I don't love my husband anymore

[Womblemom]

After 20 years together, and 15 years married, I told my husband I don't love him any more in early December. I told him I couldn't see us growing old together and I wanted a divorce.

We haven't had a big relationship crisis such as an affair, money problems or arguments.

We have three kids together who are all still at school. For years he has worked hard and I have done the lions share of domestic and childcare stuff, We have no support from family and we don't live close to them.

We live in a suburban area of London. For about 10 years I have longed to live where I grew up in the Cotswolds. I find where we live really dull and have no real friends there, despite living here for 10 years. Five years ago, I became depressed and was put on anti depressants. I received CBT through NHS counselling where we talked through my issues. These were mainly having undiagnosed post natal depression after the birth of my second child and ongoing feelings of helplessness and loneliness, stemming from dissatisfaction in my marriage. My husband worked long hours when the children were small and still kept up his hobbies. He plays golf every weekend for at least one day. He has always been more forceful at getting his way in our relationship.

I tried discussing needing to move back when I was depressed years ago, this ended up in a few arguments. In the last one, my husband said he would never have married me if he knew I'd wanted to move out of London. To be honest, I was shocked that anyone wouldn't want to move out of London so it didn't come up before we married. All of our friends have moved out of London over the years.

My husband has never paid me a compliment when we've been married, never holds my hand or acts affectionally. Sex became another job around the house, I did it because if we stopped, we wouldn't be married anymore.

The kids are older now, two are at secondary school, and I have reached crisis point, I just don't love him. I have started to fall other people and I just need to be with someone else. I long for this, my heart aches to be with someone else.

We have a lot of equity on our home and I can afford to move home without him if we divide our assets. I don't have a firm plan but would like to move back to the Cotswolds and be near real friends, not isolated here.

After telling my husband that I wanted a divorce, he has transformed into the most amazing husband, the friends that he has confided in are shocked and they keep telling me how "sad" they are about our news, and how perfect we are. I know this isn't true in my soul. My husband is adamant that we "try" but I genuinely don't know what that means. How can I force myself to love someone? I feel lost, at sea, and would prefer to move forward with separation as it feels so phoney. We are at Relate and it has been no help whatsoever. In fact it has made us argue more.

Please can anyone comment if you have been in the same situation or fell out of love? I am being made to feel that it is simply a matter of time and things can be magical again simply but talking and doing couple's exercises. Has anyone else found Relate useful? Any shared experiences? Most of my friends are not independent from our relationship and simply want us to stay together for the children. I long to be without him.

Am I making a big mistake or am I being brave in saying how I really feel. Help! :(

I’m sorry you feel like this, it’s not easy. It’s life. We can all do what we want when there are no children involved. When children are involved it’s not about all about us. In fact they are the priority. They never asked to be here. It’s highly likely they would not want to move. Especially one parent a few hours away from the other. So they their parents split up, they are supposed to move schools AND traipse cross country every other weekend to see the other parent? Awful. Text book they fck you up your mum and dad. If you were to separate, surely keep it as smooth as possible for the children and stay in the safe area? That way you get independence but don’t mess up everything else in the process. You’re giving no thought to your children at all.

Fabulous advice from @Wonderingforever.

As for crushes - I would say they’re completely normal for many of us married/long-settled people. After all, the vow to forsake all others would hardly be necessary if all other people ceased to be attractive when we settled down with our life partner.

I’ve had a good few crushes over 25 years with DH and no doubt he has too. But while I might have indulged in some fantasies (of which DH was really the direct beneficiary 😀), I have never wanted to leave him and make a life with those other men. Which is the point of commitment - you put your love for your long-term partner ahead of a passing attraction to someone else. It’s also always been obvious to me that if I had been with another man for 25 years, then DH could easily be one of my crushes, if you see what I mean.

I agree. There are two separate issues here. Your relationship problems and the fact you want to move to a different area. You can't always have exactly what you want after you've made the choice and had children. You need to consider them too. It's not a question of a fairy godmother coming along and putting you in touch with Mr Wonderful who will solve all your problems. Just beware of making changes you might later regret.

I think you're being massively naive to think your kids are moving to the Cotswolds. They're in secondary school, ramping up to exams, they have friends, activities, they have freedom of movement in London, the older they get the more they will want and need London's opportunities. London is their home. If you move to the Cotswolds, you're moving alone.

I think moves can be great- but they aren't great if they are with someone you don't want to be with anyway- I think you really need to separate the two things out clearly in your head- if he said 'yep, no problem- house on market tommorrow' - would you actually want him to move anyway- ?? Or is this more about the fact that you want out anyway and on your own the Cotswolds is where you would rather be- we live in Bath by the way-love it and it's not dull!!

The sitcom, This Country is set in the Cotswolds but tries to show what life is like there for working class people. It is not all picturesque cottages, there is a lot of unemployment, hence Kerry and Kurtan's lack of ambition. It is not an easy place to be a young person, particularly a young person without friends.
I think you need to postpone your move until your children are older. Then they can make the decision whether to move with you or stay in London with their Dad.

I realise that, I was really aiming my comment at those posters who seemed to think the Cotswolds is some far flung wilderness from London where your children wouldn’t speak the native language. When in actual fact it’s basically commuter belt.

To be clear, the alternative to the move is that I either move into a tiny house in a worse area of Outer London, or I move. Or I stay in our house and he moves into a flat. I'm not sure how we'll afford that. Its for me and my husband to discuss. I only have one teen, and no I wouldn't force him to move. My youngest however is pre secondary school and would have plenty of options.

So don't fear, I am aware of the challenges.

My main concern is the marriage. It seems frightening how we are expected to live without love to preserve the sanctity of marriage. I feel I need counselling on that personally, but I'm worried that they will just listen. I need guidance and opinion.

Thanks for the tough love on here btw! Sometimes needed from internet strangers!

@Squit Thank you, my husband doesn't believe that life exists beyond the M25! Hence how I have fallen out of love..

Yes, I have been in this situation. Was with 1st H for 20 years. His wandering eye and cheating made me fall out of love with him, and I was DESPERATE to be in a different relationship with a different man (no one in particular, just anyone that wasn't him). I did it. He couldn't believe it and begged me to reconsider, but I just couldn't be with him.

At the time my children were 11 & 9. My son took it okay, but my daughter was upset for YEARS. I only moved around the corner. However, 5 years after this, I was with someone else (my current DH) and we both wanted to move to a town that was 30 minutes away, for work reasons and also to be by the sea. Kids were in High School by then, so we did move, but I kept them in their High School and took the long school run on the chin. Even then it wasn't easy, as they often wanted to do things with friends, who all lived near the school! We made it work, but it was a bit messy.

For that reason, I think you can't have everything you want here. I would shelve the move to the Cotswolds until your kids have grown up. They will HATE you forever if you move them to the Cotswolds, and it will affect your happiness going forward.

Fast forward to now, and the kids are adults, both living in different places to us (one is the other side of the globe!) and they are happy successful adults. I've been with my DH for 15 years and we are very happy. I still feel absolutely zero for 1st H, and couldn't be with him if he was the last man on earth.

So I'd say, go for the split, but stay local for your kids sake, at least until they leave home/go to Uni. Be prepared for the kids to be very upset, maybe even for a year or two.

forced into staying in a marriage that makes me feel like I've died inside.

OP, you’re describing how you feel very articulately. You know what you want. This man has been a very disappointing and selfish husband, no wonder you’re no longer in love with him.

Set yourself free.

You don’t need to stay married if you don’t want to. I divorced my lovely husband last year. We’re friendly now. He understands that I didn’t have a choice because love isn’t something you choose.

This finite life of mine is my one guaranteed shot at conscious existence. Be damned if I’m making such an enormous compromise with it.

I used to think I wouldn't be jealous- in some ways I hoped he would meet someone else and then I could go off guilt free.. until it happened. Nothing happened at all but when his gaze shifted from me to her I was totally and unexpectedly devastated. When the decision , control was out of my hands
I was so so shocked by this..
I had been so resentful for him for so long, I'm sure the feeling was mutual but it was about work/money as opposed to moving
I started making a massive effort. he slowly started reciprocating and over time we just got a lot closer and nicer to each other. I still fancy other people but I do love him now and also our life which is a lot better as we have both compromised. Sure I don't get butterflies but seriously who does after a number of years. You might be happy waiting for Mr Right .. what if he doesn't come?
I'm not saying stay with someone you dislike but you sound so depressed I would just be really really sure you have given it your best shot before you make a decision that will alter all your lives forever.
There won't be any going back either.. if he is solvent and presentable he will be snapped up. peoples standards are in the bucket given what they have to wade through to meet anyone now.

‘peoples standards are in the bucket given what they have to wade through to meet anyone now’

That made me laugh. I’d not thought of it like that before 😂

I wonder if day to day life in the Cotswolds would be as good as visiting now and then? Friends make an effort for an occasional visit that they might not if you're around all the time, IYSWIM. Are you idealising it a bit because you're looking for an escape? Also, it's a very expensive area to live and buy property which I'm sure you're aware of. However, I have to say I think you should get out of this dead marriage and find a new life.

We live in a suburban area of London. For about 10 years I have longed to live where I grew up in the Cotswolds. I find where we live really dull and have no real friends there, despite living here for 10 years...

I tried discussing needing to move back when I was depressed years ago, this ended up in a few arguments. In the last one, my husband said he would never have married me if he knew I'd wanted to move out of London. To be honest, I was shocked that anyone wouldn't want to move out of London so it didn't come up before we married. All of our friends have moved out of London over the years.

As this is clearly such a big part of the issue, I feel the need to be honest here. It's really extremely unreasonable to decide you need a major move to another specific place so badly that you can't possibly be happy without it, and then when your husband doesn't want to completely upend the entire family's lives around it, express surprise that he didn't read your mind about it from the beginning because it's obviously what everyone wants to do.

Plenty of people stay living in London.

I'm having trouble imagining the conversations you had before you got married and decided to start a family together.

"Darling, lets get married and make lovely babies together that we can raise here in our lovely house".

"Yes darling, that sounds delightful" (thinks: Not in THIS lovely house for very long, but in a different one on the other side of the country that I haven't told you about. But I don't NEED to tell you, or raise the subject at all, because obviously you know that everybody thinks what I'm thinking right now.)

You seem to have gotten fixated about the Cotswalds, and you're trying to justify that being more important to you than your family. Sorry for being harsh.

I think it may help you to have a trial separation to see how you feel once you’re not under one another’s feet all the time.

It sounds to me like you’ve made a lot of sacrifices to facilitate your husband maximising his professional opportunities and that hasn’t been reciprocated in any way at all. No wonder you feel like this. Now, it almost makes matters worse that he’s making an effort when you’ve got to breaking point and threatening to leave. It just shows he was capable of doing those things you wanted all along, he just didn’t want to. That would drive me up the wall frankly.

Life is too short to spend it unhappy but it might be the time is not quite right to move as far away as the Cotswolds. We separated when the youngest finished her a-levels and I moved 100 miles away somewhere new for a fresh start, but I couldn’t imagine doing it when the kids were younger without a lot of disruption for them and their schooling.

I might be putting two and two together and getting five, but do you by any chance have a crush on someone who lives in the Cotswolds?

Whether you do or you don't, I don't think that divorce is going to be the magic bullet you think it is and your Cotswolds Agenda is really not in the best interests of your children. They'll have to uproot school, area and friends and start again, every other weekend vistiation with their father will be all you'll be able to expect of them and will be a drag over that distance. It will just give you a different set of problems, with a view of some fields.

Stop sleeping with your DH, tell him why. If you have seen a remarkable effort from him, then let him "try". I think divorce is a marvellous invention, when you've given it all you've got. Give it six months and see where you are. Find a better therapist, the one you have isn't for you.

I'm surprised at some of the advice you're being given. Compared to many of the people on this board who are considering leaving an "OK but not great" marriage, you sound completely clear about the fact that you don't love your husband anymore and don't want to be with him. You don't have to be able to cite specific reasons for that, and yet you seem to have a few, and if you want an external opinion I personally would have very little time for a man who can only make the token efforts needed when the shit has completely hit the fan. I feel a lot of posters are negating your clearly stated feelings in exactly the same way your husband has been trying to do.

Personally, I think it's pretty clear that divorce is on the cards for you, and the only real questions are when and how that should be accomplished. I agree with pp that the "dream" of returning to the Cotswolds is problematic right now (depending on the exact ages of your DCs) but I also think that the point of the dream, psychologically speaking, is to get you over the bridge between wondering if leaving is possible and making it actually happen. Dreams are good. They help us envisage a new version of ourselves. They don't have to be accomplished overnight. (That said, I think all the doom-speak about how damaging it would be to move kids from London to the Cotswolds is London-centric bollocks, as if "The Cotswolds" is some kind of nonsense fantasy land that only exists on chocolate boxes and Location, Location, Location, rather than a real and completely normal area of the country with towns and schools and amenities.)

In your shoes, I would press on with divorce plans and I think once the decision is made, you'll stop feeling so desperate for escape that you're fantasising about jumping on a bus and leaving your kids behind. Then think realistically about whether, and when, there's a good break point in your kids' education. If it's a way off, perhaps you need a more creative solution than just divorcing and moving away. Maybe you need to rent in London til they finish their education, but can put your share of the equity into a second home in the Cotswolds that you can escape to with the kids in the holidays and move to full-time when they've left school. I think you'd start to feel better if you had plans in motion that you know will get you where you want to be eventually.

I second the suggestion to get your own counsellor or therapist. You need someone who's unequivocally on your side, helping you through the minefield of your feelings and championing your decisionmaking. In my experience, couples counselling too easily ends with one partner not really being heard while the other hogs all the bandwidth. And you'll need a good divorce lawyer, I suspect, as your husband sounds like he's just waking up to how much he has to lose.

Oh, and you are being brave.

I don't think falling out of love with some who never pays a compliment, holds hands or shows affection and who prioritised his hobbies over family life is unhinged.

@Thecompleteposter a brilliant if depressing series it was too

Argument is, at least, communication. If you can listen to one another, you may come to a resolution.
The vicar, who married my parents, gave them some words of advice: you can stay married to anyone you would marry in the first place.
May not be true today with so many interferences, but my parents were married, happily, for 60 years. In the words of my father: marriage is a partnership, not a take over!
Good luck!

@DepartureLounge

Thank you! I wish you were my therapist!

You have given me some amazing advice here and really given me some clarity. Amd yes, I fully agree that the idea if escape is tied to divorce and that is the issue I need to address first.

I have children at different ages, hence why I seem a little panicky about the move, its only because the youngest will need to move before secondary or I face another 7 year sentence here in suburbia. But reluctant to uproot my teenager. So I am open minded. Having said that, they know the area that I want to move and may have their own opinions. The boys aren't thriving in their current school, despite it being private. A lot of friends of theirs move all the time as it's London and a transient place. They don't take advantage of all the opportunities they have but that's a side issue.

And yes it isn't remote where I want to move, they have a 90 min direct train to London to travel whenever they like. I used to go into London on my own as a teenager from there and go shopping at TopShop! The area has better transport links nationally than we have here. I had amazing teenage years in that town and had such fun. My state school was brilliant and is now one of the top rated girls schools in the country. So life does exist there 🙂

A romance in the west country?? I wish 🤣 Perhaps something to look forward to in the future...

I think the renting idea is inspired ✨️ I can ride out the divorce without an immediate upheaval whilst making a longterm plan post children for myself. I can spend my child free time when I miss them in my happy place. My children can have links to my roots when they want a break out of London. They like it there when we visit.
i have a good lawyer, I made sure I chose someone who can help me navigate everything.

Your comment has made me seem less trapped and given me food for thought. I will seek therapy to navigate my way through this. Thank you 😊 💓

Sympathies, OP. After being married for 20 years (child free), I can relate to how you feel. And the remark about living a loveless life for the sake of preserving "marriage" - spot on. Do what feels right, when it feels right. For yourself.

I actually think this is really sad. Home should be anywhere you are with your partner and/or children. The fact you still think of somewhere else as “home” probably means there isn’t anything either of you can do to save your marriage.