What is keeping me from wanting to try again?

[In_A_Daze]

I would like to share my “story” in the hopes that maybe someone, anyone can offer words of wisdom to help me figure out where to go from here. First, a bit of history and I will try to be as brief as possible.

 

When I was 22 I met my first husband. It was a short romance because he was getting out of the service and moving back to his home state across the country. He wanted me to go with him but my Mom brought me up believing that nice girls do not live with someone unless they are married to them. So, after dating for just 2 months we got married, moved across country, moved back to my home state when I got homesick, had a fight and he moved back claiming that he would send for me, eventually he did and then he decided a baby would “help our marriage”. When I was 7 months pregnant with my son he decided he didn’t want to be married anymore so when my son was 2 months old he and I moved back to my home state. Husband and I tried one more time to see if things could work out but it didn’t so we divorced. He has been an absentee parent by his own choice, going as long as 8 years without seeing our son after I stopped using my yearly vacation and buying my own plane ticket to take my son to see his “other family”. He and I were married for 4 years and lived together maybe half of that time.

 

About a year after my first divorce I started a new job where I met my second husband. Everyone at work began trying to set us up from the very first day and we started going out. We dated for about a year and a half. He was a country boy and still lived with his mother (should have been a warning sign given his age), He wanted to spend more time at my house with me and my son and I wanted that too but he wouldn’t because he felt like it would be disrespectful of his mother. So that is pretty much the reason we decided to get married. There wasn’t anything romantic about it, we just decided one night that we would, told his family and mine and he gave me a ring a few weeks later. About 9 months after we were married I became pregnant and we had a baby girl in late 1991. Everything was great until we built a house out in the country, surrounded not only by the woods but also by his mother, aunt, grandmother and an uncle. He worked 12 hour shifts and began spending all of his off time sleeping, hunting, fishing, working in the garden or yard, hanging out with the guys, doing stuff for his Mother or off with his Dad doing something. He was rarely at home, never wanted to go anywhere or do anything with me and the kids. I tried to talk to him but he wouldn’t talk. I planned romantic dinners and a weekend getaway for just the two of us. I tried to include him in everything we did but he was working, too busy or apparently not interested. I eventually decided, after 7 years of marriage, that if I was going to be alone then damnit I would BE alone. So I packed up all of our stuff and moved back to town with my two children. Either his pride kept him from trying to work things out or he decided that he was better off single, I honestly don’t know.

 

So that was it, two strikes and I considered myself out. I wasn’t interested in going for a third. I was determined that I was just somehow not cut out for marriage and would never do it again. I was very independent and a hard worker, perfectly capable of taking care of myself and my children. I had been a single parent before and could very well do it again. I had a good job and a supportive family. I put the money I received as my share of our home equity into a savings account and my excellent credit history allowed me to purchase a house for myself and my two children a year later.

 

However, almost immediately upon moving out of the house in the country I met the man who would eventually become my third and current husband. The person I consider to be my very best friend is the one who introduced us. She lived overseas at the time but now lives in the States. A bunch of us spent lots of time together online talking, joking and carrying on. After a while it was obvious that there was some kind of attraction there so he and I started talking more one on one and it was an intense, whirlwind of a romance from that point on. He was very intelligent, fun and romantic. I could talk to him about anything. He sent me flowers and little gifts. He wrote long, beautiful, poetic letters in his own handwriting and mailed them to me. He told me how smart and beautiful I was and what a great mother I was to my children. He was Mommy’s friend who helped my son with his math homework and drew pictures for my daughter, both using a whiteboard on the computer. He literally swept me off my feet. We spent so much time talking on the phone and computer about every topic imaginable that we thought we knew all there could possibly be to know about each other. He lived half the country away but two months later we met in person and to this day I still consider that weekend to be the best of my entire life. But it was also a wake up call to face reality. What was I doing? I wasn’t even divorced yet. I wasn’t ready for another relationship even if I was divorced. So I started what he came to refer to as “backtracking”. I’d pull away and he’d pull me back. We’d get together for a weekend when I didn’t have my children, either me flying down there or him driving or flying up here. Things would be ok for a while and then I’d pull away again.

 

We carried on this long distance roller coaster ride of a romance for about a year. I loved this man very deeply but things were just moving too fast. I was overwhelmed. I had told him from the very beginning I was not ever going to get married again. I was adamant about that and he joked that he would change my mind eventually. He also knew I would never live with someone I wasn’t married to. I felt like I was doing nothing but hurting him because we did not want the same things. So I decided to break it off. He did not accept that so he packed up all of his belongings and moved up to the town where I lived, without even consulting me. He just showed up. That didn’t go over very well at all with me and the first month he was up here was pure hell because I felt smothered and manipulated. I could not deny that I loved him so things eventually calmed down but I still maintained that I would never change my mind about getting married again. Well, you know what they say … “Never say Never”. About 6 months after he moved up here I found out that I was pregnant. Naturally that changed my mind for me. So a couple of members of my family, his two daughters, who were visiting him for spring vacation, and my two children witnessed our marriage in front of a minister at the end of that same week. That was in early 1999 and our son was born later that year.

 

So here I was, married for the third time and not a single one had really been for what I’d consider “the right reason”. I loved my husband and all of our children (his, mine and ours). Although I had never wanted to get married again I could not deny that he was probably the closest thing to the perfect man for me in so many ways. We were sexually compatible, shared many of the same interests, had long meaningful conversations, enjoyed spending time with each other and the children and for a long time still made time for just us. One of our favorite things was sitting outside at the end of the day over a cup of coffee and catching up on each other’s day. I came to the realization that no matter how it had come about, this is the man I could see myself spending the rest of my life with. Everything was great for the first year or so. We seemed to be adjusting well to all of the things that go along with mixed families. The kids all got along great. We made regular trips down to visit his daughters and family every month, spending vacations down there and having them up here for the summer, having “family night” and just doing things we all enjoyed. After our son was born I went back to work but the babysitter thing didn’t work out very well so we decided that I would stay at home and take care of the house and the children. Everything was great, we were financially able to do this and everyone was happy, especially the children.

 

Then in late 2000 my husband decided to quit his job because he didn’t like what he did and he had always wanted to be his own boss. So he tried to turn his hobby into a business but it didn’t go quite as well as he expected. Our financial situation took a serious nose-dive and after a couple of months of struggling to pay the bills I went back to work for my previous employer. When I was at home I took care of the children and that saved us the cost of childcare but he didn’t want to do that so we had that added expense on top of my not making nearly what he had been making. For the first time ever I found myself with late payments taking a huge hit on my immaculate credit record. Remember me saying how independent I was? I guess when the auto finance company showed up at my door on the day of our 2 year anniversary in the spring of 2001 it was just another slap in the face. They were there to repossess my SUV that I had gotten before we were married, with my excellent credit. Happy Anniversary to Me. I was hurt, angry, resentful and began to withdraw. He was feeling a lot of the same himself but for different reasons. His dream was not working out the way he intended and he had to finally give up and go back to work himself 2 months after I did. We no longer talked to each other about much of anything besides the house, kids or bills. We rarely spent time together at all. He stayed in his office on his computer and I stayed in the house with the children or on my computer.

 

About a month after our anniversary he started playing an online role-playing game that my oldest son had asked for just the Christmas before. He had always liked computer and board games but this just caused him to spend more time out in his office, isolated from me and the rest of the family. For the next 4 months I waited for him to finally drag himself into the house at night. Our sex life became almost non-existent. We hardly talked anymore. So one Friday night when my oldest son was spending the night with a friend, my daughter was with her Dad for the weekend and the baby was asleep I decided to check out this game that he seemed to enjoy spending so much time playing. Well as it turns out, it was a fun game and it was also a way for me to spend time with him. So I began playing even though he decided to let me “fend for myself and learn the game on my own”. I have always been a very friendly person so it didn’t take long before I had people in the game that I played with regularly. After a few months, when I’d gotten some experience, he started playing with me and introducing me to his “friends”. We got along fine when we were playing together but nothing else had changed in our lives. We still didn’t talk, rarely had sex, never went anywhere together, none of the things we use to do together or with the kids. I was still angry and resentful over the financial mess I felt he had put us into. He spent every waking moment out in his office. The game was a distraction. I became very close friends with one of the guys he introduced me to. We began spending more and more time together in the game while my husband was off doing his own thing and leaving me behind. As we got closer I began to open up to him about all of the things I was feeling about myself and my marriage. He made me laugh. He made me feel good about myself. He was easy to talk to and seemed to understand me so well. (This is starting to sound familiar I’m sure). To make what could easily be a much longer story just a little bit shorter, what started out as a simple friendship turned into an Emotional Affair. One that lasted for four months while my husband and I fought daily or ignored each other completely, never talking about our problems or how to fix them, just distancing ourselves further and further from each other. By late summer I just couldn’t keep going that way. I was torn between a marriage that seemed hopeless and the feelings I had developed for another man. I couldn’t think straight. So I told my husband that I wanted a separation. He moved out and for the first couple of weeks I was so blinded by my feelings for this other man that I didn’t even try to work things out with my husband. I couldn’t see the forest for the trees. But then we did start to talk a little. Not really about our problems but mostly about our children and our family. We decided to try and work things out.

 

Then all hell broke loose. My husband dropped the bomb that he had been flirting with someone in game. The other man decided to let my husband and everyone else know that he loved me. It got very ugly. I found out that my husband’s relationship wasn’t just a simple flirtation and my husband found out just how long I had been emotionally involved with this other man. The other man attacked us and our in-game friends, doing some very humiliating and vengeful things. My husband told me that his online relationship was none of my business. I broke off all contact with the other man so we could see if there was a marriage left to save but my husband took another month before he finally broke off contact with the girl. And he wasn’t happy about it when he did. He moved home. It was awkward and emotionally draining. He wouldn’t talk about anything that led up to the separation or anything that happened during that time. I couldn’t look him in the eye and he was angry all the time. He completely brushed aside any feelings I had about his relationship and wouldn’t discuss it. He didn’t want to talk about my relationship either. He slammed the door shut and put a lock on his heart and threatened to leave again every day if the kids or I asked anything of him. I lived with that daily threat for 2 months before I finally told him that if he didn’t want to be here then he should just leave. He calmed down and we eventually settled back into our routine of work, kids and house. Things were never the same. That was 4 ½ years ago. During that time I could count on one hand how many times he’s said he loved me. Our sex life that had already been almost non-existent became even more so. We became two strangers who just happened to live in the same house and sleep on opposite sides of the same bed. I felt such guilt and remorse for what I had allowed to happen that I vowed never to ask him to leave again no matter how bad things were between us. I resigned myself to living the rest of my life in an unhappy marriage because no matter what he did to me I would never do that to him again. He never felt any guilt for what he did because as he always told me “it happened after he moved out so it was none of my business”.

 

That brings us to last October when my oldest son, who had been living on his own for a while, needed to move back home to get back on his feet. My husband and I have always disagreed on many things when it comes to our children. His belief seems to be that when they reach that magical age of 18 that you basically just throw them out and let them fend for themselves. He did not want me to let my son move back in and threatened to leave himself if I did. Well I let my son move back in and my husband didn’t leave. In early January my husband got a promotion and since I worked for the same company it was decided that I would step down from the position I have been in for the last 4 years and move to a different department so there wouldn’t be a conflict of interests. Along with his promotion came a quite substantial raise, one that would have eliminated the financial stress that was still hanging on from several years ago. However, life wasn’t going to work that way. A week later, totally out of the blue, he tells me that he is moving out. He said he’d decided this back in October but didn’t want to ruin the holidays for the younger children. He said his feelings for me never returned after he moved back home no matter how hard he had tried. He said he was no longer physically attracted to me and admitted to making excuses over the last several years when I questioned our lack of intimacy. He said he’s always felt like he has no say in what went on in our family. And that he’d come to realize that he is getting older and wants more out of his life. I was just stunned. I knew things hadn’t been good and at times I’d thought myself that we needed to just end it. But here it was right in my face and he was the one doing it. I asked him if he was sure that was what he wanted and he assured me that he had been thinking about it since October. The next day he began asking me if I knew of anything we could do to fix it. I told him we needed to talk about everything that had happened beginning five years ago. He still didn’t want to talk about any of it. It took him a couple of weeks to pack up his belongings and find a place to live. Life was very awkward during that time and I walked around in a daze. I kept hearing over and over in my head everything he’d said that night he told me he was leaving. We talked a few times before he actually left. He finally asked a few questions about the other man from years ago but still insisted that the girl was none of my business. When I mentioned her he ended the conversation. I accused him of trying to make me share the burden of his decision to leave just to make himself feel better because he could have changed his mind at any time. But I didn’t try to stop him. And he didn’t change his mind.

 

A couple of weeks after my husband moved out I said hello to the other man when I saw him online one night. I had always felt horrible because of the way I just cut him off. Because of the way he lashed out I felt I had no choice at the time. A close friend of mine told me that I never had any closure with this other man and that was why I had not been able to just let go. I’ve thought about him quite often over the last few years and missed his friendship. Because we were friends before other emotions got in the way. I guess I was naïve enough to think that maybe we could be friends again. We talked for a long time that night and quickly jumped right back into that comfortable routine of talking on a daily basis, both on the computer and on the phone. We talked about everything that happened back then and what had gone on in each of our lives since that time.

 

Meanwhile, I guess my husband decided that living alone wasn’t quite what he’d expected it to be. He started asking me if I wanted to try and work things out. But he didn’t really act like he wanted to do that. It was very confusing. He still couldn’t tell me that he loved me. He seemed happy all the time, decorating his new place and spending money on furniture and household items, new gadgets and stuff. He’d call and want me to come over and see his newest acquisition. And he couldn’t understand why that offended me or ticked me off. He began calling me all the time, dropping by for flimsy reasons, asking me to go to dinner with him, wanting to know what I was doing all the time. Every time he had our son he spent money left and right on him and took him places. Things he didn't do when he was at home. The resentment just kept growing. I finally told him to stop throwing his money in my face because I would never consider working things out with him because of financial reasons. I told him that he didn’t love me and that I’d heard every word he said when he left and just could not believe that all of a sudden his feelings had changed. I told him that I did not want to try again. I don't want to hurt him but I just don’t believe that all of a sudden he loves me again, finds me desirable and wants to spend his life with me.

 

The other man and I recently said goodbye to each other again. After talking to each other for several months we realized that we just do not want the same things. We finally did meet in person, twice for less than 24 hours each time. We kissed, petted, talked a lot and had a great time but I just couldn’t bring myself to have sex with him. He wants a serious relationship and always has. I don’t want a relationship at all right now. In my head I know that a relationship with him will never be possible considering our past and the way he and my husband feel about each other. It’s a complication I don’t need. We’ve tried the “just friends” thing but it just doesn’t work. You can’t go backwards and erase the feelings once they are there. So we finally just had to say goodbye. I guess I got my closure this time and I can finally let go.

 

I will always have some type of relationship with my husband. Not only because he is the father of my son but also because I just happen to like my husband as a person. I don’t know if our marriage is salvageable or if I even want to try. Right now I am just taking it day by day. He and I get along great. We put our son first. We can talk and laugh with each other. We’ve even played online together a few times. But we still haven’t dealt with any of our problems, after all these years. I think we need to talk about everything that happened before we could even think about getting back together. He thinks there is no point in talking about it unless we do get back together. Once again, we are at a stalemate. When he loved me I knew it without a shadow of a doubt because he left me with no doubt by everything he said and did. But that was a long time ago. I no longer have that confidence. I think he is lonely and he’s begun to miss the everyday things that we both took for granted. So, what I’ve decided for myself is that I just need some time alone. Time to come to terms with myself over everything that has happened and try to figure out why I was so adamant about never getting married again in the first place, why I let myself become so vulnerable when we had problems in our marriage, why I had such a hard time letting go of the other man and why I am now having such a hard time believing that my husband genuinely loves me and wants to make our marriage work. Am I just incapable of being happy or is there a shred of hope for me yet?

[Becoming]

Therapy might help you sort all these complicated things out. You seem to be attracting slackers who like your independence to the point of taking advantage of it and basically checking out of the marriage, which causes you to do the same. Could it be that on some level you want men who are as afraid of intimacy as you and that you are using them as much as they use you?