Has anyone been through this? Where did you land on your opinion of your partner after coming out the other side of this?
My ex is a workaholic. He is never home before 10ish pm and often much later. It's unnecessary and an obsession. I was raising our kids on my own and managing the family/home/life admin too. He basically insisted on living like a 20 something with nothing to stop him from his work. He was another child to me in many ways, another mouth to feed, more laundry to do. He contributed pretty much no domestic labour, just generated more. Emotionally it was so utterly lonely and disrespectful too.
I work full time and we both earned equally and paid equally for our lives. I was home with the kids from 5pm always.
I hate the sound of it when I lay it out like that but I have huge compassion for myself and women like me - we were trying so hard to make something beautiful work. I understand you might have the opinion that it was my fault for tolerating it and there is truth in that. But I see layers of social programming, fear of the family structure self destructing, fear of economic difficulty and more. And I'm not interested in blame or shame.
So my question is about processing your feelings about your ex. I have felt ALL the feelings, especially anger, resentment sometimes disgust. And I don't like feeling that way about someone I loved and liked for decades.
It's so easy to say, 'I'm done' but I am having difficulty processing how I feel about him, there was a lot of love and friendship for 15 years before we had kids. Then I had the kids and had no tolerance for his bullshit 😆 and it slowly killed us off for another 10 years. I guess I'm sad and angry and it's exhausting.