I have a partner (P) who has an ex-girlfriend (M) whose child died in a sudden accident while they were in a relationship and it is haunting our current relationship to the point I think I am losing my mind.
P and I have been together 3 years. He was with M for a similar amount of time, maybe 4 years. They did not live together. M’s child died very suddenly and unexpectedly in 2017 while they were together. The consequence of the sudden death was that M disconnected from P and gave him no explanation or closure and she moved to a different country to distance herself from the trauma. She would message sporadically in the middle of the night or appear back in the UK for two days and go again which sent him in a tailspin. She frequently asked P for assistance in suicide because she could not cope with the death. He would run to "rescue" her but find her gone again.
P and I met 4-6 months after this all had happened. He did not tell me the backstory at the time. We talked a lot about our marriages (we are both divorced) no mention of M, and we started dating and began quite a serious relationship which soon became a passionate rollercoaster of hot and cold behaviour, disappearing acts then intense love bombing and declarations on his part.
After one particularly bad episode of P disappearing, I confessed to a mutual friend (R) what was going on, and she told me the backstory about M. She told me P had become infatuated with M after she’d had a breakdown and was still trying to pursue her and obsessively get her back.
When P tried to engage with me again, I told him I knew about M, and he admitted “everything” (in inverted commas because I don’t think I know everything.) He insisted that it was not infatuation, but deep concern for M, lack of closure on their relationship and grief which kept pulling him back into a negative cycle trying to “end things officially” with her but not being able to, followed by dark days afterwards where he would feel depressed. He said he really wanted them “to look each other in the eye and agree that it’s over. Because it is.”
Since things were out in the open and we had not broken up, we began living our relationship around the understanding that M’s presence either in person or on the phone was some sort of trump card for his attention. My self esteem was so low that even I became quite obsessed with her, and questioned what it was about her that was making him unable to give up the connection. When she returned to the UK sporadically, maybe 3 days a year, and when she got in touch with some new crisis or suicidal urge, they would spend the evenings together and P would stay over “on the sofa” to support her. P and I talked about it a lot and it was a constant source of contention and misery for me.
P was occasionally inconsistent about what it was that made him unable to let go. He’d hold on to the grief narrative and the “official ending” narrative and then sometimes he would get drunk and upset and say something like how she broke his heart and the love was unrequited. I repeatedly said that he and I should break up so he could get over it in his own time, but he used to get extremely upset every time I said that and tell me that I was “making things 100x worse by breaking up with him.”
Then my father got ill and I had to move to a different city to care for him and work from home while he was ill. This gave me huge amounts of perspective on what had happened and how absurdly I was being treated. I then started to disengage and took up new hobbies and began to lose my obsession with the whole situation. As a result, P started moving closer, becoming more consistent, not disappearing, declaring his love, saying the time apart had also given him perspective and he had decided to move on.
I was cynical at first and it took lots of proof that things had changed, but there has since been a period of 2 years where there has been a massive sea change. P has stopped all the bad behaviours, has been incredibly kind and loving to me and the issues I have faced in the last two years and when my Dad eventually died he was incredibly supportive. M-style supportive: Available, involved, responsive, caring, sitting with me through endless crying. No disappearing acts, no jumping to try and see M when she has been in touch. M has mostly been an after thought in our lives. She even came to the country last year, P saw her at her request, had a drink and then came to meet me for dinner and we carried on as of nothing happened. We laughed about how he “used to be.” We are talking about moving in together. I saw R (mutual friend) again and she said that all talk of M had died and that P was deeply in love with me.
Fast forward to this week. P is invited to a dinner of old friends. I am at a work function and we meet for a drink after our prospective events and plan to go home together. P turns up to meet me at the agreed time/location, he is obviously very drunk but he is beaming and holding his arms out to me and hugging me and saying he loves me so much. He sits down and says M was at the dinner but they did not exchange a word, and how happy and light and relieved he feels about it all. The conversation moves on.
He then gesticulates and drunkenly lifts up his phone in front of me and right on the front screen triggered by the movement is a WhatsApp chat with M’s name at the top and a series of messages from him down the page. I say what’s that about? I thought you didn’t speak? He’s a bit all over the place and says that he had messaged her to tell her it was over while at the dinner. I said really? I thought it was all in the past, surely that was a year and a half ago. He started to talk again about how things needed to be officially over between them. That he had to look her in the eye and tell her it was over. To make her acknowledge it. I felt like I had been transported back in time. I was obviously quite upset and asked to see his phone. He drunkenly handed it over: The messages went a bit like this:
Hi
Can you come outside?
I want to talk to you.
OK don’t then. Whatever.
Goodbye.
Your behaviour is unbelievable.
There was a time when we could not bear to be apart. You broke my heart. We have been through so much together, more than most couples have. I never ever wanted to break up with you over WhatsApp but here we are. Every time I try and talk to you, you disappear or it gets cancelled. You know I would do anything for you. I would cancel everything in my diary to come and see you and do this in person. X
She had seen but not replied. The first few messages were an hour apart from the last paragraph. He had sent the last paragraph 10 minutes before he was due to meet me.
He then launched into the same old explanation that he needed closure, that he needed to look her in the eye, that he needed to “officially” end things with her finally and had been planning to do so when he saw her and he now feels he finally has. And he needed her to acknowledge it. And he had walked away after sending that and come to me and had just felt so “light.”
We argued. I said all the usual things of two years ago: I thought you were over this. You told me you didn’t speak to her. How many times do you have to “try” and end this. Why do you need her acknowledgement of the end. We have been together almost as long as you and M were together.
And he came back with the usual replies: A child died. It affected things beyond what you can imagine. I am always consistent, we are in a relationship, I love you, I don’t disappear, I always come home to you, it doesn’t affect you, just be understanding.
I feel like I have no idea what’s going on. I am so confused and conditioned to have this as an ever-looming ghost. I keep re-thinking back on the messages he sent her and thinking, how can I be with a man who is suffering from such intensity of feelings about someone else? And I ask myself, what would have happened if she had replied or responded or felt the same? Then some times I am thinking, everything is great between us, he doesn’t let me down, he acknowledges this is not right but day-to-day her presence does not affect my life anymore. He turned up genuinely happy. Delighted to be with me.
What do you think? Is this needing closure, needing acknowledgement, needing to delineate to her and himself officially that they are no longer an item, a "thing?"