Yes! In my opinion, you have it right on! Stay with that thinking, and concentrating on what he didn't say, as well as what he did.

Go girl!

Susan

first of all i'll love you no matter what. but this is poison and not helpful for you in my opinion.

you're gonna believe what you choose to believe anyway.

however i don't think it's right to make assumptions and decide for yourself what he has said or not said that you needed to hear. he said what he said. there are only perceptions.

i don't think it's fair for you to want him to contact you every time you feel like talking to him while he's away. he IS IN FACT away with her right now. so of course he can't be talking to you the whole time in text.

After saying all that i totally and completely understand why you did wha thou did and why you feel the way you feel.

it's hard. the best thing i think my dear is to leave him alone. he has asked for space. give him the space and work on yourself. so you can see with clarity if you do want him or not.

we don't get to interpret other people's actions anymore that's codependency....

Having come through an ambiguous situation myself, I can say this. It's not fair to keep someone hanging, and as long as you are kept hanging, you're going to feel like shit. I have found that sending very UNambiguous messages like "Sorry, but I have too much self-respect to sit around and wait for you to make up your mind. Best of luck -- I'm out of here" is very effective. But you have to get to the point where you can say it and mean it (and really FEEL it). What helped me get there was really, really working on myself to the point where I could stop obcessing about him and start affirming my own worth as a person.

I'm going to give it to you straight! He is hedging his bets! He could be having a great time with this GF but wants to keep you as an option because breaking out of a marriage & committing to someone new is scary! Do not gain hope from this. Continue putting your life in order without him. How long has he had the GF?

Oh honey, this is a mind-fuck. RUNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Take what he said as he said it and then choose what you will do based on the information you have been given. This really is not about him even if he comes back to u...what will that do for u and for how long. How long before you are unhappy again how long before you are scared again. He is not the answer. ..let go just for a bit and allow your true wants to surface.

Thank you all so much for your replies. I went to my therapist after writing this and she said if I can just cheerlead myself and work on me everything else will work out. I am so obsessed with all this crap that I really got myself worked up. I waste so much of my life worrying about others that I have left myself behind. I need to pay attention to me and only me. You are all right. I do need to allow him his space and in doing this I can have mine to concentrate on me. I never dreamed this all would be so hard though. Going through the last 16 years with him had its ups and downs and I just kept going forward. I guess this is all a culmination of my ignoring issues with myself and staying so busy as to ignore them until last year when I could stand it no more. Now I need to face me. That is the hardest work of all. To look in the mirror and develop a genuine love for that stranger looking back at me. I think I am ready to begin. Please keep up the comments, they do not hurt my feelings, they only help me. Thank you.

Be strong. ..

It sounds like you have a very supportive therapist, that is wonderful. I was in my marriage for 16 years as well..it is very difficult to leave, because it's so difficult to reconcile the intimacy and shared experiences with the apparent betrayals. That is, of course, the cognitive dissonance aspect, where reality fights with emotion.

I just read the first post you put on the discussion board, where you told about the pact you had made with yourself when you were 14 about leaving the man before he left you. I did not have that background knowledge of this situation when I wrote my previous replies to this particular discussion. So I thought I would share an aspect of my marriage that could potentially shine some light on what you are experiencing (or possibly not--you will be the judge of that).

When I was 17, my first boyfriend cheated on me with one of my friends, similar to your experience when you were in high school. I still remember that pain--even though it was brief (thankfully we were not sexually involved). I went many years--6, in fact, before dating again. When I was 24, I fell for this sexually experienced/confident man, but was hesitant to become involved with him because I was still a virgin, and somehow sensed that becoming sexually involved with someone would bind me all that much closer. Looking back at the man, I now realize that I had probably dodged a bullet with him. At the time, I didn't realize this. In fact--I was filled with regret! I was obsessed with somehow attracting his attention back to me, but by this time he was interested in someone else. In order to stop the pain I jumped into a relationship with someone who was on the lower spectrum of the narcissist scale--but in retrospect, the relationship could have worked had I known what I know now. This is complicated--stick with me on this. I am describing things as they come to mind.

My husband knew about my obsession with the previous guy--he had a sense that he was the back-up, the heartache sponge. Yet I think he actually did love me. The relationship, and he, were pretty good for the first couple of years--I did not feel passion for him, but it was generally a stable relationship. Then he got into pornography. I sometimes wonder if his venture into pornography wasn't his own way of sponging a lack of connection with one's partner? yet I might be over-analyzing this, over-blaming myself in this. As I said, I am writing this as I am thinking about the past.

The pornography continued for a few years, and then he started to go out clubbing with his friends while I stayed home with our children (pornography continues). This was around the time Yahoo chat came out, and it was a novelty of the times. I started going to chat rooms in my spare time and ended up engaging in conversations with several men. This was not at all my original intention--and it caught me by surprise--but I ended up having several internet affairs over a period of 6 weeks, and my husband found out about them.

When he found out about them he was heartbroken--he became very solicitous, paying lots of attention to me, trying to "win" me back, and while I broke off the affairs and chose to remain in the marriage, a shift had occurred in the dynamics; whereas before I had been trying to get his attention away from the porn, away from going out with his friends without me, now I felt a sense of empowerment--that I could be desirable and desired. But I no longer desired him. I only desired him if I felt his attention was not on me.

Interestingly, when my desire was not on him (i.e. in the early years when he sensed that I pined away for the confident/charming man who had "gotten away", the one I had tried to replace in my heart by getting together with him), he eventually turned to others and other things.

After the chat room affairs, after I decided to end them and try to work on my marriage (he deeply wanted the marriage to work), I was unable to regenerate desire for my husband. In retrospect I think that the degree to which he desired me--in which he wanted me to love him--put me off. I was unable to experience intimacy. I only desired those who did not desire me--yet at the same time I feared betrayal and wanted to feel desired at all costs. Again, I know this is complex and complicated. The closest thing I can compare this mind-think to is a book I have read called I Capture the Castle, where the key characters are only able to desire those who do not desire them in return. An aberration occurs when two of the lesser characters in the book mutually desire each other, leaving the two main characters who had respectively desired them devastated.

During a time period of about 6 months, my husband truly worked to rehabilitate the marriage; my co-operation was surface--inside I was going crazy. I felt trapped. He was reading all of these marriage repair books, had quite watching pornography, and so on. That being said, even this was not cut and dried--I simultaneously felt a lot of guilt, and would participate in sexual acts with him that in actuality I did not enjoy, ones that previously he had wanted to try that he had seen while he was watching porn, but that I would not do because I did not find them enjoyable or comfortable; I did so now out of a sense of penance. The situation was not cut and dried, or formulaic in its interpretation.

After 6 months of effort, my husband began to gradually get back into pornography again--perhaps to sponge up the pain of rejection--of non-reciprocal desire? Eventually he began to see prostitutes. It was at this point that I was re-ignited to save my marriage, and for a year desperately tried to make it work. In the end, the reality was that he became addicted to high-risk sexual experiences. I knew I had to get out before I contracted a potentially life-threatening STD, I had my children to think of; they needed a mother.

As I read examples in psychology/self-help books about scenarios and theories of behaviors in relationships (eg Women Who Love Too Much, The Human Magnet Syndrome, Co-Dependency No More), I recognize how the authors work to predict, label, and understand the basis of behaviors, explaining them into predictable patterns. In this discussion group/support group we analyse these theories and these books and try to apply them to our own lives in order to see patterns in order to predict future outcomes, and thus hopefully improve these outcomes. In reality, however, there are nuances, variances, and a spectrum of personalities and behaviors that are as complex as the situations in which they unfold. What we are doing now is of critical importance--it is the field work of understanding the cause and affects of dysfunctional relationships. Anonymously, we are being honest. We are doing research, each of us. We are discovering new clues as to what eludes us.

I don't know if this helps or not. I felt compelled to write this because I had previously misunderstood where you were coming from and was speaking out of context.

Take care,

Artgrrl

"In reality, however, there are nuances, variances, and a spectrum of personalities and behaviors that are as complex as the situations in which they unfold. What we are doing now is of critical importance--it is the field work of understanding the cause and affects of dysfunctional relationships. Anonymously, we are being honest. We are doing research, each of us. We are discovering new clues as to what eludes us."

Wow Artgrrl! I had the EXACT same thoughts before I opened up my laptop this AM. Although my thoughts were a million times less articulate: my inner voice, which tends to mumble, went something like "Our own guinea pigs" and "It's all case-by-case." But still! The same thoughts, and literally seconds before I read what you wrote… [Cue Twilight Zone ooo-ee-oo noise…] Thank you for making it coherent for me. ;)

To me the labels (sociaopath, cheater, narc, love addict) are just signposts, maybe useful, maybe only so much. Like driving on the highway: you don’t need to take every exit, just the ones that take you where you need to go. It's up to each of us to inform ourselves -- to read what others are posting and read books and read articles online -- but then to take what applies to our situations and leave the rest.

Shani, you said it all just now in your last post. Ignoring issues with ourselves is what got us all here in the first place. In some ways these relationships we get wrapped up in are just avoidance tactics for the work we need to do on ourselves. Saying that, I'm not trying to reduce an entire marriage in all its nuances to an "avoidance tactic.” As Artgrrl points out, each individual situation has its own individual complexities. And it seems that even dysfunctional relationships are maladjusted attempts by both parties to get what we all want deep down inside, which is to be able to give love.

But to get back to the individual complexities of each situation. Each of us got here on a different road, a road that is entirely unique. Still, the common denominator on all of our roads, and not just in this thread but on this entire WWLTM support group, seems to be overwhelmingly this: we need to (as you say) be able to look in the mirror and love the person we see, and until we can do that, we’re at high risk of finding ourselves in situations that cause us harm.

In that sense, your initial post about putting your husband into a box and storing it deep in your heart seems to me a clear message from you to YOU about what you need to do. It seems to me you are saying that you need to remove yourself entirely from this situation that is causing you pain FIRST (because until you do, the current reality is going to keep ripping the scab off the wound and keep it fresh), work on yourself and THEN maybe see if there’s something still there for you in the initial situation -- if by then you’re even still interested. You might be, and you might not. But either way you win, because by working on yourself and learning to truly love that person you see in the mirror, you’ll have found your own wellspring of love, which is endless. After that, any love that anyone else offers you is icing on the cake. This is my hope for you, for me and for all of us.

I love co-occurrences too, Tokyo.

Stay strong Shani, will be thinking of you and sending positive thoughts your way :-)