding of your self-esteem, what you want from your future, and, as someone else said, let him manage his own recovery. It's kinder to you both.

Join...I think where you are at mentally is where I should be to be happy and healthy on a daily basis, but I am just not there. Thank you for feeling protective...I think I need it! I am sitting around hoping. It's torturing myself and you are 100% right that this is the wrong place to be.

We met in my first job about 15 years ago and we've been friends that whole time really. He was asking me out for the whole 11 years before I agreed to go out with him, and to be honest, after so many years of thinking he was "too nice" or not my type we had that one kiss and my legs turned to jelly. I just knew that night that he was it. He touched my hand and I felt like I never wanted to stop touching him. I still feel like that. It's hard to explain but I never felt that with anyone else.

He said he just got happier and happier and fell more in love as he years went past. He acted it too..just grinning all the time and always touching me and interested in everything about me all the time. He asked me to move in after 6 months and proposed after a year (although he proposed thousands of times before without the diamond)

We were just still really in love..it's hard to explain how or why I am so sure of it but it was just what life was like. When stress was on us so bad for that few months of course we weren't laughing as much and we were both really worried, but I just thought this was normal and part of life. I had no idea he handled major pressure so badly because I'd never seen him experience it. We hugged a lot and he told me it would be OK. Maybe I was emotionally selfish because I just assumed he was ok and we never talked too deeply about how the stress was affecting him.

I am just explaining this really to let you know why it was such a shock and why it is so hard to let go and move on. We were just one of those couples that was rock solid. People still keep telling me they don't believe it. They scratch their heads wondering WTF happened.

If it does turn out he stopped loving me and wanting to marry me I think I will never understand anything again. I was so sure. No one ever loved me that way before and it scares the shit out of me if that turns out to be not true in some way.

MI has always been the only explanation that made any logical sense to me (or which set my mind at any ease that I wasn't mad myself) but at the same time I thought it would blow over after 2-3 weeks and he is still in such a bad state.

I know it took him ages to understand what was happening and I know he has only just started treatment properly for it. I am just so angry / upset that this is something I didn't see or couldn't help him with. I wish he'd told me or done anything other than ruin our bloody lives and I want to believe it was MI that made him act like such a monumental dick because in 15 years I never, ever saw him do anything remotely impulsive or mean before. He was Mr Nice Guy. Mr Easygoing. Mr Stand Up Guy.

Sorry for rambling. Yes, I am going to get dressed now and go to work. Being self employed is not helping me. I could do with being forced to get to work to keep me distracted and on some sort of schedule. Some days it is all I can do not to go round his house but I know I can't.

Bookroomred...youre right. All these posts will eventually sink in that I need to look after myself and recover me before I can think of anything else. I am listening. xx

"If it does turn out he stopped loving me and wanting to marry me I think I will never understand anything again."

But that's almost certainly not what happened.

From what you know he loved you very much and then had a pretty severe mental breakdown.

But the thing is that he stopped being able to love (for a while), he stopped being able to want to marry a person.

And that ripped your life apart and destroyed the future had planned.

It matters, to an extent, that it happened because he was unwell and not because he suddenly decided you weren't worth it.

It matters because that means you can reclaim your past - you can know that you were not wrong about how you two felt about each other, you can know that he meant everything he said when he said it.

But what that doesn't mean, is that you can also reclaim your old future.

The mental breakdown happened, the heartbreak happened, the wedding didn't happen, the relationship ended.

That is, of course, a really fucking heartbreaking story. :(

But it is a story that can have a lot of happy endings for both of you.

You're both still here, both still living your lives and figuring things out. Given how sick he was, I think that's something to be grateful for.

What happens next, for both of you, is not knowable yet. And if you can embrace that and be OK with it, you will be happier than if you fight it and hold onto the past and refuse to move on.

You HAVE to move on, whether you end up with him in the end or you don't.

For you have to get over the past and be OK with what has happened before you can move forward.

That was a beautful post. Going to print it off and read it over and over. Thank you

I had a very slightly similar situation many years ago - nothing like as serious, we weren't engaged, there was no 'jilting', but it still fucking hurt.

He said similar things when he started recovering. I was his friend foremost, I wanted to help, he wanted my help. I gave up hours and hours to help him - I was very young and naive, I loved him, I loved feeling like I was essential to his well being blah blah.

And then he found someone else. By that stage in his head I was all tied in to his recovery and was a link to an episode he didn't like. I suppose I was a constant reminder of a very bad period in his life. New woman was able to see him as he wanted to see himself, once he felt better. And then I had to go through the hurt all over again, and it was worse the second time because I was even more invested.

Obviously I have no idea what will happen with you two. But I would caution you against being too involved over the next few months, just in case in his head you end up being rather more nurse/counsellor/friend. That could leave open a role for a partner that, by that stage, he just doesn't see you filling.

I have a male friend who had a mental breakdown, and as a result wasn't in contact with his three kids for many months, mainly because of the breakdown and the medication he was on causing memory loss, he had lost ten years of his life, couldn't remember meeting, let alone marrying or having kids with his wife, and he felt it was unfair when he was told about the kids to be putting them in a situation where they are expecting daddy to be normal daddy and he cant even remember them, their likes, their dislikes, nothing. He couldn't even remember his father passing away, or the funeral. he had retreated mentally to losing his best friend, and that was the point he remained at.

He basically in his then mental state felt he was a burden and would cause too much emotional damage to the kids to be involved in their lives, though did write to his eldest as they were old enough to read and understand that daddy "just was a little poorly and needed to get better"

Maybe your ex partner didn't want to be in contact, because of causing emotional damage to you, not feeling good enough etc?

Sometimes when we are mentally ill we see things much differently to how we would usually.