“I feel like he has completely rewritten our relationship.”
Hi Rosie,
Your book has been so helpful to me since my husband very suddenly left 5 months ago, out of the blue, telling me he didn’t love me. He swears there has been no affair (!!!). Since leaving his behaviour has been so cold and cruel and I feel as though he has completely rewritten our whole relationship and who I am. Like you, we’ve been together since uni, for nearly 25 years, married for 15, with two teens who are devastated. I would say most of those years were happy ones, with some ups and downs that come with the stresses of life, but nothing abnormal. Over the past few years I can see that he has emotionally been disconnecting from me despite my efforts to reignite intimacy etc. And now he has just left.
I don’t have the answers to tell the kids as to why he has left as it all seems rather thin (his take is- ‘we drifted apart etc etc’, ‘I deserve happiness too’….). Anyway, after the first 3 months of being a complete wreck, I feel like I’m now doing ok-ish, but the worst thing of all is I have a sense of ‘stuckness’ – stuck with ruminating, stuck with trying to work out what had happened to make things go so wrong, stuck with wondering which parts of our relationship were real and which were not. I do have a great therapist but I think unless you have been through this yourself you can’t really understand, not properly.
I was wondering if you experienced the same feeling of ‘stuckness’ and how you got through that. I can’t purge him from my life as now have to go through a horrible divorce. But I do want to get him out of my head. I have a busy life – work full time, lots of friends etc. This does not stop me from still feeling stuck with an inability to ‘solve’ what has happened. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, on how to move on (I think part of the reason I can’t move on is because it means I have to say ‘goodbye’ in my head to someone I loved deeply, and I feel like I can’t do that….tears are coming now…).
When he first left I felt 99% like a wounded animal and 1% Beyonce (the outrage at what he’d done!). Now I feel 50% like a wounded animal and 50% Beyonce (spoke to a hot lawyer this week!), but I don’t want to feel 50% wounded animal forever and feel stuck in a rut of him always being in my head.
By the way, I thought you might be interested from a journalistic angle, in the use of Chat GPT to ‘solve’ break ups. I think it might be part of the reason why I am stuck, and you probably didn’t have that as a tool to use when you had your break-up as its such a recent addition to our lives. Essentially, I’ve got into the habit of running his emails/Whatsapp messages through Chat GPT, putting in my responses etc – and asking it to psychologically analyse him and me. It is amazingly astute (tells me he is ‘avoidant’ and his coldness is because he is steeped in shame and guilt etc) but it is also incredibly sycophantic (tells me how emotionally healthy I am and how people who leave suddenly usually get hit with the shock much later on once the person who is left has already started healing). It is amazing, but a bind too, as I know it will be biased towards me. I wonder if other people use it in the same way during break ups, and whether it helps or hinders?
Thanks for your advice, Rachel x
