What would you do?

Since you're in a house you're having trouble affording, and in a city with too many bad memories, and in a job you hate, relocation ain't such a bad thing to be be thinking of (I know there's another topic on A2K, sorry, too little time this morning to find it and post there). Anyway, no sense doing anything hasty, but I suggest you seek out free relocation advice. Unless you're in a tiny town in the deep South, you're not in the cheapest part of the country. So selling your home and converting it to cash may be the ticket.

I am not saying you need to pack up right now or anything, or that this is the only solution or whatever, but it's an option. Here's a link to a Google search on Matthew Lesko (you know, the guy with the suit with the question marks all over it, on TV; he's for real) and relocation: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=%22matthew+lesko%22+relocation&btnG=Search

Oh, and as for going after this guy (your ex), my suggestion is to do it. I know you don't want to, I know you care about his well-being, I know you're worried about him, I know you want to get back together, yes, we all know, but the bottom line is, you need a roof over your head. You can get free legal advice at a legal services office, just go to your phone book and look up Pro Bono, or if there is no such listing, look up your local bar association and ask them about civil pro bono for a long-term relationship, as in the Michelle Triola Marvin case (that's the landmark case in this area). It's called palimony, and here's a link on the subject: http://cobrands.public.findlaw.com/family/nolo/ency/E354BF5F-A357-40DA-BAF2A0F4093A8BE8.html

I'm not suggesting this to hurt or embarrass you or him; I'm suggesting this as a means for you to establish and exercise your legal rights in this matter. I know you are hurting and I know these things are difficult. I fully expect you to reject this suggestion and tell me I'm being unreasonable, but the reason I am suggesting this is because you need not sink into poverty because of what's happened. I know you are devastated emotionally, and I sympathize, but there's no need for you to be devastated financially as well. Just food for thought, I hope you won't dismiss it out of hand.

I found this in the archives of the Washington Post.

"
The signs and symptoms are familiar. People "in love" fantasize, pine, obsess. They lose sleep and weight. "I've talked to men who 15 years after the affair still wonder what she's doing," says Layton-Tholl.

Falling in love is obviously not confined to infidelity. Most contemporary marriages start out with romantic love. But, therapists say, couples have to grow up and understand that "feelings of love are neither steady nor constant but travel in natural cycles," as Abrahms Spring puts it. "If your relationship doesn't live up to your ideas about love, the problem may be not with your relationship but with your ideas," she writes.

Falling out of love with a spouse--and in love with someone else often rekindles that early experience of romantic love. It's why lovers say "He (or she) made me feel young again."

The Aftermath

The former police officer and his wife tried to repair the marriage, had another baby. A few years later, the wife had a short affair with someone she met on the Internet, then another. Eventually she left him.

"I cried for hours on the couch. I couldn't move," he says. "My wife never recovered from my affair. Years would go by and I wouldn't hear anything about it, then suddenly all this anger would come out."

Affairs rock your world. Life is never the same again. All parties involved experience a profound sense of loss and pain. The old status quo is gone. The future is uncertain.

"After finding out, the hurt partner experiences the most basic loss of self," says Abrahms Spring. "You feel alien in your own skin. Your most basic assumptions about the order of the universe have been turned upside down. It's devastating."

The person confessing to an infidelity experiences the full gamut: guilt, self-loathing. Often there is also relief. Leading a double life can become increasingly difficult for people engaged in affairs. Getting the truth out relieves them of carrying the burden of betrayal alone.

Still the aftermath was hard. Vaughan has described how it took her almost a decade to rebuild her sense of self.

The "other" person, meanwhile, faces a whole different set of issues. How do you rebuild your life without the affair. At first there is profound aloneness and confusion. "She's not in the Bahamas or running around in mink," says Florida researcher Layton-Tholl. "She's at home, waiting for him to call, to explain himself and the promises he made."

All parties in extramarital affairs often report thoughts of suicide, according to family therapists. As Abrahms Spring writes in her book: "What people want to kill is not themselves but the pain."

Suddenly, there is no one to talk to. The loved one is gone. Unlike a death or divorce that prompts support from family and friends, the breakup of an affair goes largely unnoticed.

Yet everyone in the triangle suffers a sense of loss--a loss of self and a loss of love. Researchers believe the great hypocrisy in our culture is that while affairs are so prevalent, most people remain largely unsympathetic and closed to the complexities and pain. They slip into the stereotypes about infidelity and offer pat advice: Leave the no-good two-timer. Or focus on labels: Home wrecker. Or blame themselves: I wasn't sexy enough."

and this-
For most abandonment survivors, the issue is control. Thanks to the increase in stress hormones, they don't have much: Nature has taken over. The life they want is not within their immediate power. Their primary connection has been severed; isolation has been foisted upon them by someone else's choice.
Abandonment is a state of INVOLUNTARY SEPARATION. They are shattered by an aloneness they did not choose. They feel deserted, dependent, and demoralized, having sustained a narcissistic injury. The lack of control makes them feel like a victim.
Emotionally, it feels like they're in the recovery room having just had their siamese twin severed from them. What makes the pain so unbearable for abandonment survivors, is that it wasn't their idea to have the surgery; it was the OTHER person's. Even worse, the OTHER person has (often) already re-attached to a new love-interest and doesn't feel the intense pain of separation. The relationship is medicating the abandoner from feeling what the abandonee is faced with - - rejection, isolation, and a profound loss of love. In other words, the Abandoners aren't suffering in the recovery room, because for THEM it wasn't major surgery. They're 'out and about' in a new life.

Both sides, however, are on an emotional roller coaster; both feel regret, confusion, remorse, and anger. But the one who was left behind bears the brunt of the tear. The fact that it is more painful to be the abandonee than the abandoner is rarely acknowledged by the latter, because both sides want to be considered 'the injured party.'

Long Term Relationships: If the couple's lives had been intertwined for a long time and they had grown to count on each other for security and support, the one choosing to end the relationship will struggle with the agony of guilt. Abandoners are often themselves survivors of childhood losses and separations, and have their own abandonment issues to deal with. This makes it particularly difficult for them to acknowledge the full extent of the pain that is caused by their decision to end the relationship. It threatens their idealized self images when they witness their former partners' (understandable) reaction of anger and grief, and of not wanting to 'let go.' They feel they are being thwarted and mistreated by these reactions. They resent the 'control.' They feel 'punished' for trying to start a new life.

They begin to perceive their former partners as 'the bad mothers.' This development suggests that rather than feel less about themselves, abandoners have attempted to project rather than internalize their negative feelings, They've exercised the 'victor's option' to blame the victim. Many begin to rewrite the history of the relationship, distorting facts, blocking out emotional memories, negating the original basis of the connection -- all in an effort to justify their decision to leave someone who still wants and needs them. This causes abandonees to feel completely erased and even more isolated. They don't even have memories to hold onto; their entire emotional reality has been disqualified.

Courage Camille, your not alone.
(((((((((((HUGS from me and my girls)))))))))))

I guess it comes down to my not wanting to do anything to make his own life even more hell. I really believe he left me because I was crashing and not able to hold it together. I don't think he thought he could handle losing both his kids and getting that from me too. I also think he thought my being around would upset his daughter and hasten her cancer and her death. I could never get him to understand that I just wanted to be with him, to be there for him and to share the experience with him without staying in the shadows. I wanted to help everyone any way I could, even if I ran errands for them while they were with his daughter. That would have required his family get used to me being around and finally realizing his marriage was in the past. But the kicker was his daughter asking him to "come home" with her and mommy. After all the guilt over not doing enough for his son, he's overcompensating with the daughter. Is it the right thing to do? Maybe in the short term he thinks it is, but in the long term I don't think it will be. Sooner or later he will learn there is no bargaining with God and his daughter will die regardless of what he does, what he gives up, what act he plays.

That may sound funny but I know he's not going to any wonderful happy life with wifey. He's going to grieve his son and be with his dying daughter. It's the only connection the two of them have had for decades, the kids, and it's the only connection they have now. You can't rebuild a life from 20+ years ago with everything that has happened with us and you can't rebuild a life based on tragedy either. When you are scared and hurting, you can hold on to something way too tight and lose sight of what is reality. You lash out at the people you love out of fear. That's what I did. When his daughter is gone, he'll have to choose between staying totally alone with his wife, a woman who he hasn't been happy living with for years, a woman that will never ever trust him again, and a constant reminder of his kids, and wait to die, or maybe he'll finally realize life doesn't have to be that way. Maybe if he gets there and we are both in the right place emotionally, we can come back together someday.

If I were to take him to court I would not only destroy any possible future for us that may be out there, but I'd take time from his daughter and money he could use to take her places. I'd be no better than his wife maniuplating him for her own selfish needs. He'd hate me and I'd probably hate me too.

I don't have that much equity in the house so converting it to cash won't buy me that much. I really don't know what to do at this point which is why I'm doing nothing. One of the things I said to him was "Please don't make any major decisions right now with all these high emotions". Well, he did, and everybody loses. If I do sell the house and move somewhere else, I'm going to have to be emotionally ready to accept my actions and decisions. I'm nowhere near there.

I sort of understand. This house has many memories, of love, of hope, of dreams and of shared experiences. We worked on lots together in this house, and it was always to make it the kind of home we wanted to be together in. In some ways I want to hold on to the house full of memories of what was and could have been. To leave means I have to really give up the hopes, the dreams and only have what could have been.

Did he ever live in this house with you, Camille?

a house is only a house;

you need a place to put your 'heart' not a place to stand out of the rain.

you live 'within'!

yes, he came to live with me a few weeks before I settled on the house and was here about a month when his wife came up with this wild story about the daughter being stalked. Turned out a kid had a crush on her.

Then he decided he was going to live by himself for a while before jumping right into something else. After a year he moved in here again.

He's had four different apartments since he first left his marriage in 1997 but when he's had the apartments, he's spent just about all of his time here with me. He was pretty much living here the last time for months but hadn't brought all his stuff. Two weeks before he said goodbye he actually talked about maybe giving up the apartment and moving in permanently.

My heart is broken in a million pieces. I'm broken.

Somebody tell me why I shouldn't call him and beg him to reconsider. I'm starting to lose it again and I want to pick up that phone SO much. I miss him and love him so much.

STOP! DO NOT CALL!

You have a PM.

Camille--

Calling him, and continuing to dwell SO much on him, and contemplating begging him to take you back are unhealthy, IMO.

A life based on the whims of someone other than you is no life. I'm worried that you haven't started paying attention to your own needs. It doesn't signify "some true, deep love" as you may think it does. It signifies an unhealthy obsession/ dependence on a person, who has extricated himself from your life.

I wish you would stop making excuses for him, and start paying attention to who you are and what you need.

It will only stay as bad/get worse until you do.

Oh, Camille.

I have cushioned my comments before with saying something like I don't know for sure that he won't be back but I doubt it. Because, of course, I don't. But I think I'd better underline just how unlikely I think that is, and that even if you waited for him in this wild limbo state for possible years, and he did come back, it would be apt to be a troubled relationship and not bring either of you happiness, not be healthy for either of you.

Chances are that if things don't work out with the wife, he will still not come back, may prefer to be alone, or may find another relationship.

Begging someone to reconsider and love you, to stay, is historically problematic. It rarely works, usually increases the person's desire to stay away, and even if it does work, works on a guilt system, which I think the fellow has quite enough of, re his various abandoning issues/actions (I hate the word 'issues').

Even if it does work, somehow miraculously without a guilt wrench, begging is not good for you, who, as we all do, need to be full partners in a positive love life.

In the meantime, all this centering on him and how you need him is completely keeping you from comfort with yourself being alone, walking along, alone, and then walking with another person, not out of desperate loneliness but as part of a team. Nothing wrong with loneliness per se, it is a common factor in most lives, at least off and on.

I do think you need to get out of that house, I who railed at those very words herself. Not running, moving forward. I don't mean lurch out the door tonight, but work towards leaving.

Also, I say this not quite in jest, if anyone ever needed a diversion to get involved in, it's you. Great time to learn to draw... (or what?), exploring your creative side. Write poetry.

Life has more than one movement, like a symphony. Gather your wits, we know you have them.

Not to nudge you that other people suffer too, I don't mean it that way, but if you do look around in a city, at all the faces you see in the grocery store, , for example [I bring this up since I was just at my favorite grocery store, which I hardly ever go to, having a coffee and looking at faces], many of those people have been through or will be going through tremendous blows. Hang in, girl.

Osso is a wonderful person to listen to.
So wise and caring.

I'll second that!

What can I say, I'm older now, been through a bunch of stuff myself and with my friends. Certain patterns emerge as you near a hundred, finally catching on. My key interest in posting is to shore up Camille's sense of self, whatever she does.

Which, Camille, you can get by yourself or seek another counseller to help there. I am not very experienced with that, have always been a self-talking-to person (only child, y'know). Thus the long walks, talks with self. I might have made some leaps earlier, oh, hey, ten years earlier, if I did seek some decent counselling.

ossobuco, I am an only child too, so I know all about those self talks LOL. There are so many strong, caring women here on A2K. There is much to be learned from your collective wisdom.

Sofia...your comments are my exact thoughts. What Camille is feeling at this point is looking less and less like love and more like dependence.

Camille, don't call him. You'll only regret it, and the chances are not good that it would give you any sort of a positive result.

When I mentioned palimony, you rejected that idea (it's your prerogative, of course), but the sense I get is that you are more concerned with his feelings, whatever they may be, than with keeping a roof over your head. His feelings are not more important than your survival. They are not more important than your happiness. They are not more important than you.

It's not selfish to want things for yourself. It's healthy. You are not doing yourself any favors by obsessing about this. You are not moving towards healing. I'm sorry if that's blunt, but it's true.

You can make yourself feel better. You can pull through this. You can, but you need to take control. When your mind says, it's time to think about him some more, tell yourself no, and change the subject in that internal dialogue. When your heart says, he's more important than anything else, tell yourself no, he isn't. You can get over this, but you need to make a start in that direction. Right now, you are standing still. It's been a month. It's time to start moving forward.

Of course everyone's said this in a nicer way than I have. I'm the bull in the china shop; I'm just echoing them. I do hope you'll think more of yourself. You are important enough to be cared for. You are important enough to be loved. You are important enough to be healed.