I have come back to this discussion board after a gap and so much has happened since the post I have quoted at the end. He started divorce proceedings I then did everything that I could to resolve the issues he stated in the divorce petition and even he sees that I have made huge improvements. Particularly after one visit to a Christian healing centre here in the UK. This has enabled me to love him more than ever and even after the divorce went through I have held onto the dream of getting married again quickly and in fact even 5 months after the divorce we are still living in the same house.

The past few weeks have been hard. The financial situation was such that there was a desperate need to consolidate the debts. With this in mind I agreed to the suggestion that we progress towards the financial settlement in such a way that he got the house gave me a large sum of money with the expectation that we would get married again by mid April.

Next problem is that a few days after I signed the house over to him I had a phone call from another lady. What are you still doing in my boyfriend's house you are nothing to him but I have been his girlfriend for 18 months. In other words she thought of herself as his girlfriend 8 months before the divorce proceedings started although I have been told that this did not progress to a sexual relationship until after we were actually divorced.

We have had 2 or 3 weeks of terrible turmoil. Result of which is His girlfriend is now out of the picture. He has hardly worked during that time because of the emotional turmoil he has been through. I am exhausted coping with his turmoil while trying to start a new business so that at least one of us still has an income by the end of the year.

It seems we both gave him ultimatums at about the same time. I said marry me by Easter or at least show me considerable commitment or I will leave and she said get her out of the house or we are finished. It appears that their last contact was Easter Sunday although contact had been lessening before that and there is no sign of contact since. Its easy to be sure of that as he has been too ill with depression to get out of bed most days for the past 3 weeks.

We are still not married nor is there any sign of this happening and I have taken up an offer of a tiny flat of my own 5 minutes walk from him. It is about a fifth of the size of our former jointly owned home that now I have no legal right to live in. I am doing the decoration and other preparation for moving in on my own as I want to prove I am a capable person. He still wants to look after me so this form of shutting him out of my life for a while hurts him.

I have told him that once I have got everything organised he is welcome to come round and date me and build things up again. I am tempted to ask him to help me make up the self-assembly furniture that should be arriving there on Thursday simply to make him think he is helping me a bit, although he will do a better job of it than I would.

I was not sure if I was doing the right thing living with him after our marriage legally ended. But I so loved him and enjoyed the attention that I overlooked the ethics of the situation. Now I feel bad because it is as if tried to take someone else's boyfriend off her by clinging to my ex-husband.

Having had some experience of being the accused party as in the quote I have done my best to be kind, supportive and not let my anger and resentment take me over.

Now what do I do? I would love to marry him again and have told him I would do so immediately when he gets his act together and have given him a number of practical examples of what I mean by that. He has divorced me so I don't have to stay around and live with his mental and emotional turmoil.

Susan

Quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have tried hard to get talking with my husband but so often a conversation degenerates into raking over old ground. Basically he cannot cope with the idea that he was not the first man in my life. The first man in my life was a boss who behaved disgracefully towards women and as a naïve 15 year old I did not cope with the situation very well. Looking back I should have reported him to the police. Now I am 30 years older and been married for 26 years and my husband is still going on about this issue. I have not found anything that will stop him.

Last night I tried complimenting him and then he starts off ranting again. I am left dumbstruck. There I am trying to say I appreciate his efforts to make me feel good and bang there he goes off on a tirade about this situation. I wanted to tell him he was better than anyone else or recently even than himself a few months ago. He heard the idea of comparison and it was like lighting a fuse.

This morning I have tried hard to explain things from my perspective yet again, praying hard for the right words in case they were misunderstood. Yet again I get nowhere trying to get him to understand. However, I gained a bit more insight into why he found it so difficult to understand my view, believe it or not it is actually linked to the ideas of His Needs and Her Needs.

This situation has been going on for years. So many times I have tried to express an area where he could improve or said something that he finds hurtful and off he goes ranting about this situation. If I suggest that it would improve our marriage if he did less than an 80 hour working week he can start on like this. It does not help the situation in that he has a history of compulsive hand-washing which mercifully has subsided to normal levels and that this has had various knock effects around the house that have greatly upset me but I have to learn to live with them.

BTW I have been seriously trying to learn all the tactics of gentleness and avoiding nagging in order to avoid such a response. In fact if anything I have been too quiet as I have been fearful of his retaliation. In some moods it is like walking on eggshells and I hardly dare speak to him in case he starts going on about my past history again. Early this morning I found myself thinking very carefully over replies to his questions because of my fear of being misunderstood, only to be accused to using the time to concoct falsehoods.

As I am typing this I am trying to calm down from the last encounter like this. It got so bad this morning that I ended up with the physical symptoms of an anxiety attack, i.e. trembling inside and having a stomach ache. BTW past experience suggests that mentioning this kind of reaction to his comments would not improve the situation as I was the one that started the situation in the first place.

He cannot see the harm this situation has done to our marriage. I have tried explaining it but it is like trying to get through a brick wall with your bare hands. He sees the worse hurt as the original situation and I see the worse hurt is his reaction. It does not help that his reaction has caused me pain for many times longer than the original i.e. 10 plus years compared to 2 months. I suffer repeated emotional bruising (probably averaging about 1 or 2 a week) that has just not stopped and that I am struggling to cope with. All I want is for him to leave my past in the past where it belongs. I have got on and got over it but he has not.

Any ideas

Susan