Do you know if he wants children? Adopting is always an option if you can’t have them and want them. If you’re both 39, though, it might not even be on his mind as that’s kind of late in life to start having kids, so you might find that that won’t be an issue with him at all anyway.

Do you think you might be focusing more on reasons that he might not want to be with you than focusing on reasons why he DOES? He has been with you for a long time, so he clearly has lots of reasons why he is choosing to be. Maybe taking some time to write down all of the things you think he might like about you or that he’s told you he likes will help you reframe how you’re thinking.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Valora.

alibro991,

It’s my impression that when you go through divorce proceedings, your husband would have no choice but to split assets. If he doesn’t want to sell the house, would he not have to pay you for half of it if it were acquired during your marriage?  The only other problem is divorces are very expensive, and with having no money as it is, I can see how that would definitely make things difficult. Do you have any way to get enough money to be able to go through the proceedings?

Hi Sparkle,

I just read your other thread where you said the following:

Right from the start of our relationship I’ve had a problem very insecure about other women. Whether I would lose him to someone else. The last month we have started to fight verbally about it. He tells me if I just control worrying about other women it will be fine between us.

Those fights and your worries alone will cause someone to doubt you, especially if he, himself, hasn’t given you any reason not to trust him (for example, if you don’t have any evidence that he is interested in any other woman and it’s likely more fear/insecurity on your part). If you’ve been fighting about this a lot lately, it’s likely going to make him feel like you are incapable of trusting him, and if he is trustworthy, he will not want to be with someone who can’t trust him.

Also, lots of people who are jealous feel this way because they are doing things they shouldn’t be and they are afraid their partner is doing the same…. I’m definitely NOT saying you’re doing things you shouldn’t be, but that’s a concern that people have when their partner starts to get jealous when they don’t deserve it. In other words, he may he having doubts that you’re trustworthy because you don’t trust him.

So…. if your guy is trustworthy and if this is something that is coming from your own fears and insecurities, the best way to deal with this is to do some soul searching and figure out why you’re feeling this way. Challenge those feelings, thoughts, and beliefs on this that you have. Change the way you think. It’s good to be cautious when you’re first getting to know someone, but once you learn someone can be trusted (which you should always do BEFORE you enter into a relationship with the person), you have to be able to give them that trust. If you feel you can’t trust them, you definitely shouldn’t be in a relationship with them.

And most of all, remember that everyone is different. Your current partner is not your previous partner. Just because things may have happened one way in the past or might have some familiarity to your current situation, that doesn’t mean that’s what’s going on now. Our minds like to connect things and think all these fearful thoughts as a way to protect ourselves from feeling pain, but instead we end up self-sabotaging great things.

So remember: The past can warn us not to make the same mistakes in the future, but it cannot predict the future.

Haha… I totally get what you mean by how you felt making that drive. I haven’t driven through my ex’s town either since we broke up and I almost had to drive through and right past his house to take my daughter to a swim meet and my mind was going nuts over it. I was just all kinds of anxious and it didn’t even make any sense. haha. We ended up having a snowstorm that day though so the meet was cancelled. Made me realize how hard I’ve been avoiding anything to do with him though.

Anyway, yeah, you definitely, definitely at the very least need to have a talk with her about boundaries and her attitude ASAP, even if you don’t break up with her right then…. and if she fights you over that, it’s very good reason to break up with her right then and have her start working toward moving out faster. She needs to understand that what she is doing and how she is responding to everything is pushing you further away. She is responding in really petty ways and her jealousy is basically out of control with that “I’ll just take my kids there, me and them.”  You can’t change that you visited a place in the past (before you even met your girlfriend!) with your ex, so it’s a silly thing to even get upset about, but it shows you where her head is at.

The other thing is… you’re not trying to keep her or win her back, so you have absolutely no reason to put up with how she’s acting and her behavior is going to produce the exact opposite result that she wants, and she neeeeeds to understand that. There’s absolutely no way for you two to even have a hope of a healthy relationship with her acting like that. So, at the very least, even when you do break up, having this conversation about her behavior will hopefully help her learn a lesson that will be beneficial for her future relationships. A breakup might be good for your girlfriend if it spurs her to change, like breakups do with so many people.  I personally have a much, much better mindset and better priorities than I did 2 years ago because I got a kick in my butt to change my situation and how I was thinking. Sounds like your girlfriend could use the same thing.  She definitely needs to get out of victim mode, like life’s just handing her lemons. Meanwhile, she’s the one growing the lemon trees.

Can you give us some examples of instances where you felt she was critical of you? How did she react to the Valentine’s Day gift?

You don’t have to answer this if it’s too personal, but have you two never been able to have sex at all or is it just few and far between because of his performance anxiety?

I have to wonder what they are doing in his therapy sessions. There are cognitive behavioral techniques that can be done that might help a lot, but that knowledge is going to depend on what kind of therapist he is seeing. Does he go there just to talk to them about what’s going on or do they have him working on different techniques to try to get over his anxiety around it? Do you know if he has any idea where/when the anxiety started? If it was caused by any certain event?

The next thing is how old are both of you? If you can and if the clock isn’t ticking too fast, per se, I would probably hold off on treatments for now, if it were me. This is something he really should hopefully be able to work through either way (provided he is seeing a good cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist) and IVF treatments are very, very expensive.

Yeah, those feelings that I described and that you felt with your ex are either there or they aren’t. They aren’t just something that develops in the absence of troubles like I think you were hoping they would with your girlfriend. Instead, they are inherent and intuitive, it’s just a special type of connection that you would feel IN SPITE of all of the other troubles.  Even aside from that, couples can be compatible with lots of other things, but you and your girlfriend have so many current INcompatibilities (like her kids and all of the troubles that are result of her financial irresponsibility, for example) that it would really take some big, special-connection compatibilities to make up for it, just like you said… if you had felt that intense love connection, all of this stuff would most likely bother you less or you’d at least be happier in general because you’d have that intense love feeling. So that’s basically what I was getting at there.

It sounds like your expectations of what would happen kind of got the best of you, but that’s the biggest problem with expectations… they aren’t always right. Those are the things that often let us down. Try to forgive both of you, though, for not knowing what would really happen when you made all of these different moves that you thought at the time would help.

That’s awful about her pay. I would have her see how soon they increase the pay, too. Also, has she looked into consolidation loans at all? Sometimes you can get enough to put everything together and lower interest plus a little extra that would give her enough for like two months rent on an apartment.

Waiting until the end of the month sounds like a good plan, too. She should have her taxes back by then too, right? In the meantime, though, I would have a talk with her about boundaries right away. I get where her insecurity is coming from, but it’s misplaced right now because your ex flat-out told her she was “done” and you haven’t heard from your ex since. You aren’t having an affair behind your girlfriend’s back and you have every right to your privacy either way. So I would just let her know that her behavior with that is driving a wedge between you two and you won’t stand for it. She either has to give you some trust or you need to part ways right then and there.

And yes, I absolutely, 100% think you’ll forget about your ex once you find a woman who meets your needs. For sure. Especially if she’s a mature and responsible woman. Quite frankly, that’d be even better than your ex has been!

I’m about 1 year and 4 months out from the breakup. We haven’t really gone more than a month and a half without some form of communication in that time, and usually it’s super short talks, but it pulls me back in every time.  I’m doing well now though. I was completely devastated for about 8 months or so, cried almost every day no matter how hard I tried to just let go and move on, but counseling helped a lot and so did working on myself. I was sort of able to make sense of what happened after a while and that understanding helped me to resolve it in my head a bit, even though I never really got full closure. Watching videos by people like Kyle Cease and Kerwin Rae helped a lot, too. It just sort of gives you a different perspective.

Just know it’s okay and natural to be feeling the things you’re feeling and there’s nothing you can do about the sadness than to just sit with it until it passes. From my experience with it, if you’re similar, you’re likely going to go back and forth between being critical of yourself and him and being understanding of everything. Grief from the loss will come in waves, but those waves will get fewer and far between as time goes on, or at least that’s what I’ve noticed. I still miss my ex because he was also my very best friend, but I’ve come to accept the breakup and all of the good that I’ve gotten from it with all of the improvements I’ve made in my life that I might not have been pushed to make otherwise. So I’m grateful for that. Hopefully either your husband will eventually get himself straightened out and start lining his words up with his actions again and you two can rebuild or you find someone you connect even more with.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 9 months ago by Valora.