# help- i must be missing something



## jdl14586 (May 18, 2010)

I had an emotional affair with a woman. We had became very close friends and I hid it from my fiance. There were never any physical encounters or talks of it but based upon definitions of emotional affairs- I had one. It had detrimental effects on my relationship. My fiance and I lived with our kids and raised them as a family. Although our relationship was turbulent at times, we might as well have been married. We just hadn't gotten the paperwork. 

Through out our relationship she had told me she was leaving or that it was over many, many times. She would always come back and say she didn't really mean it even if at times she actually left. It always had a HUGE effect on me. There is some debate between us on whether or not i was partly responsible for her choice of words but either way- it always hurt. She was insecure by both the things that I was dishonest about from before and a few things that had been going on within herself that she would admit weren't my fault. It wasn't an easy time.
I cant say the reason I had an emotional affair was because of the state or progression of our relationship because absolutely NO reason that should have brought me to being so close to a woman and keeping it from T. It was wrong and even though I reasoned within myself that we were just friends, I must have known some thing was wrong with it because I kept it from T. I accept full responsibility for it and made a HUGE mistake. There had been a somewhat similar situation with her early in our relationship so I knew how I felt when I was on the opposite side. It made it that much worse that I would allow myself to get into that position.

Once it was brought to light, I stopped having any personal relationship with this woman at all. Our companies worked together so professionally I had to deal with her but it was only business. We didn't speak and the only dialogue was strictly business and through email.

T and I split up and I went back to being friends with this woman. Admittedly immediately. We didn't split up because I went back to being friends with her and I very much would have chosen T over anyone's friendship. T was just REALLY hard on me, harder than she had EVER been. I felt like the more I tried, the more I felt like she kicked my a$$. I mean, really- she would accuse me of things, I'd PROVE otherwise and she still wouldn't believe me. Some of it was way out there. IT was like "open season" on me. T said I deserved it just because of what I did.

After I asked T to leave (yes, it was me this time) she stated she wanted to come home. I asked for a couple of days to clear my head and think. When I did ask her to come home so that we could talk she declined. That was it, she was done with me. Several times over the next month or so I tried to reach out to her to fix it and be together but she was having none of it. She constantly was telling me to get out of her life. She hated me and wanted nothing to do with me or my life. She even hooked up with a guy much younger than her and wasn't honest about it (now says there was no sex but they were physical). Her explanation was that she owed me nothing and there was no reason not to do it and that she didnt owe me the truth.
So after several months of her telling me she hated me, completely shutting me out of her life I put up a profile on a dating site. I went out with a couple girls and one of them I actually kissed. Several times T would call me to ask me if I was seeing someone else, she was adamant that she didn't want to be with me but "just needed to know if I had moved on with my life". I would tell her no but that if I were dating it was none of her business. I said I wouldn't give her the satisfaction. She said I at least owed her an answer. I never thought I did.

Over the last couple months she has went back and forth numerous times about whether we would be together. She approached me and said she wanted us to get back together so she could "take care of her family". I was in the hospital, she went to my house and found a full box of condoms and destroyed my room again going back to "get the F*@k out of my life". This was all in the course of one day. Why she was in my drawer when she says she was going to cook dinner I don't know. She has put provisions on even "trying" such as not having any childhood friends on my fb page that are women ( just friends mind you), although I am blocked from her page. she works nights on the weekends and has went out with friends but never has invited me. She doesn't tell me she loves me and says it because I haven't "earned it and needs to keep me at a distance". She will invite me over to her house once week (maybe)after her kids go to bed to have sex but not for dinner, weekend bbqs w/ the kids, etc. She says she wants to keep the kids out of it but our kids still hang out.
She wont come to my house because she says she cant stand to think of it as being not "her home".

She says now that I know nothing about loyalty because I went back to being friends with people while we were apart. Hell, are we even together? She says there are certain things you don't do. You don't go back to being friends with someone you betrayed someone else with after you split up. She has all my passwords and phone accounts. She goes thru them to try and piece things together of when we were not talking and accuses me of lying, being deceitful about when we were apart and is CONSTANTLY asking me about having sex with other people when she was FIRM about her not wanting anything to do with me. I HAVE been honest and she still accuses me of lying. Some of the things she comes up with are absurd and can even be proved but she isn't interested in finding out differently.

What am I missing here? First, I don't think anything that I did or who I was friends with should even matter if she didn't want anything to do with me. 

She says I shouldn't have been dating if I wanted to get back with her, even though I had given up asking her.
She says I shouldn't have been friends with someone I betrayed her with after we split and that by doing so I know nothing about loyalty. A lot of this makes no sense to me. What do thins that happen when she didn't want to be with me have to do with wanting to be with me?

It seems her issues have went from the emotional affair, to me dating while she was telling me to go to hell (and she meant it), now to being disloyal because I was friends with people or talked bad about her. She says I ran her through the mud, disrespected her and wasn't "loyal". There are a lot of things that I can point to and say are very similar to what she is talking about but am told I'm only twisting things.

Am I a complete idiot here? Why does a lot of these things just not make sense? What does who you are when someone hates you have to do with what you do when they dont?

What does being "loyal" to an ex mean? If she wants to be with me, shouldnt she want to be with me based on the here and now? I can understand the whole precautionary steps and needing to rebuild trust but should there be SO much referral to what happened when she didn't want to be with me?


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## MarlonFamilton (May 15, 2010)

Sounds like a job for boundaries. Your post is a little confusing as to the current state of things, but it reads as though your relationship with T is over and yet you still have kids to manage. Do you have a parenting plan in place? You should look into that. Finding a way to co-parent without conflict may be elusive and yet it is a priority for the kids (assuming they are under 18).

It seems as though you are still emotionally connected with T as she is with you. That emotional connection and related anxiety continues to push you both into doing reactionary things. If you want a clean slate with someone, setting up boundaries so that T can't interfere with your life is important. When she asks questions that are invasive, just answer vaguely. "Not sure." "Sort of.. Hey, I gotta go." "A little." Or you could be more direct and say, "I'm not really comfortable sharing that part of my life with you." Though that might tick her off...

Another piece of this is looking back at the emotional affair. Yes, that was a contribution you had that T wasn't responsible for, and yet something was happening in your relationship that put you in a position of being open to that. I'll bet you were not feeling important, appreciated, understood, and more. Ideally when we feel that way we can go talk to our partner and they'll be responsive. You might have held onto a fear that she wouldn't be, and that might have been real. 

Okay, to answer your questions. If you were seperated and you dated, nothing she or you can do. Calling you disloyal is putting a lot of un-negotiated expectations on you. Did she call and say, "okay we're separated, but let's not date for a few months while we work this out?" Do you really believe her when she says her other relationship wasn't sexual?

Many of these arguments don't makes sense because she is coming at them from a place of trying to cope with emotions I'm willing to bet she doesn't understand in herself... just a hunch. Open, clear, honest communications weren't a big part of your relationship prior to the emotional affair. Now it sounds like a lot of "hit and run" and reactionary anger (which isn't really anger).

Loyalty to an Ex is something you get to define. If she wants you to be with her now, but first wants to take out several pounds of flesh, you'll have to decide if you want to go through that. I'd ask, do you think she'll get to a place of true forgiveness? Will she be able to see and take ownership for her half of how you both got here?

Assuming you have gone to her and apologized for the emotional affair, from a sincere and remorseful place, did she ever work to trust again? Did she ever talk about how hard things were for her in a calm way? Or, does she just wham you when she gets the chance?

What is missing here, for me anyway, is her taking ownership of her part of this. She's angry and hurt and making you pay, and pay and pay... Look at where things in this relationship are really at. Think about what you believe is really possible for the future. Then ask yourself, what do I really want? If you want to be with her, then expect she'll go to counseling so you can get someone else in the room giving her validation so she can begin to calm down. Until she gets that, she'll stay spooled up. You need some validation too.

~Marlon


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## jdl14586 (May 18, 2010)

We don't have children together. She has her's from a previous marriage and I have mine.

I am not seeing anyone nor want to. After we split I thought that I would date other people to get over her. It had worked in the past (best way to get over someone is to find another, etc). I think a combination of loving her more than i ever could imagine loving a woman and me maturing to the fact that physical relationships don't take the place of meaningful ones and just found myself uninterested in pursuing any others. 
The state of the relationship as it is now is very complicated in that I cant explain it myself. She doesnt feel we are "together" and continually says she doesnt know what she wants but is very sensitive when I act in the "casual" manner she says she wants. Casual as in not talking all the time, not making plans, etc. If I back off she says "I think of all those times you talked to this woman on the phone and my phone doesn't ring". She tells me she cant see me not in her life but cant see me in it. I've tried backing off and just waiting for her but she ends up feeling like I may be up to no good. I tell her I want to get back to the point that we are all a family again and she just says she doesnt see us living like that. She got upset that I got a dog because I didn't talk to her about it. She found out that I was contemplating it for sometime (which I was) but because I didn't talk to her about it, it wasn't me really doing things that would be productive to us being together. She already had a dog, so by me getting one- I was only thinking of myself. I'll admit that went back and forth over sometime and in the end just felt like it was something I wanted and had no clue where she was going to want to be.

I love her, I wait for her. If I wait but am quiet she thinks I don't care or am being deceptive. If I try and reach out to her and talk about our future she says I'm pressuring her and that she feels "bullied". I end up feeling like she wants me to be all into her but doesn't want to reciprocate. The whole conversation about why she never says "I love you" if she does really upset me. She says that I "don't deserve it" and that it makes her feel vulnerable. She has never came out and said " I want to be together again" but makes references such as "well, if we ever split up again, you would just go back to being friends with...".

She thinks because I don't see things the way she does in terms of loyalty and the things that may happen if two people are not together that I "just don't get it" and "it's just common sense". I don't understand what her definition of loyalty is if two people aren't together. T told me that she hated me, to stay out of her life forever, that I was a piece of S#!t, that I was a failure of a man, etc and honestly meant it every time she would say it. I tried and do that and move on but became friends again with a person that has caused problems in our (T& I) relationship when we were together. T changed her mind about me (somewhat) but tells me I wasn't loyal to her when we weren't even speaking by being friends with this person.

I'm not whining and looking for validation here. I don't need to tell her "Ahaa! see, I was right". I need to understand what is real and reasonable and what isn't. 

The whole issue with her pouring over emails and phone records to try and piece things together from when she did "hate" me befuddles me. She says she just has to know and that I am maintaining that I wasn't physical with someone but she knows me better than that so I must be lying. She has all my acct information and I asked her why she doesn't use that information to better reaffirm what I am saying and doing NOW instead of putting so much effort into the past, a past which didn't include her. It honestly eats at her. I don't sit and obsess about what did or might have happened when we weren't even talking because it would drive me nuts. She says she didn't have sex with this kid and I just have to take her word for it. I guess if I ever found out differently I'd have to deal with it then but I'm not going to go Magnum PI on her trying to find out.

What is loyalty once two people split? Is it wrong to rekindle a friendship with a person that was part of that emotional affair after T and I split? By "split" I mean, not living together, clearly not a couple, separate lives, "I hate you"... If T comes back and changes her mind about me, does she have a right to question anything I did while we were apart?

We went to counseling once but she walked out. She said after that it was because I was "spewing bs" but I really wasn't talking much at all. I just figured I'd let her and the counselor talk. I felt like T didn't like the way it was going and let her anger take over, blaming me.

I've asked her several times to go back and she just says she wants to but just doesn't have time.

I know that somewhere inside her that she loves me or she'd just tell me to go to hell for good. I'm just lost inside all of this and can't seem to win for losing. I do not know what to do to start righting the ship.


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