Slow & Steady Wins the Race... An Update

[GreenPolicy]

Wise words as always 1784. I think one thing that will both give us peace of mind down the road is knowing we weren't crappy boyfriends. We certainly weren't perfect boyfriends, but we loved our exes to the best of our ability and did right by them, and they decided it wasn't good enough/right for them. It's one thing for a woman in her early twenties to decide she's not ready to settle down and get married, but women at the age of our exes who are with good guys? I think we'd be hurting worse if we knew that we had screwed up our relationships by being jerks or neglectful, had been given many opportunities to shape up and could/would not do so.

 

It can always be worse. My mom just told me about what happened to my second cousin. He's around my age and has been with his wife for several years. She had two kids from a previous relationship and they have two together. He's been trying to adopt one of her kids from the previous relationship. For the past year she's been away every weekend "selling insurance" as a "traveling saleswoman." I think you can see where I'm going with this. Turns out she was living with another man and his daughter 40 miles away. During the week she lives as husband and wife with my cousin and on the weekend she plays house with another guy. That's so effed up! Why didn't she just leave my cousin a year ago? What was her endgame? I'm not sure how he found out, if he did snooping, or if she confessed of her own volition, but he's going to have to declare bankruptcy because of the pending divorce, and also because he still plans on adopting one of the kids from the previous relationship, since he's been raising the kid since birth. He's got all that legal stuff to deal with before he even can begin to deal with the emotions of being betrayed like that.

[1784]

Yeah, I mean I wasn't a perfect boyfriend. But I surely didn't do enough to warrant the dismissal I was given. That I know for sure. She obviously wasn't a perfect girlfriend either. I guess I was just more willing to accept her flaws than she was willing to accept mine. I think her vision of what her husband looked like in her mind's photo album looked less and less like me. With each 'mistake' my face in that album because blurrier and blurrier (like in Back to the Future). When I couldn't move in with her I suppose my face had simply disappeared from the photograph altogether. It was, in her words, "The last straw".

 

What has been hardest for me to accept is that had I cheated on her, abused her in some way, not gotten along with her, not gotten along with her family & friends, not had a good sexual relationship, etc, I would more easily understand the breakup. But none of these things were the case. She was so critical of absolutely everything. I was always weighed and measured with each thing I did or didn't do, no matter how small it was she made it big. It was always a 'sign' of what I'd be like as a husband. A dish not washed right away or a particular movie enjoyed. These were all clues. It's like she was always looking for holes in the relationship instead of appreciating the good things. She actually admitted that to me one time. She definitely focused on the negatives a lot more and it showed. I felt it. It felt terrible. I constantly felt like I was under an enormous amount of stress and pressure to live up to what she wanted in a man. I don't know how it got to be all about her terms but it did. I let it.

 

But in the end I DO think I was a pretty good boyfriend. Rather good! When I look at the problems that we had... they were so minor. Now some might say "Maybe they were minor to YOU". Yeah, they were minor to me. But I think they were minor in general. Nothing earth shattering. Nothing we couldn't get past. In fact, there wasn't even very much TO get past. What it really came down to was things that we both either could or could not accept. I was just willing to accept a lot more of her flaws than she was willing to accept mine. She wanted Superman... seriously. and I wanted to be Superman for her. But it's just an unfair thing to expect and a constant pressure to live with every day.

 

sigghhh