@HattieAndHerBoy I'm sorry to butt in on this thread but your paragraph rang so many bells with me
Have you had counselling? Have you had the chance to ask someone to help you to understand why its so important to you that this man loves you? What is it about your make up/self esteem that has you hell bent on being the one your husband loves? Is it some kind of competition you have to win? Do you actually want him or is it that you don't want to be the 'loser' in this and for her to have him. Why do you not think you're worth more than this? Is a song worth this?
Is this something you've read up about? Can you please point me in the right direction
Chinup, I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to find your post.
I can’t really point you to anything I’ve read because most of what I’ve read started off as a few words I’d hear inside my head that I’d then google. So it was just little seeds being planted at the correct time. In fact reading a whole book on the subject of ‘how to get over an affair’ for eg wouldn’t have been for me because as far as I’m aware no one has ever written a book about me. I much preferred the bite sized pieces of reading as they popped up in my head because they were exactly about me - they were my thoughts.
The most important bit of all though was knowing that I deserved better. Not that coming to that conclusion came easy. I had to work very hard on myself before I could finally hear the voice telling me - you are worth so much more than this, you deserve better, you are too good for this etc etc etc.
The reality is that if you have low or poor self esteem you’ll put up with things in life that aren’t that great. You’ll even perhaps think you’ve got things sorted. But the reality is that the kind of sorted a person with low self esteem thinks is good wouldnt actually be good enough at all for anyone else who’s emotionally healthy and has good self esteem.
Oh and something else that made me think about things was my husband telling me ‘you won’ and I blurted out to him whilst laughing hysterically - yep, I won the booby prize. He of course thought I’d made a great joke but the truth is it’s what my self was telling me. Jeez it was scary when I’d stopped laughing hysterically and thought about it; That we don’t always need a brass band playing in our ear telling us there’s no going back because very often it’s the little whisper at the back of our mind or deep in our heart we should be listening to.
Five years on from separating me and my adult children are well and happy. We’ve never done the jumping up and down with glee regarding the very sad turn of events in our life but we do live peacefully knowing it was the best thing for us and our long term happiness. And that’s another thing - there doesn’t have to be fanfare when a marriage ends. It doesn’t have to be shouted from the rooftops. Not feeling the need to make a party out of ending a marriage doesn’t mean your marriage is still right for you.
Finally, I think if a person is at a crossroads in their life they really do need to know exactly what their self esteem has made of them before they make their decisions.