Can you pinpoint now what was lacking in your previous relationship?
Absolutely. The biggest single thing - and it is huge - is communication. Looking back I can see that exDH and I were entirely incapable, as a couple, of any kind of meaningful communication. We literally went ten years without ever truly being able to be open and honest with one another. Amazing we lasted so long really.
With now-DP the communication has been incredible right from the beginning and it was a massive OH moment - I finally understood what people mean when they talk about communication, I get the hype and why it’s so important. I genuinely never ‘got’ it before now. ExDH and I did get on well until the last few years and for a long time I fell into the trap of conflating conversation and communication - I thought that because we could usually find something to talk about that meant we were communicating. But that wasn’t it at all 🙈
I also realise now that my motivations for getting back together with exDH were all wrong - I was so young (21) and was kind of all over the place and felt so chaotic and like I was just freefalling through my own life. I knew that DP would be reliable and steady and I went back to him as the ‘safe’ option, which again was a bad call. I should have been working on myself and my own issues rather than looking for a fix from outside myself - he was reliable and steady but ultimately that translated into incompatibility and we reached a point where the things we wanted from life and the things we valued were just so far apart that there was no way of compromising or reconciling them. And going into the relationship for those reasons also set up a dysfunctional, almost parent-child dynamic where he was always right and always knew best and i was never to be taken seriously.
Add in the fact that both of us come from dysfunctional families (in their own different ways) and had no role models of healthy relationships anywhere in our immediate or wider families, and all our own individual issues that stemmed from that. Plus the usual resentments that happen in many couples in terms of unequal division of labour - and that, as is often the case, I ended up being responsible for all the shitwork - and the whole thing inevitably fell apart in the end.
Also, and it feels a bit trite and superficial to say this, but sex! I’m in my early 30s and for the first time in my life I properly understand the concept of emotionally connecting with someone during sex and what an unbelievable difference that makes to a relationship. I genuinely assumed that my sex drive had just vanished and that was just what happened when you get older and have kids - turns out no, I just didn’t want to have sex that wasn’t fulfilling or satisfying and felt like it was something that was being done to me for someone else’s benefit. And while sex isn’t the be all and end all in and of itself, it turns out that amazing, mutually fulfilling sex where you feel cared about helps enormously with feeling that connection in a relationship - which in turn makes the other things (kindness, communication again!, etc etc) flow so much more easily.
I know I’ve gone on and on but to be honest I’ve barely scratched the surface - I could probably spend days if not weeks unpicking the whole thing. Relationships are a tricky and complicated thing! I thought for a long time that exDH and I had a good thing, and in a lot of ways we did, but I wish I could go back and show myself what a really good, healthy relationship looks like and tell myself to hold out for that! I just didn’t know what I was looking for or what it was supposed to look like.