Married but my ex is my soul mate

[Maria309]

I am a female (23) and my husband is (30) we met each other at work and eventually my feelings grew towards him. During this time i was going through a really rough patch with my ex we would keep getting together and breaking up. (Main reason this happened is because my family wouldn’t accept him) we both come from an south asian background and my family strictly follow a caste system.

I was with my ex (25) for around 5 years we were high school sweethearts he was my first love as I was his. We both drifted away after college as he went off to uni and I started working hence we didn’t see each other as often. He was going through a lot emotionally as he had recently lost his mother and emotionally he was unavailable to me. I tried my best but he kept pushing me away.

Eventually i decided to move on and this is when i met my husband. It was really good at the beginning which made me rush into marrying him. Since we've been married I have realised I am still in love with my ex. For months on end he is the only person I think about. My husband has completely changed he twist what i say and makes me feel really down and we argue all the time. I have come to the decision to divorce him i’m just trying to find my way out.

During the time i got to know my husband my ex did try and reach out to me but I couldn’t tell him i was seeing someone else i knew it would hurt him.

This last weekend I reconnected with my ex (I text him) and i told him i was married. He was really really upset and said he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He wrote me a long emotional message about how he waited for me to come back and he turned away women with the idea maybe one day I’d return and we could get married. I keep reading the message and crying as i had no idea he still loved me. My life is a mess.

I just keep thinking about all the good times we had, how he would make me feel better when i was down and the friendship we had. It was perfect. I have told him I will marry him straight after i divorce my husband. (Which is happening soon) he said he couldn’t accept me as i chose someone else before him and he feels 2nd.

We both made a promise to eachother when we were together that we would keep our virginity and lose it to one another when we were married. When we spoke on the phone he mentioned that he turned away advances from other women to keep his promise to me but all that time I was having sex with my soon to be ex husband and that really hurts him.

I really really love this man he is my soulmate every time the worlds pressure is on me i want to run to him, he is my home. It was the biggest mistake I've ever made in my life getting married and letting my ex go. Im torn I don’t think I can live without him.

He told me he went out on a date last weekend with a girl to the place me and him used to go. Even though im married im so jealous it really hurts seeing him with another woman.

Please help? What can i do?

You are incredibly young. And making a young woman's decisions. And your ex sounds similarly young and naïve.

I have told him I will marry him straight after i divorce my husband. This would be the second worst decision you have made. You need very badly to be you for a while. And work out what you want and what you need. You went through one rough patch with your ex (him losing his mother) and neither of you could work through it as partners. Because you were essentially children.

Divorce your H, he is clearly not for you. Then breathe. By all means spend some time with the ex but not with some awful idea to rush into another ill-thought out marriage.

Honestly your relationship with your ex sounds completely toxic and unrealistic. You're unhappy with your relationship with your husband, so you're building up the relationship with your ex into some idealised version of what it actually was.

@RealMermaid it wasn’t toxic at all tbh they were mostly my demands that he upheld out of his own good will. I genuinely feel certain bonds and people you don’t appreciate till they are gone. I have craved his presence every time life has thrown a curveball at me. Every time i come home i wish it was my ex sat on the couch welcoming me home. He was so good to me its the happiest i have ever been in my life when we were together.

@MrsTerryPratchett You are right I shouldn’t run into another marriage but I crave his presence I want to spend my life with him. I have realised what I want. I just dont know if he will ever be the same with me. I want to start over with him and show him how much he means to me.

Marriages aren't about craving or jealousy or yearning or romance or showing someone how much you love them. They are about weathering the storms. Everyone thinks they invented that feeling of utter love. And no one did. We've all been there and made bloody stupid decisions based on it.

If you actually want a good relationship and maybe marriage, date and go through hard times without running away and without him pushing you away. Maybe you will, maybe you won't. But at the moment it's all Romeo and Juliet nonsense and that will be another disaster.

Your family will not accept your ex because they follow a caste system.
That fact has not changed.

You’d be far better off on your own and from that work out properly what you want both from life and a relationship rather than go from one sub par relationship into yet another that previously was problematic too.

It was perfect.

Eh? No, it wasn't. It doesn't sound perfect at all. You're in a crappy marriage and your brain is searching for comfort by playing you a rose-tinted version of the past.

I think you need to move forward without either of these men so that you can heal and learn how to build healthy relationships.

How long have you been married? and how long have you been with your husband before you got married?

It's highly unlikely your ex is still a virgin he lost touch with you long enough so you could move on and get married

Your ex isn't being kind or supportive to you. You say you drifted apart before as he went to uni anf you started work, and when you did see him it sounds like it was hard work. And he seems to have thought that you would just wait for him in case he decided to come back. That's not a soul mate relationship which ended due to parental interference, it sounds like a teeenage relationship which fizzled out.

You don't need to have him as an escape from your unhappy marriage - you can leave because you're not happy, but jumping straight into another relationship is a very bad idea.

Divorce your husband.

Go no contact with your ex.

Take time to be single, be comfortable in your own company and enjoy doing things that don't involve a bloke before even starting dating again.

You're so, so young and you've never been single as an adult.

Marrying your ex would be a huge risk unlikely to pay off.

Please rethink your attitude towards both men. You do not need a man to be happy, especially when you're already so very young and have so much of life to enjoy as a young woman in her 20s ready to own her destiny and discover who she is before making another commitment potentially for life.

He was so good to me its the happiest i have ever been in my life when we were together.

You've nothing to compare him to though - you were a child, then with him and then with what sounds like an arsehole in a rushed marriage.

You've no benchmark for a healthy, happy, calm, equal and drama free relationship.

Grow up

@Theunamedcat I have been married for a year now and I was speaking to my husband a year before hand.

@AttilaTheMeerkat My family are now starting to change their Ideology in terms of the caste system this is another reason why I can’t stop thinking about my ex.

@MenoMom He has been really supportive recently even though he has no right to be as I married someone else. I’ve been down and depressed and wanted to fall back on him he talks to me every other night assuring me everything is going to okay. His words really having a calming influence on me. We hadn’t spoken in over 2 years but it just feels like we never missed a beat when we started talking again. Tbh it was me that would push him away majority of the time. Even when we broke up he tried a lot to get me back but i was blind.

I can’t imagine him marrying someone else it would literally kill me.

@youvegottenminuteslynn

I have had experiences with men before and after him whether thats dating or talking. He is the best of all the men I have come across. The heart wants what the heart wants i cant change that.

Well, you can change that, you know. Eventually. (After all, presumably your heart wanted your husband for a tiny smidgeon of time...)

Even if you couldn't, you could still ignore it.

Your high-school sweetheart (who wasn't even in the same year as you, in case anyone missed that) went off to uni and built a life apart from you, refusing to allow you to be a part of his working through his grief. Okay, he was still a teenager at that point, and obviously not ready to confront a maturing relationship.

That was the point at which High School Sweethearts generally end.

...and the only reason this one hasn't is that your marriage has turned out to be a bad one so you are (understandably) indulging in the If-Onlys.

Your ex, now a fully-grown adult, is still refusing to confront a maturing relationship and is encouraging you to believe in a childish fairy-tale. Don't do it.

This is a fantasy and nothing more.

You’re idealising your relationship with your ex, saying he’s your soulmate, etc. But he isn’t. You broke up. The relationship wasn’t perfect or you would have stayed together and you didn’t.

Relationships come and go when we’re teenagers. I could look back to my ex who I was with when I was 19 and think about the fact we promised to be together for ever but it would take time as I left the country with my family. But then the reality happened, and we both moved on, and 30 years later he’s on his 4th marriage. somehow I don’t think that “forever” would have materialised for us, I would probably have been number1, and he’d be on to number5 by now.

And let’s be honest, he’s dating women. He certainly hasn’t been waiting for you all these years in the hope you stayed true to him. That’s just a line he’s feeding you because he knows that you want to be with him. And his telling you how upset he is that you got married is incredibly manipulative, as is him saying he doesn’t want to speak to you again. Honestly a relationship with this man has disaster written all over it.

But you don’t really want to be with him. You want a relationship which feels like the one you had with him when you were in good times. That’s different.

Divorce your husband, Stop talking to the ex, and fgs don’t promise him you’ll marry him soon. And then stay single for a few years and learn to be you before looking for another relationship.

you’re 22. I promise in 10 years time you’ll look back and wonder what the hell you were thinking, and you’ll be giving others who are your age now the same advice you’re being given here.

You had EVERY right to marry someone else. You’d drifted apart from your childhood sweetheart and the fact that he now tells you that he was patiently waiting for you and saving his virginity is frankly bullshit. If he was that bothered he would have contacted you, not waited for you to contact him.

Please listen to the wise women of MN when they say you need to be single for a while yet. Divorce the prick. Focus on your career, hobbies and friendships. It’s hard I know. I’m in a similar boat - single for the first time in years and I miss being part of a couple, keep wondering if I’ve made a mistake ditching my ex. But that’s just fear talking. Plenty of women are happy single, they remember fondly (and not so fondly!) the times with their ex but they know that going back won’t help.

There’s no such thing as a soul mate. There are literally billions of people to choose from out there. If it was “meant to be” with any single one of them, then fate/the universe wouldn’t keep putting such awful people in our way.

Do you think that fate decides that one woman should spend her life getting beaten by a violent husband while another gets to live the fairytale? Or that once you meet your one true love that he should die of cancer? Why would fate be so cruel?

Who we meet and spend time with us entirely our choice, not some serendipitous moment. And we make the best of those choices, deciding when something has run it’s course. Your future is yours to decide. It may or may not include your ex, but if you having married in between times is a deal breaker to him then he’s not for you.

You sound very young OP, as does your ex. You are both very young! And perhaps coming from protected backgrounds make you more so. With kindness, it’s all very teenage.

This guy is not your soulmate. He’s just your first love.

Get divorced and focus on growing up and building up your own life. Do not chase your ex. Keep working at your job, aim to buy a flat eventually - get out and about and find out what you like and want from
Life. It sounds like you don’t agree with a lot of your family’s values, hopefully you’ll maintain a relationship with them, but they will need to accept you as an independent woman.

Go see a solicitor, if you have shared equity, you need to get it out so you can invest it and build your future.

Get some therapy / counselling, you sound very depressed.

No one person can save another or be a soul mate . You are projecting the pain you feel inside , get some help talk to some one
Goodluck

Sounds like your ex is trying to punish you by telling you he's dating and taking them to places that means something to you. How do you know he wouldn't continue to do this if you actually got back with him. I'm not too sure I would believe he'd shunned all the other offers.
If you don't want to be married to your DH then get divorced but don't do it with the hope you'll go back to your youth and your first love

We both made a promise to eachother when we were together that we would keep our virginity and lose it to one another when we were married. When we spoke on the phone he mentioned that he turned away advances from other women to keep his promise to me but all that time I was having sex with my soon to be ex husband and that really hurts him.

He's a liar.

There is no such thing as soul mates or The One or any other such bollocks. It is a childish belief and a concept that abusers to continue abusing.

I think you need to forget your ex, no matter how much he says he loves you, he has already made clear he is not going to take you back as you have been with another man and he won’t forgive that. 😕

That door is closed now. So the only options you have is sort your marriage or leave it, but ex is never going to be a good par5 of the future, quite the opposite if you insist.

And I agree, he is lying to you, if he was turning women away he would have approached you years ago. He didn’t.

OP I really empathise about your marriage. Yes, it sounds like you should end it.

However, the way you describe your feelings about your ex come from romantic songs or films. What you describe is not true love at all. You are describing infatuation. 'craving' somebody does not mean that you love them.

As many people have already said, you need to end your marriage and spend some time alone gaining some wisdom and maturity.

You haven't made the wrong choice, the ex wasn't emotionally available to you if he really the thought you were the one then he wouldn't of let you go, I expect it hadn't worked out with someone else, now he's full of regret, well tough luck mate! You've found a man that wanted to marry you, you took the right choice.