# When/how did you realize you stopped loving them?



## SepticChange

For those who weren't emotionally finished with the marriage before it ended....

I am proud to say I am no longer "in love" with him but I'm not sure if I still love him or not. It's fading that's for sure but it could be more lingering fondness of him when things were good. 

Explain how you feel.


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## stillhoping

I wish I could. I was still in love with my ex when he asked for the divorce. I love him still. I would never have ended my marriage and I would work with him now to repair it if he was interested. I am working on making space in my heart for someone new.


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## Hopeful Cynic

For me, it turned out I was in love with the person I thought my ex was, but that was a complete manipulation, and I only loved a lie. Once I realized my ex was just going to keep lying and never actually turn into the person I loved, that was it. For the first few years post-separation, I had to keep reminding myself though.


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## Rowan

I hadn't been _in_ love with my husband for a very long time. He made it pretty much impossible to hold on to that feeling after we married, and it had slowly eroded away over the years. However, I still loved him enough to want to be married to him. The night he finally admitted that he'd actually been cheating on me for the duration of our marriage, though, pretty much flipped a switch for me. It was suddenly just completely and utterly over. 

I do still care about him, even today. I want the best for him. I hope he gets what he wants out of life. I would be deeply saddened if something bad happened to him. But I have zero desire to have him in my life in any meaningful way. I don't hate him, but there's no love in me for the person he is. And the person I thought he was, was a lie.


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## Pluto2

I stopped being "in love" with my ex before I asked for the D. Too much abuse for that to continue. I suppose i loved him when I thought he was suicidal since I was jumping through every hoop I could to make it better for him. Once I found out that was a manipulation, too, and then all the infidelity, I no longer loved him.
His actions post-D have caused me to care very very little for his well-being.


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## Jellybeans

It wasn't so much that I fell out of love, I just realized that I didn't like him very much. 

You can love someone a lot but it doesn't mean you're good together.


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## SepticChange

Jellybeans, that's what goes through my mind as well. I may still love him just because he was my husband, but I don't like him very much at all. Even if he didn't cheat, deep down his personality sucks. I now see with clearer eyes why he goes through friends like that :snaps: Nobody likes him..


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## Wolf1974

I went from love to disgust in about 15 seconds Which is how long it took me to read the texts from the other man.


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## FrustratedFL

I went from love to hate to now just pity. 

I loved being married and loved my spouse until I found out about the affairs and all the lies. My trust turned to distrust and my feelings turned to hate. Then frustration during the divorce. 

Now I just pity him and his victim role and lies he tells everyone of why he got divorced.


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## Healer

stillhoping said:


> I wish I could. I was still in love with my ex when he asked for the divorce. I love him still. I would never have ended my marriage and I would work with him now to repair it if he was interested. I am working on making space in my heart for someone new.


That makes my heart sad for you. Unrequited love is a nasty SOB.


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## Healer

My love for her started dying Dday. It completely flatlined 3 months later, when I ended R and left her for good. It turned to bitter hatred, which has now turned to indifference.


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## arbitrator

*It was pretty-well waning when her lowlife kids all got busted for drug possession by the County and did jail time, over a very short span of time. But when she extended her heartfelt sympathy, criminal defense attorneys, and additional money to them to go buy themselves another stash, was largely when I totally fell out of love with her! Instead of kicking their everloving, unrepentant, dope-smoking asses, her motherly defense mechanism was simply "Well, Everybody does it!"

But like the good, loyal, and devoted husband that I thought that I was, I fervently prayed to God about it, hoping that perhaps my sincere prayer might possibly bring about a marked change in her! And in them! But that ol' dog just never showed up to hunt!

But as Garth Brooks so eloquently intones in his famous song, "Thank God, for Unanswered Prayers!*


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## TheGoodGuy

Dday to week 2 I still loved her and held out hope for R. Week 2 when she was in my home getting ready for a "date" with OM was the last of that fog. I kicked her out at that point and it became disgust. I didn't know this new person at all. 
After that were periods of hate and/or indifference. I was still hurting inside but it was over the loss of my hopes and dreams, not because I still loved her. 
This hate/disgust helped me fend off a false R attempt from her around month 2 which would have had me picking up all of the pieces in her destructive path. Too much water under that bridge.
I'm almost 2 years past DDay, 19 months post divorce final. Now I feel nothing for her. All of my emotional energy is spent on my own health and happiness and taking care of my daughter who I got sole custody of.


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## bkyln309

I realized that there was continuous lies for 10 years. I realized how unhappy I was and I filed.


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## Houstondad

I threw in the towel soon after she left me and the kids despite still loving her. It was definitely a slow healing process. I was on TAM all the time. There wasn't a day that went by that I hadn't thought about her or missed her. I knew that she was no longer the person I was married to, but it took over a year for me to understand on an emotional level. And once that happened, I was able to truly let go.


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## Chuck71

I will always love my XW but, the person she was.... the first seven to eight years.

The person she turned into, was a stranger. About two months after D final,

an episode occurred and whatever was still bouncing around in my heart for her

was flushed away. It did help I was already seeing someone.


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## 'CuseGal

I think probably I stopped loving him at all when I realized that not only did he no longer care about ME post-marriage, he didn't care about our kids either. It's hard to love a man who will completely abandon his children.

Looking farther back, though, to when we were still trying to work things out pre-divorce, I think I gave up when I became so disgusted by all his affairs that I literally could no longer stand him touching me. I could not stand having him try to kiss me or even hold my hand - it actually made me physically ill.At this year, almost 11 years post-divorce, my feelings towards him are so negative that even LOOKING at him makes me ill. If I didn't need it to support my kids, I wouldn't even accept the child support he gives me, because honestly I don't WANT anything from him anymore.


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## Ynot

I think I will always love my X. The reality is that we grew apart and I can understand that. The other part of the reality is that neither I nor my kids deserved the lies and manipulation at the end. Until she brings herself to apologize for her actions, and not the results of her actions, I doubt there will ever be any type of relationship at all. She is the mother of my children and I truly hopes she finds happiness but have grave doubts that will ever happen until she stops lying to herself and every one else.


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## SamuraiJack

I have the rather annoying habit of finding the good in people when even they can’t see it. 
My ex was one of those people and I most likely fell in love with an idealized version of her. 
She presented so well in the beginning…seemed so well adjusted and willing to work on things.

One of the things I always loved about her is she would not hesitate to send food back if it wasn’t done properly. She was a good consumer and was firm but polite.
About a year before she left, she got a meal that wasn’t done the way she wanted and she refused to send it back saying it would “make a scene”.

It may be that I never actually stop loving the gal I married.
I realized after she left that the woman I married died in front of my eyes in the year before she left.
The chances are very high that she had an affair. At the very least she had a full blown MLC. 

Now that I can detach and see it for what it was, I can see that she had a very unfulfilled need for approval and that her core issue was with her father and needing his approval. When he died, I got those needs transferred to me and I simply could not be her father. Subconsciously she was asking me to give her that validation as a daughter and I was behaving like a husband.
Nobody could do that and nobody could fill that need.
Combine that with some projection, turning 39 and an overly demanding job, and you have a recipe for disaster and slowly festering resentment.
I stopped loving the ex when she announced that she was “in love” with someone a few weeks after the divorce was settled.

But as I said to my ex once “if you see the woman I married, tell her I miss her.”


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## sammy3

I still love my husband but no longer in love with him. An affair (his))changes the heart.((mine)) He's worked on himself a lot, has become a better person, but he also has shown sides of himself I dont like either with these new changes. Cant explain it, but I liked some of his old "anal" ((no violence or weirdness)) ways that are no longer... he's not the same person I married ....all the real bonding that we had over a life time had been broken in a second ... 

~sammy


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## TroyN

She was verbally abusive, bi-polar, and possibly had Borderline Personality Disorder. She has a mask that she needs to wear to get what she wants, and I was fooled.

I loved her too much and got no love in return, so I ended it. I didn't want to, and she didn't want to divorce, but I really had no choice. 

I'm with someone new now, who I feel really does love me, but the heartbreak still lingers at times. 

It's really hard to let go when you are empathetic and have the ability to love.


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## grays

Hopeful Cynic said:


> For me, it turned out I was in love with the person I thought my ex was


Me, too. I loved who I thought he was and I loved the relationship I thought we had, but when I found out that he had been involved with someone else for years and that he had not felt the way I thought he had for years before that I turned off to him completely. I almost don't have any feelings about him at all because I feel like the person I loved was a figment of my imagination and didn't exist at all in reality. When I look at him now I only see a stranger, and not a lovable one.

I didn't feel like I fell out of love but more like I had never actually been in love with him because it was all just false, not what I thought it was. In a lot of ways I feel like I was robbed of 25 years because none of my memories are what I thought they were.


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## sammy3

grays said:


> Me, too. I loved who I thought he was and I loved the relationship I thought we had, but when I found out that he had been involved with someone else for years and that he had not felt the way I thought he had for years before that I turned off to him completely. I almost don't have any feelings about him at all because I feel like the person I loved was a figment of my imagination and didn't exist at all in reality. When I look at him now I only see a stranger, and not a lovable one.
> 
> I didn't feel like I fell out of love but more like I had never actually been in love with him because it was all just false, not what I thought it was. In a lot of ways I feel like I was robbed of 25 years because none of my memories are what I thought they were.



I know for me, I look back on my whole marriage and wonder now. too, if the memories are what I thought they were. Him being an airline pilot he had many many years and chances to cheat. When I ask has he in the past,? the answer is always no, I never doubted before, but I never thought held cheat ever in the first place either. 

~sammy


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