[Dragonfly33]

One Day, I am very proud of you! You managed it with dignity! Now you can continue moving forward and not look back anymore. My H was the same when we were at the court. My L told me he looked depressed. I just read a saying today that says when it’s not meant for you God will give the circumstances that will force you to let go otherwise you would still be clinging on to that situation that would destroy you. Funnily enough, after my H came back to me and still I was suffering instead of feeling happy, I prayed and said, if this marriage was not meant to last then please give me a reason that would force me to let it go. And He did! My H continued to hurt me to the point that I had to kick him out. It hurt a lot but I think it was the best decision I ever made for myself, to save myself. My D like yours was also forced on me but I think it’s a blessing in disguise. It detaches us from that toxic rollercoaster ride. I believe, had I kept clinging onto that marriage, at some point he would still decide to live the moment he found another OW. It was just a matter of time. It was just a transit for him. It would have been just prolonging the agony. I’m happy for you and I wish you all the best in your new life.

[One day at a time]

Thanks xyzcf and Dragonfly33. I am resilient and I'm pretty far away from the puddle of tears that exH left behind nearly 5 years ago but certain things still hurt, don't they?

Journaling

Today is exH's birthday.. I find it interesting that at this point in my journey, I don't even question if I should say HB or not... But it doesn't mean I don't think of him and still wonder how we spent 15 years celebrating birthdays together and all of the sudden, there is not even a message exchanged.

Since the divorce, we had a few exchanges on email. There was a joint account that we needed to close and we got that done. And the final step was to deal with some of his belongings that were still in my house. He organized for his brother to be available in early February and B and I drove to exH's hometown. I got out of the car before arriving and B delivered the stuff on his own.... I was a bit anxious that someone in the family could drive by and see me so I was glad to see B coming back after a few minutes.. B asked me if I was sad after delivering xH's belongings. At that point I wasn't, it was the last tick in a VERY long list of boxes...

I guess at this point, 3 weeks have gone by and it's starting to hit me. There is absolutely nothing left to do and that means I will probably never hear from xH again... NEVER, what a word, it's very final but I need to come to terms with it I guess... How did it get to this? I will never understand it.. It's been nearly 5 years since he decided he was done and despite everything that has happened since, I still find it the most baffling experience of my entire life.

For people who are not familiar with my story, B and I have been in a relationship for over 3 years. Not an easy one and I have questioned it more than once but our main issues are due to scars from the past so somehow we keep getting through the rough patches. I wish I was one of the stories here where the LBS found new love and is even happier than he/she ever was in the his/her marriage but I'm not. My IC told me I would more than likely struggle in any relationship due to the trauma of how my marriage ended. It feels very unfair but it is what it is..

In about 2 weeks I'll be flying to my home country to visit my family and B is coming with me for the first time. My family has met him over Facetime many times, there's a language barrier so it's all very superficial but now it is time for him to come and meet my family face to face. This morning occured to me that the first time xH brough OW to this country and paraded her all over his hometown, there was a massive shift in me. It made it "official". xH used to come with me in my yearly trip home so I spent the last couple of trips navigating the "How come your H didn't travel with you?" questions..  Now it's my turn to bring "a new man" to my hometown and I can't help it but feel "it's wrong" 

As I have said many times, I'm very happy with the life I have achieved. I know myself a lot better than I did before and I have done things I never thought I was capable of. And yet, this was not my original life plan and I think my heart and soul are still struggling to truly accept that there is no going back. This is my new life, things are moving forward and sometimes I feel I'm simply an expectator in my own life, a life that I don't completely recognize. Am I the only one that experiences this sort of "out of body" experiences?

[Evermore]

As I have said many times, I'm very happy with the life I have achieved. I know myself a lot better than I did before and I have done things I never thought I was capable of. And yet, this was not my original life plan and I think my heart and soul are still struggling to truly accept that there is no going back. This is my new life, things are moving forward and sometimes I feel I'm simply an expectator in my own life, a life that I don't completely recognize. Am I the only one that experiences this sort of "out of body" experiences?

Hey OneDay

Nope, you are not alone here! I still feel every day like I am watching someone else's life. Like this is Bizarro-land and 'my real life' is just over there, over the horizon. Sometimes if I'm driving home from work and my mind wanders I will think something like 'what will we have for dinner?', and the 'we' I'm thinking of is H and my kids, as though he will be there when I get home. And it's still a shock when I realise that this happened and he actually won't be there when I get home, and he very likely won't ever be there again when I get home. It's bizarre to me that I'm still shocked by it after more than 4 years.

Like you I am (relatively happy in the new life I've created. I have much to be grateful for. But it's not the life I planned, and not the one I wanted (still want ). So there is a weird feeling I have about this current life. It still feels like I'm wearing someone else's coat that doesn't quite fit. I'm hoping that eventually that feeling will go away and I'll 'grow into' this new life more and the shock will stop being shocking. I hope that for you too.

[readytofixmyselffirst]

Hello,

Yes to the "not my original life plan".  I was looking forward to retiring with my ex and spending my retirement watching our children become adults and having grandchildren to watch. My plans are gone and one of my daughters lives in another state with her mother while the other one lives near me.

But with every closed door, another opens. My new wife and I have our travels, adventures and other times together. She is a truly special person and I love her deeply. Never put me through the wringer and has always shown me respect and kindness. We have our moments, but we do communicate well. Bing watch movies and shows, find new places to eat, and what needs to be done on our home together.

I don't feel like I am on eggshells all the time and when I go home, I go to peace. I don't wish my ex happy birthday either and I actually feel better from the silence. I only have one more document to get filed with the retirement system and we are officially done. All I need is a stamp on one page and then I can be truly free.

My IC told me I would more than likely struggle in any relationship due to the trauma of how my marriage ended. It feels very unfair but it is what it is..

Every situation and person is different. While the end of my marriage was very traumatizing, I did not give up on the concept of love or marriage. After all, she divorced and left me. Now I have been married five years and we are still going strong. It is different, but the plusses outweigh the negatives and despite all my fears, my new wife has shown no sign of MLC and she is about to turn 50.

Keep putting one foot in front of the other and if there is one thing I can say that I hope you can take comfort from is that your ex's choices and actions had very little to do with you or your marriage. This was all him and his choices due to conflict of his own essence. His very being.

Have an amazing evening and be good to yourself,

(((Ready)))

[Treasur]

Another one here who gets that same feeling occasionally. 
Tbh I also get a kind of ‘Gosh did I imagine that old life/marriage/husband?’ feeling too occasionally. 
It was a pretty weird experience to live through and I don’t think I could explain what happened and why now with any more clarity than I could have explained it then. Which is a bit weird too.
I think all that has changed, with time and other kinds of living, is that the strength of my emotions about it have faded significantly. And tbh, I don’t think about those feelings much now....I tend to live more in the present now, I think, for good or ill. Plus it was so horrific that I feel grateful every day that I am not in those post BD months/years.  I truly don’t think about it or him much now....but if I do, yes, it still seems surreal to me that I got from there to here.

Mostly tbh I treat it as if he died....have done for quite a while. May not make sense writ large, but it made sense to me......Easier to do of course with someone who vanished with no kids and no contact.

I’m not sure that i’d agree with your IC. After this experience, i’m A little cautious about using ‘always’ or ‘never’ about anything much....I prefer perhaps and we’ll see and I don’t know yet  I think it is probably true that this was a big hairy upending kind of life experience and those tend to shuffle our bits around for a while, don’t they? We don’t come out of it with quite the same perspectives that we went into it with, good and maybe not so good. Having said that though - and research backs this up lol - most of us have a kind of internal baseline, a core of who we are as individuals on some of the big stuff like optimism and love and commitment, that we tend to return close to over time even after trauma. Just with a few different coats, I suspect  The other thing that I suspect takes time too, maybe longer than we would wish, is knowing in our bones that whatever it was that caused it all was about someone else’s chaos....not ours, not other humans’ either. We may be left more sensitive to the smell of bad apples for a while, but one cataclysmically bad human apple does not make all apples rotten 

[UrsaMajor]

Another tick on the "Not what I had in mind for my future" box here.

Since I have a bit of a wallowing Clinger and we have 2 kids together, I have a fair amount of contact with MLCxW. In fact, this past weekend, she had to put her dog to sleep as a result of him having cancer and the kids were with me. I took them back to her place early so they could say "Goodbye" to the "Floof" (the nickname they gave him since he was a Samoyed so about 20 kgs of fluffy white fur and 10 kilos of dog underneath). She wrote me later and thanked me for being so kind and supportive.

I just let it go because there was nothing that I could answer besides a short "You're welcome" that wouldn't have been harsh.

But it did lead to a lot of thoughts like "I always was. You just couldn't or wouldn't see it."

As far as future R's go, I have been in one for 3 years now but I am still not interested in marriage again. After taking 2 trips around the MLC Mulberry Bush, I am just too hesitant/distrusting. It is not the fault of my SO but strictly on me. I noticed that too as I am living in her house, I do not feel "at home" and like I may end up having to move at any time based on her wishes.... Not a particularly relaxing way to live but, again, nothing specific that she has done  - just my own thing about keeping myself (and my kids) "safe" as needed

[One day at a time]

Thank you all for your comments

Evermore, the coat that doesn't quite fit it's a perfect description. I'm wearing it every day and I know it's mine but it just feels "wrong"

Ready, I do follow your thread and I can see you have a wonderful marriage now which makes me very happy for you. I'm not sure I believe in marriage anymore... B wants to marry eventually but I find myself asking "what for?" It didn't stop xH from leaving so it's like I no longer believe that marriage means commitment...

Treasur, I probably have a bit more of a window into xH's life than you but I also treat it as a death of sorts. The person I knew is definitely not there anymore. I saw a picture of him recently and he looked like a stranger to me.. I had 0 emotional response which might be a good thing however it also feels "wrong" that I feel nothing when I see his face.

UM, what you said about your current relationship made me think about my own situation.. As I said above, marriage has lost its meaning for me too and after the long, costly and painful divorce process that only finished 4 months ago for me, I really don't want to even consider putting myself in that situation again.. And while not everyone is the same and just because xH walked doesn't mean B will, still...
I also hear you about the house, B moved in with me rather than the other way around and he has made a lot of nice improvements in the house, people have said the house looks a lot more "homely" now and yet, it doesn't feel to me like the same "safe home" I had before MLC hit. In my case, there has been a few things that B has done (his own trauma responses) that really triggered my fight/flight response and I think I haven't been able to let that go yet.

Journaling

I was reading a thread about how life in social media might look a lot better than real life.. I don't necessarily consider what happened to me proof of this but it does make me question it... Up to the point of my divorce, I used to check social media as OW was great at giving me evidence that could turn useful in the divorce proceedings if xH was to make my life difficult.. The fact that he got married in the middle east before divorcing me was "my wild card", all evidence courtesy of OW.. Since the divorce was final, I decided that their life no longer impacts mine. I can't claim I never look because sometimes curiosity wins but I know it's not what I should be doing, specially because I know I will only find pictures of happy faces, nice trips or whatever.... The thing is... if all those smiley faces and hints of a complete and happy life were true, why would OW be lurking in my socials? 5 YEARS after my xH left me for her?

About 2 months ago, someone created a dummy profile in LinkedIn and looked at my profile. xH has looked at my profile many times since he left so I don't believe it was him.. The country of the dummy profile is where xH and OW live and I don't know anyone else in that country so my only guess is that it was her... but I could be wrong..

But then last month, OW sent me a Facebook friend request  This was obviously a case of fat fingers because she removed the invite immediately and blocked me. I know who she is so the alert on my phone was enough for me to figure it out.. What's more interesting about this is that this happened 2 weeks before xH and OW came to xH's country to marry officially.. I have no idea why she felt the urge to look at my profile but maybe this has been happening all along and I didn't know. B has an xW and I never feel the urge to stalk her, she's his past and I don't have any doubts that their relationship is well and truly over.. Maybe OW is not that confident.. What's even more interesting is that when I checked a few days later, she unblocked me..

After some thought, I decided to block both OW and xH, I never blocked anyone before but it will serve 2 purposes, they won't see me and I won't be able to look anymore. I don't need to know anymore.

As for the official wedding, I will post some interesting insights I got later... This is getting way too long at this stage!

[One day at a time]

Right... I see in my last post I was meant to come back later to post about their wedding.. But a month has gone by!! I guess life is not so much about them anymore!

So.. the wedding. Thankfully I was away at the time so while at the back of my head I knew their wedding was coming, I was too busy spending time with family and B to really care. Ex SIL (married to exH's brother) made a clear statement of how she feels about the whole thing by simply not attending. Her H had to go to wedding with the kids but without her and finally admit to his brother (exH) that his wife doesn't want any involvement with him or his new bride.. ouch! At this point, it feels like she's more affected by all this than I am 

I then heard from her a few curious facts that she heard from her H.. The night before the wedding and the wedding night, OW went to bed at 9pm and left exH drinking with his family. Maybe I can understand the night before the wedding. It was a great opportunity for exH to catch up with everyone but on their wedding night I just find that very strange. The other thing that I heard is that OW spent much of their wedding day sitting on her own.. Sounds like the ex in laws are making her feel as welcome as they made me...  They have nothing but good things to say about her (even when they met her a handful of times since they live abroad) but yet, when it came to it, they were happy to sit together drinking and ignore the bride. How charming! I have to admit, I don't miss them one bit!

Things returned to normal for me and since I blocked exH and OW, I literally have no way of knowing what's going on.. The only link I still have is my exSIL which I will probably have to thing how I handle as I realize that when I hear stuff from her, it pulls me back into MLC madness... Anyway, this past weekend exSIL went to visit ex MIL and FIL.. She was getting upset while she was there and was texting me as we always had that special connection around the in laws (not feeling welcome, how insensitive they can be about others' feelings, etc)
Anyway, in a nutshell, she told me that the pictures of my wedding are STILL hanging on the wall!!! I mean, WTF? They can do a straight swap now and hang the pictures of exH's latest wedding but nope! There's not one picture of exH with OW... and they stay with in ex in laws when they visit! I mean, does exH not tell his parents to remove the pictures? Do my ex in laws not realize that it could be very upsetting for OW (not that I care about her but still...) The wedding pictures are hanging on what my exSIL calls "the wall of shame" as there are pictures of 3 marriages which have broken down in the family (exH's 2 sisters) I can maybe understand why the 2 sisters' wedding pictures are there. They never remarried and their exHs are the fathers of their children so when the grandkids come to visit, they can see the pictures of their parents wedding... but my wedding??? It's either laziness or they truly live in lalaland!!!

The other piece of news I heard is that exH's older sister travelled to the middle east for a week "to support exH"... whatever is going on there, I have no idea but obviously things aren't too rosey. Either exH said something while he was here for his wedding or maybe they sensed something.. In the end it sounds like she went for nothing as exH spent all the time working and sol his sister spent the time with OW...

One thing I realized about all this is that whatever is going on, it has nothing to do with me anymore. And I really don't need to know. ExSIL apologized the day after for dragging me into the drama as she realizes it's not good for me. Not because it sends me back to the pain of 5 years ago but it unsettles me... Time will tell if I hear any more or not... In the meantime, back to me, my new life and my future!

[MadLuv]

My xSIL wants nothing to do with XH new wife either. Lucky for her he has never told them he got married. Haha. I still am amazed these men who were unhappy and most felt controlled jump right back into another marriage. Sounds like they are off to a great start ( laugh, sniffle, chuckle)

[sachat3]

Behind the times here but better late than never.

So the photo thing makes me chuckle. My ex mil has a photo wall and when clington lived next door she has right by his bedroom door a picture of me, him and D11 who at the time must have been 1 at most. Ow went into that bedroom but must have seen it. I think you’re in laws think more highly of you than you think.

I was never divorced. Never married so I can’t relate to those feelings but I do relate to the issues you have with B. I think for me, I always think I could get another crisis kid. But you’ll never know. Not everyone is the same. You’re not the same as B’s ex wife just as he isn’t the same as your ex husband.

So glad ti hear your update and hope all is well