[Milly]

Good point, Nas.

[One day at a time]

I also subscribe to the club of what was the point of our 15 years together.. I feel cheated out of my happily ever after.. not the fairy tale type but the real lifetime together with the normal ups and downs. I see happily married people everywhere.. in work, friends, gym.. so I keep asking myself, why did I choose him? Why didn't I invest my best years in someone else? I got bomb droped at 40 and I guess I could eventually have a life with someone else but the innocence is gone, the getting old with the person I chose is gone. I resent having to start a new life at this stage.

I know the 15 years were real and the love was real, or as real as H knew how to love.. I can now see that his FOO issues were present throughout our marriage and time together.. and even if the memories are happy, what good are they to me now? Some days I wish I had never met him which I think it's a very sad way to end a 15 year long relationship but also the sad reality of today's state of affairs

[Nas]

I could have written much of what you said, One Day.
We have similar stories. Together almost 16 years, no kids, H moved 1100 miles away (might as well be another continent.) I have often thought the same as you, why did I choose him and waste my best years only to end up alone at a time when I’m most in need. Feels like a big ole waste.

[Treasur]

Nas - get your point about repressing or suppressing memories, maybe consciously maybe not. Certainly my experience post PTSD is that they DO come back and not always when you expect once your brain is working properly. Completely logical to assume that is no different for MLCers. What might be different I guess is how we respond when they appear....perhaps there is a time when as LBS we doubt them, or we don't want to feel distressed so we shut them down or do something to distract ourselves? With time though I am finding more pop up, there is a momentum to them and I am more comfortable with them. I wonder if the suppression eases when one doesn't have to squeeze them into a story? Either an LBS or an MLC one? Harder for the vanishing MLCer maybe bc they need the justifying story for longer perhaps or have more distractions or more guilt? Idk.

But, for instance, it is a sunny late summer morning here after a storm, smells like a hint of autumn and the light is softer...I can hear wood pigeons cooing...and I suddenly had a memory of a morning a few weeks before our wedding in 2003  (we were married in September)...a similar morning, walking through a park to get coffee and we were so excited...I can see us and it was lovely. Have not thought about that morning in years. But I also know now that I don't have to run from the memory. If my h was here I would probably say 'hey I was just thinking...do you remember...' and we would enjoy the memory together and the folks we were then. He isn't here but the memory is if that makes sense. I have sometimes felt really angry that my memories were disenfranchised somehow bc I could no longer share them with my h or my parents...but of course my vanishing xh can't share them either can he? How could one share these with ow/om given the way they behaved, given the standard kind of ow/om's lack of grace lol...so you would have to live your new life with an undercurrent of never being able to talk positively about your old one. Often years and years of your own life. I imagine that might be quite hard sometimes...that it might leave you with a kind of internal sense of dislocation which doesn't seem very healthy....but we LBS can if we want to, just not to the spouse who shared some of them.

It's so funny, and so useful, to see ones own thoughts expressed by others bc I find my reaction to YOUR thoughts is sometimes quite different to my reaction to MY having exactly the same thoughts as Nas, One Day and Milly say. About the point or value of if it was all a huge waste. I read your words and I want to say 'but of course it wasn't...that isn't how life works, that things only matter if they work out perfectly or if we all get an A+....that there were plenty of things that you did and had and enjoyed bc of being married to that particular person...not bc of them exactly...but bc of who you were with them...places you saw, things you did, feelings you felt'. So I challenge myself by challenging you I guess?

I remember somewhere reading someone who said that in this situation he had to do two things to recover...he had to beat all his unanswered questions to death until his brain got bored of it lol...and at the same time he had to chip away at all the bits of his current life where he was still paying a fallout price from his w's actions. That the second was harder, took longer and often needed not just actions but a real effort to change his lens. Bc for instance he DID see less of his kids, he WAS struggling financially...with time, he could work to rebuild his finances say but he had to pick out the positives from spending less time with his kids (in his case he decided that actually bc when he was with them he had to be more actively involved as a single dad that the quality of their time was much better than when he had just been s married dad rolling home from a long day at work etc). But while he felt conscious day to day of the COST of this in almost every bit of his life, it made him feel stuck in this loop of 'this wasn't worth what I got and surely not what I damn well ordered' 

I honestly don't know what God's cunning plan was here, or which bit of it is supposed to be about me lol. But what if there was one? What if there was something different but better? (I know, I am rolling my eyes and making snorting noises too...grrr). I am given to intellectual arrogance ha ha...so it is so easy to say 'I know x or y'...but what if I'm wrong? After all, this experience has proved me wrong about a whole bunch of other things right? So I could be wrong about new things too. And so could you.

The one thing I remember thinking quite early on....although I didn't want to think it...was that God or the universe may have protected me by taking my vanishing h away. It didn't feel good, it wasn't what I wanted....but he was an unreachable destructive mess of a human then. Like a black hole.  No amount of love or logic could reach him and the cost of trying to was incredibly high when other events had already brought me to my knees. What if it would have been worse if he hadn't vanished and run off to his new life? They really are impossible to have a normal kind of relationship with aren't they?

So, my learning from your thoughts reflected back on mine....I refuse to feel guilty about needing to beat my own questions to death until I'm done lol. And I will excavate those 20 years to pull out the value for me regardless of what xh came to believe about them or me. And I will keep chipping away at the day to day costs that I am still carrying either practically or with my mindset, bc maybe that will change the cost/benefit ratio of the whole thing. Hope that makes sense. Hope that is useful to someone else in the clanisher family too.

On a weird side note, did/has anyone else found that suddenly they have started having dreams with their spouse in them again after years of not? I did initially, painful dreams normally...then not at all for ages. Recently, literally two nights in a row, I have had very vivid dreams of my xh but quite different flavoured dreams. I assume bc my subconscious is tackling different things. Might post about them on my own thread as a bit of journaling....

[Nas]

Treasur, what you say about the MLCer being alone with their memories reminds me of an article I read the day I found out about OW. It was an article about why affair relationships don’t last and listed a bunch of numbered reasons. One of the reasons was that the person who leaves a marriage for an affair can’t talk about their past relationship with the affair partner, which leads them to feeling isolated sometimes and can lead to resentment as time goes on. I can’t imagine having 15, 20, 30 years of my life in my head and not being able to talk about it.

H and I met in 1999, two years after his father died. In 2003 we bought our home back in the area H grew up in. It was a whole new unfamiliar area to me, but to H it contained the memories of his entire life before me.

One of the first nights in the new place, we were laying in bed and H suddenly began to cry - sobbing in a way I had never seen him do before. When I asked him what was wrong, he said, “I miss my dad.”
At that point it had been six years since his father died, we had been together almost 4 years, and he had not talked about him very much. Apparently the memories had just struck him so intensely in that moment, he broke down in tears.

Imagine if he had been in that moment and not been able to talk about it to anyone?
I can imagine some of our vanishers having those moments as the years go by and memories creep in. And what do they do with those intense moments, however fleeting?
Can anyone imagine their MLCer sobbing and telling the OP it’s because they were struck by a memory of the spouse they abandoned? Can’t imagine any OP being sympathetic or supportive in a moment like that.

My H had a shared history with OW until they were 19. All the years between then and when they started the affair again at age 40 are pretty much unshareable.
Except that OW is surrounded by her former life still. Her exH lives in the same town, they have a shared relationship with their kids. She has her same job, same friends. She didn’t have to give up her memories. But H moved far away, left his job, left his life and, at least for a time, seemed to erase me completely.
So while OW can have a memory pop up and share it with her kids, her friends, or even her exH, when H has a memory of me and our life pop up, he can’t tell OW or his new friends he’s thinking about the wife he abandoned.
That’s got to feel extremely isolating.

*modifying to say the article wasn’t about why affair relationships don’t last. It was about why they don’t turn into healthy relationships.
We’ve all seen they do last, often for a very long time. But that doesn’t mean they’re healthy relationships.

[Tyks]

The words that everyone wrote here very much resonate with me as well.

In 2003 my xh and I had a bit of a split up. We have just returned from adopting our second daughter from China. It was stressful for me BC now I had xh and two kids to care for and he didn't do much of anything in those days.

We met awhile after the split up at my request to discuss our marriage. He told me that he was never going back to "that". Whatever that was I have no idea. 

Fast forward a few months and he lost the girl (who had a bf) he had been screwing, lost his job, no money to live, and he then found out I was seeing someone. All of a sudden he could not live without me and our family. I went through weeks of him crying on his hands and knees to take him back. Many tears were shed by me as well trying to figure out what to do.

I weighed the options. The guy I was seeing wasn't really "marriage" material and in the end I decided I wanted to be with xh BC he would complete our family. I was 35 at the time, looked great and felt great. But I chose to be with him again and to make our marriage work.

Why did I choose that? I wasted the best years of my life on someone who didn't deserve it as well. Then he leaves me when I'm 47 BC he found an ow that he wanted. Unreal!!! I really believe that if she had left him alone he would've come back. We were two peas in a pod... Or so I thought. I also know that the blame should rest with him but she is not blameless completely.

[1trouble]

I felt I have to respond to your post Tyks because I have seen something like this mentioned before

Before I start

Do I have a vanisher?

well in a lot of ways I do because absolutely my MLC'er would have been a vanisher if I hadn't sporadically, at times, reached out to him anyway that's my credentials

Now to get to the point of why I felt I have to respond
I absolutely get what has been said about the IF only or what if and the 'sliding doors' (referring to the film here) thoughts that are on the post, I was 34 when I met my MLC'er and although, as soon as we met, I felt that connection there was something in me that knew this was going to either be bliss or heartache, it felt destined that's for sure

We met, he came back for coffee and left 18 hours later and I knew my life had changed.
I remember phoning my best friend 2 days later early in the morning and crying saying I felt like I was on a rollercoaster (ironically) and it was either going to be the most wonderful journey leading to clear blue skies and sunshine OR it was going to take me into to shark invested waters!

As I have documented many times, my MLC;er had a serious coke issue, I didn't know about at the time or even for a while because, in those days I was very niaive about drugs and he hid it well (from a niaive person anyway).  We had many splits in the first few years and inbetween  time I was contacted by an ex boyfriend and actually someone I had known since I was 5 and we spoke at times but I knew my heart was with my MLC';er, as lovely (and good looking) as my ex was, he went on to be a millionaire btw!!

Because of the instability of my MLC;er in those first few years, we didn't try to start a family but we did have an unplanned  pregnancy a few years in which was an ectopic which I found out late into the pregnancy (it burst whilst I was having a scan when I was 10.5 weeks) and the rupture caused a lot of issues and led to a lot of gynae ops and that meant we didn't attempt IVF until I was in my early 40's and the attempts we had didnt work.

Why am I telling you this..............?

Because I will admit to a few fleeting moments of thinking what if this and that, like some of you,BUT that way lies the way of trauma and more misery

You cannot change the past and your choices you can only change your future

Now I cant speak for any of you I can only speak for my own experiences

And what I know is I had some beautiful, loving, wonderful times with my then H and I am very grateful to know that sort of love and respect

We can all fall into the trap of trying to rewrite history to demonise our spouse and EVERYTHING that we had in order to make what happened seem somewhat more palatable and somehow, in some perverse way make more sense but realistically does it?

Isnt it, in some ways doing what a MLC'er would do?

I know WE had some fabulous times and those times were very real and I know I wasn't duped or catfished or fooled I had a man who really loved me and he went into CRISIS.

I also own the decisions I made all those years ago, those decisions meant I am where I am now, they meant I ended up without children yes

BUT do I really know I would have had any NO
 maybe I would have made worse decisions, not ended up with my ex ( we split up ironically because I didn't want children at the time and he did!).
And I may have ended up having an ectopic with another person and divorced or something else

The point I am trying to make is YOU JUST DONT KNOW how your future would have been if you had taken another road but we can fall into the trap of thinking it would have been better because that's how our brain works BUT we do not know and more importantly
HOW DOES THAT SORT OF THINKING SERVE US?

Surely its better to put energy into something you can change, like your present and your future ?

And do MLC;ers remember stuff ABSOLUTEY

You have read Shocks sister she used the analogy of the damn, that damn not only represented the holes in her persona and what she was running from (which was her demons AND past life) BUT it also represented the memories she was trying to shut out, that's how everyone who is truly in crisis is.

They remember and over time they remember more but those memories lack the emotion that we feel except for fleeting moments....its when memories AND emotion connect is when the damn wall burst open

[Tyks]

Wow, 1t. Thank you for that lovely post. Your posts always make me rethink things. Thank you for sharing that. I had 4 ectopic pregnancies. One cycle of IVF and getting ready to start the second IVF when they found my 4th ectopic pregnancy. Eight weeks. Didn't rupture but it sure was a rush to get it out that day.

They ruptured my bowel that time and I spent 10 days in a hospital an hour and a half away from home. We were not yet married. My xh drove back and forth everyday so that he go to work and he slept by my bedside in a chair every night !! That is when I decided to marry him. I fell more in love with him and thought, whoa, if he is like this now he will never abandon me!!!

It always makes me wonder about all of our histories. To go through all of that and then we went to China twice to adopt our girls, why would they want to end that book the way they did. Then I read your words and other people's words. BECAUSE THEY ARE IN CRISIS. Have to remember that.

Thank you again

[sparklestar]

That post from 1t also made me really think - it’s the ‘you don’t know how your life would have turned out if you made different choices it may not have been any better’ this is so true. I think from my perspective my H and I really had something special, so many people saw that, I thought that to yet the actions of MLC trashed it all. What I once saw as a magic, lucky relationship feels like a wrong choice. But yet I absolutely see that I don’t know any other house would have been better? I’m with someone else now, yet there’s still pain, still hurt, still a sadness that resides and I don’t know if I will ever fully be able to love like I did before because its like a part of me is deadened from it all too.

I think what makes it harder that he has a child with OW now (obvs not planned) when we were in the early stages of IVF when BD happened. I think had I ended up with someone else might thy have been different? Yet still I then think ‘but it might not’

It will be 3 years since BD this coming weekend and I can feel myself wobbling and in some ways it feels harder than it has for a while, maybe because I hoped that relationship would have bitten the dust by now, it’s like the longer they go on, the more I feel like he made the right choice and that people believe in them... I probably should have journaled this on my own page (not that I do much any more)!

[Tyks]

It will be 3 years since BD this coming weekend and I can feel myself wobbling and in some ways it feels harder than it has for a while, maybe because I hoped that relationship would have bitten the dust by now, it’s like the longer they go on, the more I feel like he made the right choice and that people believe in them... I probably should have journaled this on my own page (not that I do much any more)!

This right here . We have the same bd pretty much, sparkles

No, I don't think we will ever fully love and trust again.