There a chasm of difference between wanting something to be true, wanting something to be what we want it to be and turn out the way we want it to turn out, and the truth about the situation.
The obsessing is chasing the way it made you feel, you can’t think of anything else to replace that feeling so you chase it.
The going over conversations/ messages/ memories serves that purpose, but also it can be a forensic search for something, some kind of empirical evidence, no matter how small to ‘prove’ to you that he wasn’t lying, he did care, the chance of happiness together really did exist, it wasn’t a fantasy or an illusion, I was/ am important to him.
I wouldn’t say these things if anyone here was saying how happy all this made them, and granted, I have the luxury of being in the outside looking in. However, it’s patently obvious, reading all that is said here, that it makes you unhappy.
The words you use to describe the feelings around this throughout the posts are:
being driven crazy
sad
lonely
unhappy
feel stupid
feel like an idiot
cried
sobbing
killing me
cross with myself
why
why
why
The list goes on.
There are so many questions asked too, mainly hypothetical. The questions do have answers, the answers lie in the truth about these men and the truth about the situations everyone is in.
Above, Vanishedinexplicably (not singling this out, it’s a typical example of many similar posts by others too) wrote, “I left a slightly tearful sounding voicemail earlier, so cross with myself but also just want to keep calling until he picks up. I don’t know how he can just ignore me. He’d have to have done something truly awful for me to do this to him.”
The answer is right here, glaring at us. But we don’t want to think that they don’t care about us as much as we care about them. Because it hurts. ‘How can he just ignore me?’ Probably because he wasn’t a ‘real’ relationship, he was having an affair, saying what he knew you wanted to hear. For some reason (you’ll never know the actual truth) he’s distancing himself and ending it, you are more invested than he obviously was, you thought it had a future but he always thought it was an affair. The rhetorical questions have painful answers that it hurts intensely to face.
And I’m sad reading all the hurt here.
Many of you have scrutinised the wife and seen similarities, compared yourselves to her and are trying to get inside his head to see what that might mean. It’s a pointless exercise. If you are similar, does that mean you’re his ‘type’ so maybe there’s hope? If you are very different, does that mean he’s bored with her and wants a change so maybe there’s hope? It’s pointless.
What you are actually comparing is a wife to a mistress. Two different roles. The answers to why her and not me aren’t found in comparisons, the answer is simply that you are you and she is who she is. The simple answer isn’t that you or she are better or worse than anyone else. It’s just that you are not her.
My husband’s AP had twenty years, no children or ties, foreign cachet and great beauty over me. On paper aesthetically speaking it was a thirties mysterious single, foreign gym bunny over a mid fifties British familiar wife and mother. No contest. She couldn’t work out why Wookie and not her. I killed myself comparing and feeling like unloveable shit. I could never look like her or be twenty years younger, ever. I did the pick me dance for months after it was over! My husband cried and said “I don’t want you to be different, I just want Wookie. I just want Wookie how she was and always is. I just want Wookie.” It made no sense, why have an affair then? Why did you want her if you always wanted me exactly the way I was and am? Why wasn’t I enough then but I am all you want now? Then I researched and read about what affairs are really about, what purpose they serve, and it was obvious I was asking myself the wrong questions. It was never about her or me. It was all about him.
Her biggest problem was very simple, all her ‘advantages’ would never matter. Comparing didn’t matter. Her biggest problem was that she just wasn’t me.
The wife is his wife for a reason.
Married men can’t have both forever, a few do, but usually not fully in secret. They know that, so at some point there will be a choice. The mistress knows that at some point there will have to be a choice.
His mounting guilt might force the choice, or the wife’s discovery of the affair, of the mistress forcing an ultimatum. But the choice hovers over the whole thing like a dark cloud on the horizon. It’s going to rain at some point. Everyone knows this but shoves their head in a bucket of sand and hopes that if they stick it out, he will really mean it and you’ll be together. Even if it ends, if you hang on and hope and long for him, he will miss you and you’ll be together. Affairs can be on/ off things but usually the net result is permanently off.
Unless the man genuinely wants out and is having an exit affair (vast minority) they will always choose their wife if she allows them to. Affair partners are mostly temporary arrangements with the clock always ticking. When they are truly over they are over. The man doesn’t like to look at what a shit he was to his wife and family so he eventually nukes the affair and to him, it’s the painful past. That’s why they can just ghost you. That’s why they can just switch it off. Because to them, it’s done and you’re in the past, like any other ended relationship.
You can stay in the past and want the present to be like the past was, long for it and hope that by some miracle it will return, or you can accept the truth, pick yourself up off the floor and look ahead.
There are no more possibilities popping out of the past. The future, however, is filled with possibilities. These men have decided and made a choice. Their future does not include you, if indeed it ever did.
Now you have to do the same. Looking back and analysing and comparing and asking why why why keeps you trapped in the past, doing this will change nothing for you until you accept it is over.
I’m not shaming or judging, nor do I think this is easy, but the truth is that this works like an addiction and won’t change until you decide and are determined to put a stop to it, like alcohol or drugs or food. You are always in control.
Why can’t I stop = I have not chosen to stop yet.
Claim your futures, claim your happiness, the past is gone.