Acceptance
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| Wed, 01-26-2005 - 12:02pm |
Well I have my NC back again we agreed mutually and it is so easy to go forward this time. My A was 8 m long, We ended it 15 m ago. After this much time has passed, I have accepted the situation. I remember in the early days afted it ended I said the acceptance words over and over every day but it took this much time to have it really sink in and change my life.
There is no more pain. There is no more sadness. I am all cried out. For a good 9 solid months I was in excruciating pain and sadness and did not want to live my life without him and found no happiness in my life without him. At about the 9 month mark I started making rapid recovery and it keeps going to this day. NOW IF I WANTED TO HOLD ONTO THAT PAIN AND SADNESS AND MY BROKEN HEART--I COULDN'T IF I TRIED. My grieving process was intense; all my friends said they had never seen anything like it. But I did it my way---the long suffering way. and now I'm done.
I still think of him most of the day every day. There is still love. But this love asks for nothing in return. I can live without him. I WANT TO LIVE. I want my real life back and I want ME back and I am getting both.
I am secure in the knowledge that he loves me too. I ACCEPT that he made the choice to stay in his M and that he has the right to live his life the way he wants to. He has told me he never loved his W, he has told me he looks at her and wants it to be me, He has told me that he feels like he lives in prison, and that he believes we will be married to each other some day. But he also tells me that his W can't support herself, that he can't hurt his boys, that he can't get an annulment from the Catholic church, that my children will hate him and his children will hate me, that all of these things will kill our love, that he is scared.
I CHOOSE NOT TO WAIT FOR HIM. That is MY CHOICE. I have the right to make that choice. So I am accepting that HIS choice and MY choice make it unlikely that we will ever be together. And that is life. It is peaceful to give up on FORCING something to work THAT IS SO HARD. Life is so mysterious and beautiful and strange especially when things don't work the way we plan. What a lesson on letting go and acceptance.
HUGS TO ALL. MY MESSAGE IS GIVE IT ENOUGH TIME AND YOU WILL FEEL BETTER.
Survive

Hi Survive,
Wow, everything you said just reminded me that I empowered myself. You see, I am the single one, the one that got into this R with a MM who also was unhappily married. For a while, he made it seem like he may leave his W to be with me (although I never asked him to and didn't want him to) but after months of waiting and guilt of having this R with him, I decided we should end it.
Like what you said, YOU decided that you can live w/out him. YOU decided that what you wanted was different from what HE wanted. My xMM told me towards the end that he was going to stay with his W. That told me that HE WAS OK WITH BEING UNHAPPY (if he was telling me the truth about their unhappy marriage). And I know that if he could have both of us, he would. He told me so. Because it was just as hard for him to let me go as it was for me. But at the end, I WANT MORE!!! I am single, young and want more with my life. For a long time, I thought I couldn't live without him. That I'd rather be in this R in hopes that somehow, God will change things and somehow, we could be together w/out having to lie, cheat and pretend. I REALLY THOUGHT I would die without him. I got to a point where I would have sacrificed my future (possibly meeting someone new and getting married myself) to be the other woman.
Now, looking back....and after almost 3 weeks of NC and other a month of not seeing him, I realize that it does get easier. Not that I don't think about him every day....I still do. I still want to call him whenever something exciting happens. But if he's ok with living his unhappy life (for whatever reason), that doesn't mean, I want to stick around for that. I am not his counselor. We are not friends (although he thinks we are), we are what we used to be....two people who really cared about each other and shared a brief moment in our lives together. But that's it.
I will always remember him, always miss him but I am determined to look back at this years from now and know that I made the right decision.
I hope everyone here can do the same.