He's left me.

[BookishBabe]

16 years together, married for 12, 2 disabled DS.
I've never felt so alone, or not good enough, or not worthy. I am absolutely broken, I begged him to stay and try harder, but he left.
I can't sleep, where do I go from here?

Oh my goodness OP 😔 You have put your husband on such a high pedestal, and given yourself over to him completely, throughout your relationship, without really realising it. You WILL come through this, I can absolutely promise. At the moment, you are in shock, totally blindsided and haven't really had the time or headspace to process what's happened. I can guarantee that your husband has been having an affair for some time; this hasn't been just an emotional affair, it's clearly been a physical one too. He left the family home, and went straight to the OW's house and moved in, so it's something that has been planned, probably for a while. Your husband is no longer on your team, and you now need to remember that. He doesn't have your best interests at heart, and if it interferes with his love-life, he won't have your children's either. Yes, you need to try and keep co-parenting amicable but that doesn't mean you have to agree to every whim and demand of your husband! You may need to get a CAO, so that his access to the children is structured. He's currently loved-up and is likely to be flakey with any arrangements. We all know you can't switch feelings for someone off, but your husband has very clearly shown you who he is (and truth be known, has probably always been). Amicable co-parenting is the best you can hope for going forward.

I just wish I could feel better. I don't want it to take months or even years for me to get over this heartbreak.
When he got over me before he even left me.

You are bloody amazing. He doesn’t deserve you.

I love that the school are looking after you all, they also sound amazing.

Well done for telling his mum! If he’s going to behave like a child treat him like one.

What an absolute toss pot he is.

What a brilliant school I am so pleased they have your back. He really is utterly selfish- you deserve so much better !

So sorry that you’re going through this OP.

The pair of them sound absolutely awful. They will be the laughing stock at the school gates.

You sore stronger than you realise. Those of us reading your posts can see it, even if you can’t.

Hold your head up. Your are ten times the parent/person that either of them are.

I felt he was my soul mate, my saviour, my everything. If he wanted something, I made it my mission to make sure he had it. His happiness was how I felt happy. If he was sad, I felt I wasn't doing a good enough job of making him happy, and therefore I was sad.

He did have many, many good traits, and its hard to miss them so much now. I loved his cuddles, big strong arms, stroking my hair, forehead kiss. Spooning in bed with his arms wrapped around me. I was treated like an absolute princess alot of the time, but also knew anything could make him angry at me, so I was constantly trying to prove what a good girl I was.

Honey jesus h he is an abuser. You dont have to prove your worth to a man and proving you are a 'good girl' sounds like something he has been manipulating you with for years. You will get over this piece of shit man believe me. You need to learn to relove yourself though. He really has done a number on you Im so sorry you do not deserve it.

But I know I am smart, loving, patient, kind, loyal and thoughtful. I'm fat but I have a beautiful face and if you like fat, alternative, beautiful women, you probably can't find much better than me.
I love my boys so much, and I know I gave absolutely everything to this relationship. There is nothing more I could have done to make my marriage work, or make him want me. And no, long term, I think even if I had agreed to threesomes or throuples or seeing other people, he would probably have picked another boundary to push or left me anyway.

It is so sad to read your posts.
Being so dependent on any other human is really not good for you. You can love somebody without feeling so dependent.
Sadly, if your happiness is based on a man’s then if something happens to them, and they leave, or pass away, you are left with this level of void.
Your language around being a good girl, or being the best girl in a category, OP, it’s okay to just be yourself. You don’t have to prove yourself. You just have to be yourself.

'I was treated like an absolute princess alot of the time, but also knew anything could make him angry at me, so I was constantly trying to prove what a good girl I was'

This makes me really sad for you....to my outside eyes it reads like the tip of a potentially abusive iceberg.

@BookishBabe

Can you find a local Talking Therapy which could offer you support as you go through this?

I still think that you should see a solicitor too.

https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/mental-health-services/find-nhs-talking-therapies-for-anxiety-and-depression/

https://solicitors.lawsociety.org.uk/

...........but also knew anything could make him angry at me, so I was constantly trying to prove what a good girl I was

He was clearly abusive @BookishBabe

You shouldn't have had to tread on eggshells around him. He sounds dreadful, especially when he tried to persuade you into threesomes etc.

You're well rid of him, although I appreciate you're not feeling like that right now.

He sounds very uneducated and truthfully you are better off without him. What educated man parades his new OW in front of his children and discusses it with the other child, he has no wit.
Please realise you are so much better without this ass of a man. I know you are being mature about the kids, but if I were you, I would limit myself to dealings with him, really the bare minimum. You need to heal and you won't do that with so much contact with him. This is going to blow up and hopefully when it does you will have seen sense.
He actually sounds abusive.
Good luck OP, if you can manage it with your kids, go for walks, get out of the house, it'll lift your mood. Honestly, I wish you could see what all us posters can see. This man is a total loser.

Ffs. Are the gods testing me?
I've had a weird day. I love him and I hate him and I love him, and none of this is fair and hes being so selfish and I've got to be strong.

But I'm exhausted, I've barely slept all week. I've been alternating little ones in bed with me to make us both feel better.
Well, both asleep and BAM! Projectile vomit all over me, the blanket, the bed, the sheet, the floor, tried rushing him to the bathroom and it's now on the walls, floor and round the toilet, pretty sure he got nothing actually inside.
I've showered little one and put him into his own bed. Cleaned the bathroom, walls, floor, bed, showered off vomit from the bedding. And damp clothed the mattress topper.
But now what, my bed is wet and smells slightly vomity.
I don't know if the stress has made the kids run down, or if they've had an actual bug, but I hate sick! It was always a dad job. And now, on the hardest week of my life, both my boys have projectile vomited and I'm the only person here to clean it up for them.

So, now I await my turn to be caught out with this bug.
And I dont have a bed to sleep in.

I've always said, if seeing a man be a good husband and father (to someone else) makes you fall in love with them, but then he leaves his wife and children to be with you and destroys his family, he's also destroyed the reason you fell in love with him.

I have no words of comfort, other than you are one of very many who have had to come to terms with a new reality - one that seemed unfathomable when your lives were intertwined

NOT GOING TO HIM by Sharon Olds
Minute by minute, I do not get up and just
go to him –
by day, twenty blocks away;
by night, due across the city's
woods, where night-crowned heron sleep.
It is what I do now: not go, not
see or touch. And after eleven
million six hundred sixty-four thousand
minutes of not, I am a stunned knower
of not. Then I let myself picture him
a moment: …. at twilight, just over the surface
of a sloping terrain. He is alive, he breathes
and moves! My body may never learn
not to yearn for that one, or this could be
a first farewell to him, a life-do-us-part.

I'm mad that I've been left to deal with everything.
I'm mad that the kids are poorly.
I'm mad that when I saw him yesterday he basically said everything I wanted to hear and then backtracked as soon as he was back with the OW.
I'm mad that I fell for it again.
I'm mad that I still feel like my self worth is linked to how much attention or time he can be arsed to give me.
I'm mad that he's not giving me his attention or time.
I'm mad that for years we agreed on the best way to parent, and then saw other people jump into bed and try and introduce kids immediately and we agreed it was shitty parenting, and now he wants to do just that.
I'm mad that last we week, when we talked and he said "We" it was always me and him, and now when he says "We" he means him and the OW.
I'm mad that hes got a distraction from the pain and I haven't.
I'm just so fucking mad.
And I still love the prick.
And I just wish it was last week again and this pain hadn't happened yet, and he was still mine.

You need to disengage from him. Protect your heart because he won’t. Don’t do the pick me dance.

He’s living in some fantasy world right now and thinks there is a scenario where his children aren’t traumatised, he can have a relationship with this OW and you will be waiting for him in the wings if it doesn’t work out.

He needs a dose of reality. Do not give him any more of your emotions. Go cold
and then silent. Tell him you accept his decision. Tell him that the way he has behaved has disgusted you and you will never see him the same way regardless of whether he is with the OW. Tell him your children our your priority and if this relationship goes the distance then eventually they can spend time with her but it’s selfish to expect his children to deal with such big life changes overnight. Tell him you will seek legal advice on child contact arrangements but hope he can be reasonable and put them first. Tell him he can only visit at pre-arranged times and if he tries to take his children to meet the OW without your agreement you will go to court to get primary custody with conditions attached. If he wont put them first you will have to enforce it.

Then tell him to email you about contact with the kids and you will check it once a day. Then block him.

Just to add that even if you are open to reconciling you need to be firm now. He needs to know there is no going back and he has a real choice to make. If he doesn’t care that you are moving on and are done with him (even if that isn’t how you feel yet) then honestly there is nothing you can do and blocking him is for the best as it will speed up the grieving process.

You want him back, you will never get him back if you set no boundaries and keep welcoming him back. Show him how strong you are and that you can do this without him, let him miss you. He knows he can have you back with a snap of his fingers, he won't respect you.
And maybe you might find yourself in this process and realise you can do much better than this cheating abusing asshole.

I think you're right in pretty much everything you've said.
He was trying to have his cake and eat it too.
And maybe me trying to be his friend and be nice to him is still him having his cake and eat it too.
I have humiliated myself a few times this week. I haven't begged to come back to us.
But I text him to tell him I missed him and it was hard not having his arms around me when I thought he was at his Mothers house, only for him to be with her. And I just felt utterly embarrassed. And then pathetic and weak.
I think I'm probably still stroking his ego when we talk.
I haven't let him touch me and told him I'd never have him back, so I thought I wasn't doing the pick me dance. But maybe I still am. I want him to still prioritise us, and he isn't.

Don’t give him your kindness, your anger, your hurt, your love. He does not deserve to know how you feel. He knows you still want him. He has the control and the ‘choice’ between two women. He thinks he is the centre of the world right now. He’s the important one in this scenario.

Give him silence. Have him wonder what you are thinking. Being ghosted is far worse than a break up. It has you questioning your worth if you are that easy to forget. All of this is about his ego. She’s no better than you. But his ego is telling him that he must be worth a lot because two women want him. If the person that truly knows him no longer wants him he will want to regain your approval because otherwise what he’s left with is a relationship with someone he barely knows, living with kids who aren’t his and don’t think of him as the centre of their universe. Whilst the kids he left behind slowly become aware of his faults and see him a different light.

You can’t ghost him because you have children but you can keep as much distance and boundaries between you as possible.

I hope that like @Diarygirlqueen said once he realises his mistake you have healed and no longer want such a weak willed and cruel man.

Even if you 'got him back' - it wouldn't be the him that you knew. In your heart you'd always know that he was capable of this kind of behaviour; of this kind of cruelty. You can never unsee what you've seen. He has made himself poison.

You must focus on you and your boys now. The lure of the known and the familiar is so strong, but that has gone, see my point above. You have a new future now, not the one you expected but there's no reason why it won't be just as good, but different. It's so hard to see when you're in the thick of the pain, but you will be all right. I promise.

Hey everyone.
Thanks for all the support.
I just still feel like this is a bad dream I'm going to wake up from.
I just don't know how my entire life can be shaken up within a few days without my say so or me having any kind of control.
I barely sleep, I barely eat. I always described my love for him as all consuming and obsessed. I'm aware now how bad that was for myself, but when I had him it didn't even register.

Every new realisation pisses me off. I've been thinking about how I look, what I wear, how I act, and realise that, while I did and still do have a lot of choice, alot of myself is based on his opinions of me. If he thought I looked nicer in one type of outfit I'd always choose that over a different one. And I could say that about all of me. My tattoos, piercings, clothes, and while I do still mostly like who I am, because I do like all thise things, its his influence too. Which means I'd let him build himself his perfect woman. Everything I did was to please him, make him happy with me, make him think I'm wonderful (I am still wonderful though). It just seemed like he worked really hard to build his own perfect version of me, and then threw it away, so I just keep thinking "why the fuck did he bother?".

We also had a lot in common, everyone always said we were strange, but we'd found our strangeness enhanced each other. Just how we are, our personalities, what we like, what we like to do. We were just so on each other's page. I don't think he'll ever have that again. All I've heard so far is just how "blah" she is. Nothing sounds that exciting, or different ot worth fucking us up for, except he's found someone else who will desperately do anything in their power to kiss his ego and its a new shagging experience.

I will say I was worried about her for a while, their was definitely some mentionitis, but it was the age old "we're just friends, you wouldn't be like this if it was a man" and "it wouldn't even matter if she wanted me, i only want you" and "have i ever given you reason to doubt it, you're just being silly".
I even apologised a few times for being insecure, what a twat I am.
But I warned him a few times that I thought they were too comfy and cosy together, and when I heard him say "dont get up to trouble this weekend, I'll worry", I said to him "worry about what? Shes some fucking rando that you speak to for 12 minutes a week".
I should have trusted my gut, but I've had fears in the past and I think they were mostly unfounded, so I just keep telling myself that maybe this time it was also my insecurity.

I am fucking wonderful.
I could not have given more to him or our marriage. I regret what he has done, but I can hold my head high that none of this never was and never will be my fault. If anyone asks I can always say that none of this is me and everything to do with him. Because I am fucking amazing, and I was amazing to him.

I've always been a good Moma, but in the light of this I have stepped up more than I ever thought I'd be able to. I have 2 disabled, completely confused, emotionally disregulated, boys who keep asking if this is real and why it's happening, and I think I've handled them with the love, kindness, patience, attention and reassurance they need. They will always know that they can count on me for anything and I will be strong for them.