I am in a situation where I intellectually know I probably need to leave my DP but can't seem to do it. I am still young enough (38) to meet someone else and get married. I have grown kids, so that's not an issue but I have still never been married and would like a partner to grow old with if possible.
I know I would find it easy to find someone else if I tried to, although I can't at present imagine wanting to. I'm not a person who needs a relationship and have spent many years single, so I think fear of being alone (as long as it's not forever!) isn't a factor.
That said, I have always taken breakups particularly hard looking back. I have only had two from people I loved but it took years rather than months for the pain of loss to go away. I am good at being alone, but once I let someone in I find it hard to move on from someone if I love them.
Getting married and sharing a life with someone is deeply important to me and if I were to look back on my life and feel I had missed out on that experience of sharing the ups and downs of life with someone special, I would feel my life was wasted in a sense.
I spent many years focussed on career and raising kids and when I met DP you could say I was "ready" when we met and it would be a big disappointment to have to start again when I believed with certainty that I had found the right person.
The relationship I had with DP was good for me and I became a really joyful person after he came into my life. I've never had a relationship before that felt so comfortable and right for me. He ticked all the boxes for me and was my best friend. He allowed me freedom to live my life, but also great love and comfort and we made each other the best versions of ourselves. We had so much fun. Had circumstances and choices been different, I am certain we would have had a happy life together like two peas-in-a-pod and died old together.
DP and I have been together almost five years. I had believed DP to be an unusually moral character and that's partially why I fell in love with him. I knew he had low-self esteem but that was quite endearing. Rory and Amy from Doctor Who if you can picture that. We had a really happy relationship.
So the reason I have to leave is he had an affair. I want to keep details brief as it's not really about them, it's about me, but as I know questions will come so it's important to know two key elements.
Firstly that it happened during a very long (16 months) physical separation over the lockdowns and working in different countries temporarily at the time. We had never expected when we made the arrangement that we would be apart for so long or that it would be impossible to travel for visits, otherwise we would never have made the arrangement which was made for financial and career reasons and made good sense at the time.
Secondly, due to these circumstances, he was spending all day, every day with this other person and consequently was forming a friendship for nearly a year before the affair began that should obviously never have happened. It also obvious she was pursuing him from the beginning and the "friendship" was a deep infatuation on her part. I believe he was largely unaware of this infatuation, being largely unaware of why anyone would fancy him generally. Not an excuse by any stretch, but I do not believe a relationship of with any other person would ever have been formed had there not been those circumstances.
Thirdly, the affair was unusual in that it was characterised with copious alcohol (he was never a drinker before but during this period was drinking heavily every day), as well as serious psychological abuse from coercion to blackmail to violence and control, reminiscent of his turbulent childhood and bringing out the very worst in him - the of he and I. When he refused to leave me for her, she turned out to be a complete bunny boiler and the police had to get involved and so on. I put the blame on him entirely for what he did, but it's also worth noting this woman subjected him to severe abuse over a prolonged period and latterly subjected me to the same, which makes him both perpetrator and victim.
Infidelity was always a deal breaker for me, but I found myself for a myriad of reasons trying to work through it. At first, he was absolutely committed to doing anything and everything to help me and us but over time, the perfect reconciliation grew cracks which turned into chasms.
Partly as neither of us expected a year long campaign to get rid of a completely mad woman with a dangerous obsession with him, which put an unimaginable strain on us both. There were weeks where she would be harassing me or him to the point I actually thought she was going to kill one of us and that made it hard to focus on the actual cheating. Secondly because it became clear as the effects of it all settled that he was too damaged from it all to be fully capable of what was needed. So the guilt, shame and pretty severe anxiety and depression resulting from his actions and the consequences of those are more than he can handle.
He is, deep down, a good, moralistic person and he hates himself for what he did which makes me feel a profound sense of sadness over the sheer waste of it. He always felt he didn't deserve me (childhood crap), and now he has confirmed it to himself. The spiral of shame and self-pity is the opposite to what I need and I don't see a way he is going to be capable of turning this around probably without long term therapy. I am worried at this point that the damage he's done to himself might be irredeemable, and it's difficult for me to say that but he's massively traumatised and seriously depressed.
With those parameters, I am basically in a situation where although our relationship is still full of love and passion, there is an unresolved betrayal and the perpetrator cannot (at least for the foreseeable future) do the real work of healing me or us. Worse, where I am left picking up the pieces of destruction (ie: dealing with a far diminished version of him) from how his bad choices have affected him and that's not right either.
I think our relationship used to be characterised by us both thinking the other was the best person in the world, and feeling lucky. That is still there in a way, but whereas being with me brought on the very best in him and gave him strength and security, the affair did the opposite and so he's a mess now. Now he feels he is a POS in my eyes and is responsible for my unhappiness and for a man who was once susceptible to flattery, lovebombing and ego-stroking I expect that's hard to deal with.
I know that what I need from him is for him to get out of the loop of self-defensiveness, self-pity and shame and just decide he has serious work to do on himself to fix all this. I want him to go to counselling, read lots of books on all this and decide to take positive steps to make real amends. He's not doing that, he's just depressed and barely coping.
So I think the best thing for me would be to leave, but these are the reasons I find it hard:
- I feel attached to a version of our life where he didn't do this. Or even where he did, but the person he did it with wasn't so crazy that he ended up like this. Being with me was the best of him and this was the worst, and a series of terrible choices led us to where we are when we could have been somewhere else entirely. Like Sliding Doors or something. I have experienced a lot of loss and tragedy in my life and my nature is to think that things can be fixed and hope can endure so it's hard for me to turn my back on a possibility that from the destruction there may be hope.
- I am, by nature, a deeply loyal person (I realise that sounds pretty ironic in the circumstances) and the thought of leaving him is hard for me. I promised to be there, and I know that sounds crazy but it's how I feel.
- I am, despite all this, utterly miserable without him. This may be a mess, but the happiest I am is when we are together and not thinking about all this stuff. His affair and all the consequences have caused me grief of a kind I scarcely knew I could feel, but losing him entirely would be a grief I am unsure I could endure.
- I find it difficult to accept the sense of tragedy that mistakes, bad choices and a calamity of circumstances came together to destroy something that was once so precious, and I feel a profound sense of sadness that nothing I can do can bring that back.
- I try and picture a life where we are not together, and it feels alien to me. I can't imagine not telling him when something great happens that day, or not turning to him on days where I feel bad. I can't imagine the life we have laid out not being the life we end up with and it feels like such a massive loss to lose that.
- I feel worried about him. I know if I leave I will be devastated and probably be single for a year or two, but will eventually meet someone else and marry. He would probably not be okay. I honestly don't think he'd ever recover, not just from losing me, but from the psychological damage of all that's happened.
- I can't shift the feeling that he feels like my family. I am not sure how to leave somebody you feel that way about. Even when he's annoying me or I am upset with him, he still feels like he belongs there. I don't understand how people detach from that.
- There are times, sometimes long periods of time, where we are just "us". The "us" before he did this, and in those times we are happy. There is so much love, and I find it difficult to accept that is all gone.
So I am in a situation where someone I love has done something so bad to me, to us, and in a lot of ways to himself that I don't think either of us can or will recover without tools I don't think he has. At least not now.
I have toyed with the idea of trying to separate, but I can't seem to be apart from him. I don't know what the right thing to do is, and I find myself thinking maybe I should just accept it and keep quiet.
Has anyone experienced infidelity or anything like this to offer me some kind of wisdom? I know, intellectually, that I would hurt badly for a long time, but it would get better and I would love again but I just can't honestly imagine two people who fitted together more than we do, and the idea of facing the rest of my life without him makes me so sad.