FrICTION       How to cope and recover when your partner leaves

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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

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

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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