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How to
recover when your partner leaves
[Tips
for catching your cheating spouse]
If
you are happy in a relationship but your partner walks out
on you, it can be one of the most devastating periods of
your life. If they also betrayed you by cheating behind your
back, the pain is worse, causing months of anger, remorse,
self-pity, depression, despondency, and in some cases a
sense that life has no meaning. You will recover, you'll
learn to love again, but it takes time
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Question: I am talking
to Bruce, whose wife of five years walked out on him eight
months ago. This is still a painful time for him. Bruce
believes he is through the worst of it, but there are times
he gets extremely depressed, especially at weekends when he
can spend an entire day sleeping on his couch. Even though
this is going to be a difficult session, it will be very
useful for people going through the same thing. Bruce, how
are you today?
Bruce: Today is a very
good day. Any opportunity to talk about this helps me. There
are so many emotions involved that it's good to be able to
talk and talk and find words and descriptions for those
emotions. If you had talked to me seven months ago, it would
have been very different.
Questions: What are
the emotions you've gone through?
Bruce: I am almost
back to normal now, looking forward, looking at other women.
But there used to be a bottomless sense of sadness and loss, an
almost unbearable feeling of grief, like a death. Then
there's the bitterness about being betrayed. There was anger
in there too, regret and remorse, a constant desire to
retrace my steps to find out where I
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went
wrong, what I could have done to prevent this. I kept
wanting to call Maya, my ex-wife, and tell her "We can patch
this up, build a better marriage". Now I'm like, "Good
riddance, get out of my life!"
Before,
I often dreamt that Maya and I were back together having sex.
Then I'd wake up and understand she'd gone. I've had
feelings of jealousy. Just imagining that another man is
making love to Maya makes me crazy. The first few weeks after
Maya walked out, I just wanted to be dead. We're separated
now with divorce to come. The thought of all the paperwork,
that headache, is nothing compared to the emotional hell
I've been through. Luckily, we don't have children.
Question: Have you
received any help for your depression? Are you on any
medication?
Bruce: You know what,
I did not want to go down that route and have Maya know she
had driven me to see a shrink or be on anti-depressants. I'm
not against therapy but I wanted to bite the bullet and put
up with it whatever I was going through. It's probably more
difficult this way, but I figured that grieving is a natural
process that's going to take time. I figured, you know,
happiness is a part of life and you don't protect yourself
from that, so I told myself grief and suffering are parts of
life and I'd go through it, accept it, and learn from it.
Anyway, I didn't want to pay for all that therapy and all
those pills.
Question:
What have you been doing to get better?
Spending whole days on the couch does not sound good. Are
you improving?
Bruce: I have learned
there are phases you go through; I guess they're steps of
grieving, things like refusal to accept what's happened,
then you move toward acceptance. There's anger, feelings of
being betrayed, there's regret, all those steps. I'm
processing everything that's happened. When one thing gets
sorted out, I move on to something else. It think it's all
part of the healing. Today, eight months later, I think
about the future, which I never did a few weeks after Maya
left me. There was no future then. It was just constant
misery, days and nights of torment, thinking "What has
that b-tch done to me?"
Question:
Do you think there will be a final step for
you, then you'll completely healed?
Bruce: Oh yes, I think
I'm almost there now. It's a matter of accepting what
happened, feeling healed, and being excited about the
future, not constantly tortured about the past. I'd love to
fall in love again. And then there are things I'd love to do
that I didn't, or couldn't, do with Maya because she wasn't
interested.
Question: What, other
than the passage of time, has helped you through this?
Bruce: Talking and
having good friends who let me vent. My mom and dad, bless
them, listened to my boring rants. I have some great buddies
who listened, didn't jump in right away with their own hard
luck stories. Four months ago I met a woman online in a
fitness discussion group. She's going through exactly the
same thing. Sometimes we exchange 50 long messages a day.
Writing long, long emails has helped enormously. You put all
your emotions on paper, or on the screen, and you feel so
much better afterwards. Often you don't even need to send
the message.
Question:
I'd like to retrace some steps to clarify a
few things. Were there any times you felt the breakup
coming, that things were not right in your marriage? Or was
it a total surprise to you?
Bruce: That's
interesting because there are things you are blind to at the
time but which make sense afterwards. You think to yourself
later, "Ah-hah, that's what was going on then" ...
or "That's what she meant by that comment." I
guess when you're in the middle of a mess it's easy to
play the blame game, seeing yourself as totally innocent.
With the benefit of hindsight you can look back and see that
you were an active part of what was going on. Usually,
you're not totally blameless.
Question: There are
always reasons for a break-up ...
Bruce: Right, but when
you're in the middle of something, you don't always see the
patterns that are emerging. I guess our marriage was in
trouble, but I didn't see it, or I didn't pay attention to
it at the time. I thought a lot of our trouble was just
normal marriage stuff. I never expected marriage to be
perfect. I knew there'd be disagreements, conflicts, which
would get solved as we went along.
Question: Yes, lots of
young married couples think marriage is going to be
conflict-free, perfect. Their first big disagreement can be
a shock for them.
Bruce:
Luckily we were both well into our twenties
when we got married, we had careers, we had that maturity,
so we knew life wasn't going to be all rosy and perfect. The
hardest thing for me is I was married for five years and my
wife was cheating for the last two of them. She was actually
bringing the guy to our house when I was away on business.
She was sleeping with the guy in our bed. In some ways,
knowing about the cheating made this harder for me and in
other ways it made it easier. I mean, I figured I didn't
want to be with a woman who could do that to me.
Question: Were you
ever unfaithful to your wife?
Bruce: For the first
three years, I was completely faithful. Then at a conference
I got chatting to a woman, we were in the hotel bar
drinking, swapping stories, talking about our marriages. We
ended up in her room, had sex, I spent the night there. In
the morning, it was regrets and "What the hell
happened?" We both agreed it was a mistake, but we
kept in touch and did it, oh, five or six more times before
she moved out of state and we lost contact.
Question: Did you tell
your wife about this?
Bruce: Of course not.
And I don't think she knew, don't think she sensed it in any
way. It wasn't that serious -- well, yes I guess it was
serious when we kept doing it, but I didn't really think of
it as impacting my marriage. It was a different thing, I
didn't do it because I was unhappy.
Question: A lot of men
say that. Do you know how your wife met the other man?
Bruce: "The other
man", that's good. I call him "the guy who was
screwing my wife". Anyway, she met him at an art class.
Out of the blue she decided she wanted to go to art classes,
learn to draw and paint. It seemed a dumb idea to me. Why
start to draw at 34? It's not like you're gonna become an
artist. She meets this guy there, a bit older, maybe 38, 39,
and he doesn't even have a regular job. He's got maybe four
different jobs, a hand-to-mouth, artsy kind of life. I bet
he didn't he even make 20 grand a year. And she fell
for him because he was artistic. And she's still with him.
Question: You seem to
have contempt for the man?
Bruce: Well, yes, he's
screwing my wife, my ex-wife. He's a loser. Back then I was
earning maybe $100,000 a year, maybe more, and she's with
this guy who's got an old car, a one-bed apartment, no
money. She left me for him.
Question: Do you feel
she cheated on you with someone who is in some ways less
than you?
Bruce: I
am thinking about some of this stuff for the first time
today. I hadn't thought about the artsy stuff before you
asked me, but now I realize she always had that side to her:
books, galleries, she liked to look at paintings. She'd stop and
look at sculpture and I'd wonder what the heck it was all
about.
Question: Are you
interested in those things? Art? Galleries? Sculpture?
Bruce: Tell you the
truth, no. Most of it turns me off. It seems phony. Some guy welds some rusty pipes together, puts it in a park and
we're supposed to stand and admire it? No, I'm not into that
stuff at all. At first, I figured she'd hooked up with the
artist guy to hurt me.
Question: It's good
that you're able to talk about your ex-wife's relationship
with a distance to it. You're not in the middle of it; it's
not causing you so much distress anymore.
Bruce: It varies. You
can be doing well, sailing along, then the sadness or anger
will hit you in the head, literally decking you and you have
to curl up and lie down. Back then,
I thought "How the hell could she?" Now, I figure
good luck to her. I have this daydream of meeting this
gorgeous woman who's making $250,000, great looks, long
legs, and Maya splits with her artist guy and begs me to
take her back and I tell her, "Too late baby. No
frickin' way am I taking you back!"
Question: You must be
feeling better if you're thinking that way.
Bruce: Like I said,
it's a long process. At the beginning, just after your wife
or girlfriends walks out, you think your life has ended. You
see no way forward. You're just hurting all over. You can't
sleep, eat, or concentrate. Then, a little bit at a time, it
gets better, and yeah, you do recover.
Question: Thank you,
Bruce, for an excellent and encouraging talk.
Marcia Thompson, the
interviewer, is an avid distance runner. She helps couples get in shape
together, guiding them through the many obstacles that can
occur in physically and psychologically mismatched relationships.
[If
you are in a joyless, sexless, or loveless marriage or
relationship, we would like to hear from you. There are
millions like you; you are not alone! How do you cope?
Please help others by sharing your experiences so that we
can publish your thoughts, advice, or even cries for help.]
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