@Vanishedinexplicably I agree it’s so very cruel. Given all the things he has said to you, it’s a terrible way to treat someone, which is exactly why you need to leave it all alone.
I’m not sure there’s an explanation for this that he could tell you that would explain or excuse it at all. If he can text like he used to he could text now.
What concerns me is that if he texts you with a ‘reason’ you might be so desperate to believe it that you’ll put yourself back at square one, living in hope that one day he’ll leave his wife, now with an added awful worry of “What if he just disappears again?” because now you know he’s capable of this.
A while back you urged a poster to heed what I said about actions not matching up to words.
His don’t.
I honestly am not judging and I get how these things happen.
My worry for you is that you’re trying to play down the situation you are in on one hand, then writing about the seriousness of the feelings and hopes for the future together on the other. How you are rationalising things in your head seems at odds with itself. You say PPs are overstating your ‘situationship ‘ and you have never defined your relationship, this is why I think you are at odds with yourself internally.
You have strong feelings and they have nowhere to go, because you’re not married to each other or partners or boyfriend/ girlfriend like a normal relationship, so you can’t find a definition for what’s going on. With no definition, you try to rationalise his behaviour in terms of the normal ‘rules’ of normal, open relationships. So his behaviour appears bizarre.
This is why his behaviour is inexplicable, because who in a normal open relationship says these things then ghosts and vanishes without an explanation? Not many people. Once you do give your relationship a definition, it operates under different rules than normal relationships and his behaviour becomes far easier to explain . No less shit, of course, but once you call it what it is, far more plausible explanations offer themselves.
You are married, he is married, you have secretly messaged each other, spoken and met up, shared private confidences about your marriages with each other, declared feelings for each other and discussed a possible future together and leaving your marriages. All secretly, all held together by deception.
The definition of your situationship/ relationship is an emotional affair.
If his wife presented screenshots of your messages and what you have written here to the company, what would they say it was? She wouldn’t need to present it as an affair, it presents itself as an affair. If it was all ok it would have to be a secret or be any kind of risk. Once you accept this, and see his behaviour as affair behaviour, things become way clearer.
What he is doing is absolutely explicable in terms of affair behaviour. Sudden disappearance means one of two things: he’s had enough and wanted out, or she found out. Either way he’s a coward and not facing things like he really should.
Personally I’d bet my bottom dollar she’s found out and now sadly you are finding out by his actions what he intends to do about it.
I’m a random stranger on the internet who only has what you write to go on, I don’t pretend or presume for a second to know what has gone on between you, him, his wife and your husband. I didn’t realise he lives abroad but to be honest this would make me take it all with a pinch of salt even more, he knows he can say anything and you’ll never know.
As such, on the surface and with scant information and understanding, granted,I am not in the situation, but I do have an objective outside viewpoint.
The problem is that you are telling me it’s not the script, but I can see an awful lot if it in your story, Saying ‘if only we’d met twenty years earlier we’d have been together’ is a classic, (we could all meet anyone who if we hadn’t met our husbands we might have married) but I’m not you or him therefore you know better than me and this is only my opinion, not fact based on being there.
I really hope it isn’t, because he’s already caused you a world of pain and I feel there’s more where that came from if you pursue him.
I don’t think it’s all cynical and he never meant a word or cared about you etc at all, no, however, I do think that everything he’s said benefits him more than you. He knows that this stuff is lovely to hear and that you won’t be going anywhere soon if you think there’s more of that on the way. He can enjoy himself whenever he wants to as long as you’re invested. He thinks his wife is far enough away in another life compartment to ever find out. That stuff keeps you invested, hoping and dangling and he knows you only have his word to go on. He knows you are a nice trusting person who wouldn’t dream of not believing him. That alone is cruel and selfish in itself of him.
All those lovely words and yet still he’s with his wife and you’re with your husband.
I hope you find the strength to stay away and I’m glad you have real life support as you say you are unhappy in your marriage and being made miserable by him and his, I think you deserve better. Concentrate on you now and either improving your marriage or making plans to leave it so that you can be happy. Living in limbo certainly won’t do that.