Ex-dp and I met as teenagers. I thought we evolved together - he now says he changed for me, so he wouldn't lose me ... though for 10 years or so, he seemed incredibly content, fulfilled and loving of life and me.
About 18 months ago, not long after the sudden death of one of his closest friends, he became what I can only describe as "high" - quite full-on, high-octane in the way he lived his life: hiring limousines, buying two sports cars, ordering a yacht. He also slept with a prositute on a stag do.
We had counselling, and by December 2006, things calmed down briefly, and then he became very depressed for about six months, not getting out of bed in the morning, feeling occasionally suicidal and getting little pleasure out of life.
He went on an intensive therapy course in September 2007, and came back really "high" again. He proposed straight away (before I'd realised how up he was), I tentatively accepted, and then withdrew over the next few days when I saw how "up" he was again - I said let's leave it for a few months, for life to calm down.
He spent the next two months out almost constantly with single friends, spending like a demon, living so fast-paced, hatching projects and business ideas, on the phone so much ... and got intimate with a girl in a club and began seeing her casually, booked up prostitutes - including a couple at a time - and then, in late November, due to the strained time we'd been having, we separated ... after which I found out about all these infidelities, and how mortally rejected ex-dp felt by my uncertainty around the proposal.
We've since talked about events, and while I feel it's never acceptable to be so unfaithful, he feels it had to happen. He is sorry he hurt me, but does not feel he did wrong. I still see him regularly because we have a three-year-old son who doesn't like separating from me (understandably!), and ex-dp behaves as though nothing has happened. He is so happy, upbeat, full of ideas and optimism, and today arrived at my parents' house to collect ds - and behaved as though nothing at all had happened, even though he knows they know what he's done. My dad was in tears about this the other night - the first time I'd ever seen him cry. But the pain is lost on ex-dp.
I find it bewildering, alarming, that he can be so unemotional, so unfeeling. He isn't thinking at all about how this may affect ds, about how much hurt has been caused by the order in which he chose to do things; how he chose to conduct himself - says he thinks it will be best for all of us in the end, and then cracks on, all upbeat. He only seems interested in the many things he is doing and buying; not in the people in his life, nor the pain they may be feeling. He is a different person to the person I was with for the ten years or so before his first "high" 18 months ago.
And yet I cannot let go. I truly love the person he was, and wanted/want a family and future with that person. And although I prep myself to be cool and dignified when I see him, I go to pieces when he arrives; his indifference, lack of emotion, hurt desperately. I can't sever ties out of self-protection, because of ds - so how do I "be" with him? Where do I place myself, mentally, moving forward? Or is it simply a process which will take its own course ...
Argh. Just having a shit time dealing with it today and need some help. And I'm 30 in a month and I think that's getting to me - it will be a very different milestone to what it might have been.