OP I can resonate in many ways with your situation.
With ex partner over 20 yrs. Teenage sweethearts right up until 2022 when we did go through a rough patch in the relationship after having the kids a year apart. I took post natal depression and I fell apart at the seams to being a new mum to two kids under 2 and with covid and lockdown it put more stress on me. He thought I had fell out of love with him because I was irriated all the time and so depressed and couldn't understand why I wasn't in the mood for being intimate all the time (as I was struggling with how I looked after gaining loads of weight and my beautiful mummy tummy) I felt unattractive.... He thought if I was having sex with him I was getting it somewhere else which made me want to vomit that he'd even suggest such a thing.
After a heated argument where I admit I lost my shit one morning he told me he had enough and he left. For a few weeks we were trying to making things work and I was beginning to see where I failed the relationship myself & it pointed it out numerous times how he felt unloved, unneeded and unwanted so I blamed myself and I still do. In those few weeks he'd been seeing a girl 15 yrs younger and when I found out I was distraught and I admit I went down a rabbit hole of telling him what a bastard he was and pushed him away more, another few weeks later she was pregnant by him and he came to tell me and I just fell to my knees crying. I couldn't believe that I'd a 3 and 4 yr old upstairs sleeping and their dad was telling me he was having a baby with someone else weeks after feeling it was better to leave me.
I cant explain the damage this done to me. We bickered for a few months because I was just all over the place. Until I settled down abd realised I needed to stop reacting because I was causing more damage. When things settled down and we began getting on again he told me he still loved me, we did declare many of our feelings and discussed our shit and he said he regretted walking out that morning I lost my shit but he felt that I didn't love him. She had the baby and they're still together and we're Co parenting the kids well but he has massively broke my heart and honestly I feel ill never get over it. It doesn't help that he's still with her but will tell me he wishes things went differently, because in essence I think we just needed time because we forgot to appreciate one another after we had the kids so quickly and with my pnd and things I think we've both learned where we failed each other.
He still says he loves me, he'll send me videos from tiktok explaining how messed up his head is and while he's saying he loves me ill also get told how he can see a future with her but that I was his everything and he can't let me go and ill not lie I feel the same. We didn't fall out of love we just went through a difficult patch. All the love and emotions are still there between us.
Sometimes I think he's playing with me just to keep me about as a back up but then other times I do see the genuine distress in him that he'd like to come back to his family but he's fucked up because he's now created a family with someone else as well. He looks at it that either way he's destroying one family over the other and he loves me but he's afraid of us going back into old ways where as I suppose with a girl in her mid 20s it's more fun and it's new and fresh and she's obviously smitten over him.
it is all causing me serious damage. I feel like he tore my heart out and stomped all over it. Not because he left, his reasons I understand. But the fact that his side of the bed wasn't even cold and already I was dealing with a younger woman, she was in my kids lives and then her getting pregnant. I feel like I've completely lost myself and I love him and if I'm being honest I'm that lost and broken and hearing my kids crying that they wished daddy would come back would make me go back in a heart beat (no point lying) and the fact he expresses all his emotion to me as well about feeling so conflicted. But today I begining to realise I'm doing myself no favours. The old saying if he they wanted to then they would comes to mind. I think he misses me, I think he still loves me but he's not coming back no matter what he confesses. I'm starting to think I'm just a convience to him, because he knows I'm just at home rearing the children and I've no intention of starting out with anyone else. I don't think it's that the grass isn't greener with this other girl, she's stunning, she's young, she's popular, she's probably everything I'm not.
I think im just familiar to him 😔 and he's afraid of letting go completely. But since he left its been a rollercoaster of emotions getting told he'd love to come back, he thinks about me all the time, he never meant to hurt me or things go as they did and the unplanned pregnancy etc... he wishes he'd took time to see where we both messed up so we could fix it and I wish he'd have done the same instead of breaking me and then leading me down a trail of false hope and with all the blame I'm carrying on myself and the absolute fear I have in myself. I loved him and give him all of myself for 2 decades of my life. I don't think I'll ever allow myself to be that vunerable again to be betrayed and then left to pick up the pieces by myself. Plus the man I loved and built a home and family with not only let me down massively but tells me one minute he loves me and needs me but then goes on about her and how well they get on etc like it's causing me way more damage because now I've pitted myself against her and feel like a failure. I lost my life time lover, best friend and father of my kids to her, he took my whole little world and put it straight into the hands of someone else 😪
You sound like a much stronger woman than I am. I'm soft and a hopeless romantic and my ex knows he's broke me but how much I still love him and how devestated I am that my family has broken up. He claims he's heartbroken too and knows in a heartbeat I'd fix my family if he actually wanted to, but instead he'll quietly admit these feelings to me yet they've now purchased a rented accommodation together and the girl wants to have another baby and get married etc, in fact they're basically living 2 min drive from our house, I've to go past the place every single day to run errands and school runs etc. The man knows he could fix things if that's what he truly wanted and I'm that pathetic I'd allow it but instead he keeps telling me things but still moving on with another life. The damage it has done to me is crazy and I can't just blame him because I've also allowed him to do it, I've allowed myself to be used because I love him and believed him. Please don't fall into the trap I have, I know I only have myself to blame and I've allowed myself to carry the blame for the fact he left and found someone else. It's having serious effects on my mental and physical health because I keep allowing myself to think he'd like to repair stuff when probably in actual reality I'm just convient and familiar but I can't believe how much he has crushed my soul. I honestly don't think I'll ever love again after experiencing this