I met an unhappily married woman on Reddit (Sorry, this is a LONG one)

[EStreetJC]

Hi, everybody. I'm in an extremely bleak emotional space and need as much insight/advice about this situation as I can get. Be warned that is post is extremely long, which I'm deeply sorry for, but it's all so complicated and I figured the more context I can provide, the more sense it will all make.

 

Background on me: I’m a 32 year old male and live in a major city in the Northeastern U.S. I’ve recently come to accept that I have suffered from intense depression and anxiety for well over a decade but have seldom acknowledged it or attempted to treat it, despite its demonstrably deleterious effects on my life. This will be important later.

 

I’ve only ever had one long term girlfriend of two and a half years, and we split up almost nine years ago, when I was 23. Since then, I’ve drifted from casual relationship to casual relationship, and a ton of first dates that went exactly nowhere, and long stretches where I didn’t bother with dating at all. A couple of women captured my attention but never enough to inspire me to fully commit and pursue them. That is, until I met Liz.

 

We met on Reddit, in one of the pen-pal subs. It was a lonely Saturday night in August of 2017. I learned she was 24 (so seven years younger than me) and lived in the southern U.S. We moved our conversation to another platform and quickly realized shared the same sense of humor and appreciation for classic rock. We exchanged photos (nothing sexual) and I was taken by how gorgeous she was. We chatted late into the night. By the time I fell asleep, I knew I needed to speak to her again as soon as humanly possible.

 

Checking her Reddit the next day, I discovered, much to my horror, that she was married. Devastated, I asked her about this and she confirmed yes, she was married, but rather unhappily, as it turned out. We initiated a long-distance friendship anyway. Phone calls and FaceTime chats confirmed her to be exactly who she presented herself as, which was a tremendous relief. We became intensely close and long conversations became the norm for us. We both shared our individual struggles with mental illness. I listened to her talk about the problems with her failing marriage and offered as much advice as I could to help talk her out of what sounded like a rotten situation (her husband sounded like a real ass). There was a lot of fun and laughing too; talking about our respective days, our crazy families, pop culture stuff we loved and hated. I had never met someone who “got me” as much as Liz, and she told me the exact same. After a little while, she was talking to me more than she was talking to her husband. Frankly, I didn’t care. We were already falling for each other. She even sent me a birthday gift a month after we started talking.

 

In November of 2017, Liz and her husband moved into their first house. He did not yet know of my existence. Overcome with guilt for what she was doing, Liz decided we couldn’t speak anymore. I was shattered. This end was brief, as we began communicating again a week or so later. Liz cared too much about me to just forget and ignore, and I was relieved she was back. We decided it was finally time to meet in person. She would fly to me on a weekend and then back home in time for work on Monday. I was apprehensive and freaked out about impressing her (I’m pretty broke and was concerned I couldn’t show her a good time) but she didn’t care about any of that. She just wanted to spend time with me.

 

Liz flew to my city in December of ’17. We’d been speaking for only four months. It was her first time ever being here and we spent the entire weekend together, me showing her the sights. She even met my family. It was during that visit that we first kissed, and had sex, and realized we were completely in love. But she wasn’t ready to leave her husband; she couldn't yet bring herself to do it. I felt no guilt in being "the other man" because he sounded like such a bad dude and obviously didn't deserve her. My memory here is slightly hazy, but I remember he found out about us around this time. He was pretty pissed, but nothing major happened.

 

Enter 2018. Liz and I continue voice and video chatting using alternate means that her husband was unable to track (Kik and Skype). She frequently expressed intense guilt about deceiving him but loved me with such an intensity she had never experienced before. She was deeply unhappy in the marriage but so hesitant about leaving and throwing her life into chaos. There was another brief period where she stepped away out of guilt, but she came back again because we simply could not pull out of each other’s orbits. We were completely keyed into each other. But remember the mental illness I wrote about earlier? Liz had been imploring me to let her help me to find more professional help for what I was dealing with. I was so deep in the hole that it had become my home, and it blinded me. Kept me distant from all the things I really wanted in life. This had always been the case, and as much as I loved Liz, I was terrified by all the work her love would inspire me to do; I’d have to do to claw myself back into the world and I did not see myself fit for the challenge. I kept promising to get help, never following through, always trying to deal with it myself because I was petrified of revealing the extent of my illness to my family (we don’t really “do emotions” in my family). I thought I could talk myself out of it. Sometimes I even succeeded. It grated on Liz when I would lose myself, but we were still there for each other when our respective mental illnesses got the better of us (she went through a very rough patch early last year due to problems with meds).

 

Liz and I visited in person again last May, this time in her city, while her husband was on a business trip. She paid for my airfare and put me up at her mom’s apartment (she was also out of time at this time). We spent the entire time together. I pushed through a hellacious fear of flying to make it happen, but I had to see her. Nothing was going to keep me from her. We spent four days together down there, and Liz was distraught by the end, wondering when we were ever going to see each other again. Quite wrongly, I tried to “be a man” and serve as a stoic pillar of strength for her. I hate that I did that. I was as torn up and uncertain of the future as she was. Of course, her husband figured it was me who had come down to see Liz (not just “a friend” as she had told him), but the marriage shambled along like a zombie, deteriorating and rotting but never actually dying. Nothing changed.

 

We attempted another break that summer, but by now you know how well that worked out. My depression/anxiety continued to eat away at me and Liz threatened to leave if I couldn’t enter treatment. I promised her I’d get better but I could never find the bravery to open up to my family. Surely I could finally find the magic words, some archaic incantation, to talk myself out of it and avoid shame and embarrassment! Liz hung around, and we had our good days and our bad days. She went back to school in the fall to finish herdegree, and with this and her persistently ****ty marriage neither her nor her husband seemed to be able to leave, her own life became highly stressful, but we continued to remain as close as we could in kind of a “holding pattern.”

 

In September, Liz asked me what I thought about moving down to live with her, if she got herself out of her marriage. Me being me, I freaked out and instinctively said no. The hole was home, remember? I’m too stupid and helpless to do something like move to a completely unfamiliar part of the country! I didn’t want to say no. My brain was screaming “YES! YES! YES!” through the frantic cacophony of my anxiety. The damage was done; Liz rightly interpreted this as a rejection of her. I knew how wrong I was but I was so terrified by the idea that I reflexively ran from it. I spent days and weeks breaking myself down to remove the fear, and told her how wrong I was, how I wanted to do it. Things settled down, but Liz hangs on to that initial rejection to this day. I can’t blame her for being wounded.

 

In October, her husband caught her talking to me via Skype. He flipped his lid and Liz once again terminated contact. I was already beginning to feel numb to it by now, almost expecting it to happen, but it neverfailed to obliterate my heart when it did. You already know what happened next. The holding pattern continued, then she started spending more time trying to buckle down and be “the good wife.” Our communication became dramatically limited but we would occasionally chat about how much we missed each other. She had planned a trip here with her mother and cousin which was due to happen in January, and we both dreaded it because we didn’t quite know what to do with each other at this point.

 

Liz did come here in January. We met and spent a lot of time together, and our love was reaffirmed. She told me her marriage had finally collapsed during Christmas and she was unofficially separated from her husband. She ended the trip with a promise not to leave my life again, and there was optimism that we could finally move forward with her marriage out of the way.

 

When she got home, she texted me that she suddenly realized she “couldn’t do it” (be with me), how deeply unhappy she was, how she wanted to be alone, etc. All these doom and gloom ideas. Communication fell off for a little while. I entered into a dark and painful period of depression wherein I kept trying to force myself to seek therapy, having finally accepted this was bigger than me and I couldn’t do it myself.

 

Liz and her husband officially separated early this month. And this is when it all comes back to Reddit.

 

I stalked Liz’s Reddit account one night, a week ago. I hadn’t heard from her in a few days and was worried. I wanted to see if maybe she’d been active on here. My world ended. I discovered she had met another man on r/r4r only a couple of months ago, and they've already made plans to meet up, entirely behind my back. I confronted her about it, and she came clean. She said she was afraid to tell me because of how devastated I’d be but had planned to do so when she “could explain it better.” She told me she could not wait anymore for me to get better. In a flash of suicidal ideation, my defenses broke and I finally admitted what I’ve been going through for years to my dad and my brother. They’ve actually been extremely helpful and supportive. I’m already wait-listed at two mental health centers.

 

Liz doesn’t want to hear anything about it, though. She’s told me she’s heard it all from me before, after all the help I refused from her. She doesn’t believe this time is any different, but it is, because her betrayal and selfishness decimated my world and my hopes for the future. The thing about Liz is she was the first person in nine years to make me believe I could be a good person, that I could have a future, that maybe I did deserve to be happy. And I wanted it to be with her. She’s the first woman I’ve ever actually loved and wanted to climb out of the hole for. Now she’s barely responding to my e-mails as she continues at school and the divorce gets underway.

 

In January, she looked me in the eye and told me she loved me. It wasn’t until after she left here that she “realized I was never going to change.” Does that all disappear in a month? Is this completely my fault, as I suspect? Was I only being used by Liz to help her leave her marriage, as my friends and family suggest? Was it all a lie, or was it something beautiful and pure that I destroyed because depression closed its grip too tightly around my neck and I was too stubborn and prideful to ask for/accept help?

 

Somebody please help me gain some insight and perspective here. I’m in desperate need of it. This was my first time dealing with a married woman, and will most assuredly be my last. Thank you for reading.

 

TL;DR: Met an unhappily married woman on Reddit a year and a half ago, we fell madly in love, met in person three times, I never took the help for depression she offered/wanted for me, now she is divorcing her husband and has already started another Reddit relationship behind my back.

[LostOne08]

Wow. That’s a lot to unpack.

 

First of all, it’s really fantastic to hear that you’re finally getting help with your mental illness. And, you’re doing it for the right reason: to help yourself and not because of the relationship. Good for you and I wish you all the best with your progress.

 

As to your questions, nobody will really ever know the answer to whether she was “using” you to end her marriage. That’s the type of thing that she’ll prpbably never really be honest with herself about if it’s true, never mind openly admitting that to you or anyone else. For what it’s worth, it sounds like you both were really into one another (maybe too much so). To me it seems like you both were getting something you’d each been missing out of the relationship. That would also explain why it was so hard to walk away from it for you and her. You each had found in one another someone who cared about you when it seemed like no one else in the world did. And it does sound like she genuinely cared about you. The problem is, nobody can MAKE another person seek help for a mental illness. The reaching out for help doesn’t happen until the person who is suffering from the illness is ready to reach out. Sometimes that readiness never comes. In your case, it came recently after the news of her new relationship broke. It sounds like while you were with her, you weren’t ready to seek help, no matter how much she pushed. Often, that pushing can have a negative affect on a person seeking help.

 

I’m sorry that you’re hurting from the loss of this relationship in addition to trying to deal with your own struggles. Objectively looking at it, you can see a pattern there. She hid your relationship from her husband and let the marriage carry on long after it died. Who’s to say she even ultimately ended it? Maybe the husband was the one who finally pulled the trigger. Similarly, it looks like she was willing to hide her new relationship from you until “she was able to explain it better”, but who’s to say how long that would’ve been? I don’t know her, so I’m not saying she’s inherently dishonest, but there is a pattern here. Maybe it did have something to do with you saying no when she asked you to move down, too.

 

I’m glad you’re going through recovery even if she doesn’t want to hear anything about it. Like I said, this is for you and not for her or the relationship. I’d focus on that exclusively and cut contact with her. Maybe down the road when you’re in a better place everything will work out with her, but for now it sounds like the best thing to do would be to focus on you. Continued contact with her always has the potential to cause you more hurt and set back your recovery. And, even if you never speak to her again, putting yourself in a better position from a mental health perspective benefits you as an individual and a partner for the next woman in your life.

 

It sounds like this was an intense romance that reached breakneck speed pretty quickly. Then, when your individual realities started settling in, the difficulties in managing everything began to show. It’s asking a lot for chemistry and desire to overcome that. I think you both might’ve been what the other needed at that particular moment, but now you’ve both been given the opportunity to move forward and address your own lives. Like I said before, after you’ve focused on bettering yourselves, who knows what will happen?

 

Take care of yourself.

Edited March 1, 2019 by LostOne08

[mark clemson]

Adding to the excellent advice above:

 

You ask: "Was it all a lie, or was it something beautiful and pure that I destroyed because depression closed its grip too tightly around my neck and I was too stubborn and prideful to ask for/accept help?"

 

It was a lie in the sense that affairs include deception. Perhaps it was beautiful and pure to you and her. But no doubt less so to her husband. But I strongly doubt her feelings for you were false, if that is your concern. Certainly not until near the end.

 

You were not too stubborn and proud to ask for help, I think, but maybe too sick and accustomed to "your normal."

 

It will be tough, but accept that she has moved on. It is what she feels is best for her. Also believe that you can get well with treatment, and that you can have a new love once you're ready for it.

[FMW]

I would just add one thing.

 

It seems Liz isn't able to be alone - when she didn't have her husband or you she found someone else.

 

I'm sure she cares about you, but wrapped up in that is her need to be attached to someone, whether you or someone else.

 

I don't think you messed anything up.

 

The positive takeaway from this relationship is that you finally shared your struggle with your family and are taking steps to get healthy. That will put you in the right place emotionally to have a happy relationship with an available woman in the future.

[EStreetJC]

I would just add one thing.

 

It seems Liz isn't able to be alone - when she didn't have her husband or you she found someone else.

 

I'm sure she cares about you, but wrapped up in that is her need to be attached to someone, whether you or someone else.

 

I don't think you messed anything up.

 

The positive takeaway from this relationship is that you finally shared your struggle with your family and are taking steps to get healthy. That will put you in the right place emotionally to have a happy relationship with an available woman in the future.

 

 

While I'm loath to discuss specifics of Liz's mental illness, she did mention having been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder a long time ago (though that is not the primary issue she deals with), if that means anything. I say this not to cast stones, as I am guilty of showing signs of BPD myself, but for the sake of additional context. She has always been in therapy and medicated (most of the time), but I'm ignorant as to how such a diagnosis could impact her behavior.

 

Thank you all for your helpful responses!

[David33]

I agree with all the above. Some people cannot be alone. They will reach out to others while their marriage is collapsing. They're just wired that way. I'm also glad you're seeking your own peace. If you two were meant to be together, it will happen. She has to get divorced to have her head on straight. GL