Update on my sham of a life!

I only have contact with my husband by email. I don''t have to see him and ow as they live in another town. I didn''t do any shouting which is what he would have expected from me. I don''t know how I kept calm in the first 6 months, but when we spoke face to face he was the one raising his voice he managed to turn every answer to my questions around to make the breakdown my fault. I don''t want to speak to him as it upsets me to much. He has become a man I dont recognise, yet I still find it difficult to accept he doesn''t love me anymore. He''s lived a new life for the last 16 months having luxury holidays etc not concerned about me, where as my life hasn''t changed because I''ve been to focused on him and what he''s been doing and this has eaten away at me.
Try to do the opposite of what he expects from you, you can question him as much as you like but you will never get the answers you want.

As far as the average adulterer is concerned when you show signs of anger what it does is vindicate their actions (see he/she is hideous, angry and impossible to live with - hence that is why I had to seek refuge in the arms of another) or it just makes them feel good to know you are very upset and angry and they know that you care about them (they couldn''t care less about you really otherwize they would end the marriage first and then possibly seek a new relationship).

Not saying that is true for everyone who leaves a marriage having found someone else first but it is true for abusive people who don''t care whether you are hurt. The fact that he found your anger funny is proof of that because if he really cared he would find your anger upsetting and apologise for the hurt he has caused you.

Scary

You asked some questions on anger. Speaking frankly, some people think expressing anger is a way to punish or try to force someone to accept some kind of accountability or responsbiliity. Your post indicates this as you talk of letting him get away with it if you don''t express anger.

Ask yourself what is this anger doing for you? Is it getting you better outcomes or is it like that phrase I''ve used before here. Resentment is drinking poison yourself and expecting someone else to die.

You have a right to be angry, very angry. It''s not fair what has happened. Maybe you do need to get stuff off your chest. I did too. I found sitting down very calmly and telling my husband the impact of his behaviour on my life was very cathartic. I simply told him how his conduct had made me feel. Personally my words had more impact I think when I communicated this way.

I took a route to behave impeccably in front of him. Because anger was a waste of energy, we would merely get locked into these awful tit for tat rows which solved nothing, made me feel worse, his behaviour got more extreme and nothing got sorted for either of our futures.

My Stbx did not get away with anything. At the end of the day, he lost me. I saw him breakdown and sob when I stopped being angry and treated him with indifference. Because then he saw the woman he had lost, calm, capable and in control, the real me. Not some angry person who wanted to make him suffer. His actions have consequences, he will suffer due to his own choices. I did not consider it my role to live my life in reaction to what he did. My focus was to move my life forward in the best way I could, protect my interests by focussing on the things that were important to me, securing my share of the assets and letting him go. I found anger really just added fuel to the fire, it kept me connected to him in a way that was not helpful to my healing.

Thanks Shoegirl ,I know you are right .
I went through the being civil and talking about my feelings about how it made me feel..But he just ignored this and said we would never agree and it was a waste of time talking about it .
he basically said move on and get over it .
Easy for him to say when he has a new girlfriend and completely unable to understand how I am feeling .
that''s when the anger started .
At the moment his girlfriend has moved away to London and he is now pestering me with things about the kids and finances that he hasn''t bothered with for the last 9 months while she was around .
How do I react to this ?
I just want him to leave me alone .
I cope better with no contact and every email just brings back the hurt .
Finances aren''t sorted yet and I suppose when that is done I will only need contact to do with the kids - still in limbo ....

My life saver has been the no contact rule. As for anger - I try to keep things civil. Being civil is enormously stressful but anything else would impact on our (adult) children. It would also make sorting out a Consent Order far more difficult. Besides I can''t cope with it. There is no way I could sit down andcalmly explain my feelings to stbx because I find it difficult to analyse precisely what they are: anger, sadness, rejection - they are all still too mixed up. It still makes me cry to think about it; I concentrate instead on the present and the future. And my new life is good.

Does this mean he feels vindicated or that he''s got away with it? Well on some levels yes. As I''m the financially stronger one, he''ll get more than 50%. That still means a significant drop in his living standards.

But on other levels - hey the man is lonely and miserable. He''s been dumped by ow. I spurn the ''let''s be friends'' offer; both children are now leading independent lives and have left the family home.

In Kazza''s case being civil is far more important because her children are younger. If my 20 somethings need protecting from the flak, I''m sure younger children need protecting even more. Besides she can''t push him totally out of her life because she is going to need to sort out money and access

So yes hide the anger. It gets you nowhere. It''s a long game and a facade of civilised will pay off. But be ready for the inevitable ''let''s be friends'' stage and treat it with the contempt it deserves.

You have not reached the point where a rational conversation is possible if he is still in the move on get over it phase. I smile at this as mine had the same attitude. I found it very hurtful at the time, now I see it differently. He was actually really indicating that he could not deal with the pain of marital breakdown at all and thought the affair was the easy escape. It''s a poor strategy for long term happiness as my Stbx is finding out the hard way. But that''s his stuff.

So, consider this when he starts. Telling you to move on and get over it is just a reflection on him not being able to deal with difficult feelings himself. If he listens to your views, what will that trigger in him? It''s running scared thats all. You have to let all of this go of course as you have been doing.

I went through this phase with my Stbx pointless emails. I made it a rule never to respond on the same day, I took a few days to think about what I wanted to say. I would wait until a time when I was emotionally strong enought to face the contents so sometimes letters would remain unopened if I was in a bad place emotionally.

I would not feed him with any information to encourage response. I would limit my email to directly answer his points like I would a work colleague. Polite and professional. Rule of thumb for me was making sure my emails were no longer than three sentences. That''s how focused I was on just directly dealing with the points. He''d ask the same thing, I would just reiterate the response not drawing attention to the fact he''d asked before.

Any attention seeking behaviour was disregarded that included emotive language or things that were designed to get me cross. I was firmly in control of my anger, he wasn''t. So there were plenty of emotional outbursts from him. I would deal with the matter in hand only.

Any questions like how are you? I would respond with I''m fine thank your for asking. I volunteered no information about me whatsoever, all open questions were blocked with a polite answer. So for example, if he asked what I''d been up to I would say, I''ve been really busy this week and leave it there. There was no point in engaging on these things, he was with someone else and the only outstanding things to discuss were matters pertaining to the divorce.

So that''s how I managed some of the persistent emailing, good news he got bored eventually as he wasn''t getting a reaction. I found in a kind of strange way, these emails were his attempt to talk. I decided that this would not help me and did not engage on anything other than the outstanding matters between us, I think that upset him more than anything to be honest when I stopped responding to his angry outburst and loaded statements. For someone claiming to be over their marriage breakdown it was very odd behaviour indeed. His persistence in trying to provoke a reaction from me I think was trying to test the water on whether he still had power over me. He was very disappointed to find out very quickly he had not.



Good luck x

Shoegirl, now true.

I did plenty of screaming before my ex left but nothing to do with the other woman it was because of DV and his delusional behaviour.

My ex left and went off with OW stating to everyone that we knew that she was just helping us both to sort out our marriage difficulties. Stupidly I tried to defend myself against those words but all I got back from our aquaintences at the time was
"they are not saying horrible things about you".

That totally confused me as I did not say that the two of them were having an affair (although I knew they were as they were making it blatently obvious to me - texting day and night and spending all the time they could together).

Anyway, I might have surprised my ex (not intentionally actually) as 6 months into the affair when I had basically had enough of being the guinea pig in all of it I phoned my ex one day (happened to be on the day of the grand national one year). When he answered he said in a cold voice, "what do you want I am busy in the bookies" so I said, "Look please be honest would you prefer to spend your life with Mrs Lovely" to which he answered very coldly "thats a given". So then every bizarrely I said in an even voice "OK then lets proceed to mediation and divorce".

I look back on that and think how weird, why did I not go off my head and have a rant. I don''t actually know why I didn''t and maybe I surprised him (who knows).

Actually it hurt like hell but in truth I didn''t want to be married to him and he definitely didn''t want to be married to me.

Mediation btw didn''t work as he refused to get involved in it and in the end the court route was the only route possible. He still kicked up and refused to acknowledge the Petition, stating that he was only going to send it back if I agreed to pay all the costs - both his and mine (generally you both pay half or the defendent pays for the petition).

I don''t know, some people (I include myself in that as eldest son keeps telling me I should have never got married to ex - eldest was born before we got married).

I sort of agree with him except we did get married and went on to have another two children together - that is one thing I will never regret dispite the agony ex has caused me and my entire family ever since.