I am looking for some alternative points of view. I’ve heard from my family, my friends and my ex partner but I’d like to throw this out to the wider world.
I’m 44, average English guy. I met and fell in love (with a big L) with a wonderful woman three years ago about my age. I’ll call her Ex from here on in.
So many things were wonderful. I loved her strength, her beauty, sense of humour and her daughter (now ten years old). Many other things.
We never had it easy. Her ex husband looked after his daughter very well (I’ve not issue with that) financially – paid for really good prep school in London and there was an Amex for any of her needs which my ex was in control of (and in fairness was pretty sensible in use of it).
My Ex comes from Indonesia so we had the challenge of understanding each other whilst coming from very different cultures. I’d say most of the time we had a wonderful time but in the other bit of the time we had a dreadful time – massively misunderstanding each other when the pressure was on.
Just under one year into the relationship I asked her to marry me – I couldn’t imagine ever being happier when she said yes. Time passes, I buy a house for her and her daughter last summer. Moving and settling together is something I understand is never easy but my word this was had. I’d put everything thing I had into the house and was working 50 / 60 hours a week, but the first few months were really hard.
I’d left it to my partner to choose the house she wanted with the budget I could afford. Once we moved in though it was a whirlwind of demands and requests. I’d come home from a full on day to “can we have this”, I “want to change this”, “we need this”. I’d been clear from the start that once I’d bought the place we’d need to consolidate, save our pennies for what we really needed further down the line. But it was as if I’d never uttered those words.
The more the demands grew, the more I retreated. My partner complained I wasn’t talking to her – I was afraid to as I was worried what more would be asked for next. I tried to stay cool but things blew up. She moved out, I asked her to come back, she did. It was very hard but I thought we had both come to terms with it as a reaction to the intensity of moving in together.
More recently – from the start of 2016 my job was getting increasingly intense. I had a new boss, the company was performing badly and I was working my socks off. I was worried about the future, ability to pay the mortgage etc. Through this time I tried to stay positive about things at home – I didn’t want to put at risk the wonderful life I had there because of the crap I was experiencing at work. I didn’t always succeed – I could be grumpy or thoughtless on occasion but I tried hard.
Things go harder in the summer. I was put through a redundancy programe which dragged on for ten weeks. I fought really hard to keep my job and by extension the house – I have no savings and my ex doesn’t work. I kept my job.
During that time I felt I had zero support from my partner. I don’t mean money or a pat on the head. I mean an understanding, a bit of support, ‘are you ok’, ‘thank you for fighting so hard for us’. Instead I got ‘ can we get a new TV’, ‘ can we go to Greece for a couple of weeks’, ‘I’d like a new sofa’. I repeated my advice from last year, gently, we have to be careful there is too much at risk. Alongside this it felt like whenever anything was planned for us together the focus was on what was easier for the Ex ‘I’d like to leave at lunch time on Friday for our camping weekend, why don’t you get the train after work and meet us there’ – because it would take me four hours to get there instead of two with us together and we spend train and petrol…. Lots of examples of this…
So, then there was the blow up. A silly argument about the garden. My ex complained I’d not sorted things out and I’d ‘failed’. This was after another long day at work, plenty of stuff to deal with and then coming home to be told I’d failed on cleaning up the garden. I tried hard to say yes I could do more but I don’t have much time and am under pressure but this didn’t wash. In the end I got quite frustrated and basically said she has all the time in the world, I have none (she doesn’t work), I am busting my guts to keep everything together and getting zero support and called her a spoilt princess.
I shouldn’t have said that or reacted that way, I know. But I was exhausted and frustrated at carrying all the risk and stress. My ex response was to say ‘that’s it, I am not talking to you anymore’. A week later she announced that they would move out.
I was devastated and wrecked. Physically the lot. I asked her many times if that was what she really wanted to do. There was then a month of her living there before she could move into the new place she has found for her daughter and herself. Interestingly the rent on the place is almost six hundred pounds more than the mortgage on the house I’d bought but could no longer afford to pay for now her ex wasn’t contributing to the mortgage to offset some of the costs of me looking after his step daughter.
Still with me? Thank you. Subsequently Ex told me that throughout the process of her moving out she wanted me to persuade her to stay. I think deep down I knew this but wasn’t prepared to do it. Not because I don’t love her, miss her or her daughter but because the hurt / rejection of her threat to move out of the house I’d bought for her, her daughter, us, together, a family for ever was something she could gamble on? I spent months in agony walking back into the house and it being empty, physically in pain. I am now in the final throws of selling the house and moving away but it still hurts. It probably will always.
Please let me know what you think? Be kind but honest.