I don't know how some of you have survived so long. I am still relatively new at this but this being alone is horrible. I am going to start couneling again this August as soon as the new insurance starts. Tried to find some divorce support groups in town yesterday but didn't have any luck. The few places that were listed as having one no longer got together. I guess that I could check the next closest city but that is about an hour away. Was it difficult for any of you about going out to do things on your own? I can't seem to want to get out of the house. I make plans then I never seem to follow through. It really is not any fun doing things on your own. I have decided that I had better not call my XW's friends just in case that it makes her mad. I am going to sign up for a class at the local community college today. That way since I am going to have to pay for it then I will have to go. At least I may meet some new people, if not to meet new friends then to at least have other people to talk to. These feelings of being worthless and lonely are very strong but I guess that they will pass in time. I hope that others on this board have better luck at putting their marriages back together than I have had.

Yes, I have had the same kind of problems. Thank goodness for my job, otherwise I might never get out of the house. I live in a small community where everyone knows everyone else's business, so I am always afraid of running into "his friends". I think you are doing the right things in trying to find things to do and places to go. Don't give up. I too have started counselling - not to save my marriage, but just for myself. I finally realized that I can't change him, so I have to work on myself and be happy alone. My STBX has been gone for over a year now and I truly held out hope that he would want to come home, but alas - NO!! He is still no happier than when he was at home - I'm not sure what he is searching for. Take care of YOURSELF because no one else will. You will come to find that you are worth the effort and you will begin to feel better about yourself. Don't look for happiness in another relationship. Learn to love yourself first and the rest and the best will follow!!<P>TB

If you're not going to get out of the house, at least make some use of the time that you're in the house. I highly recommend udate.com, which runs about $15 a month. After hooking up with a <I>nightmare</I> on AOL's personals, I found udate.com. There are other services, but they're either a lot more expensive, or their message board and chat features drag, or they just don't do a good job of matching ... a lot of them also have <I>dangles</I> that are just shilling for internet porn services ... answer one of their ads and get stuck on a list. <P>If I had it to do over again, I would have a picture professionally taken (wait for baby day at Kmart if you're that cheap), then scan the biggest one at Kinko's, so that you can have a .jpg you can use a freely available shareware.com program called <I>Lview Pro</I> to re-size at will. Then I would get on udate.com, submit the picture and be completely honest answering its detailed pages about myself and what I wanted in another person. <P>Then I would do a lot of bantering with women who showed up high on my list. I'd do it for a while (say a month) before I even asked anybody to go out. Mind you, you will not be giving out your e-mail address. The system has its own internal mail, and a chat feature. If at some point you want to give out an e-mail address, get a special one on one of the free services like Hotmail or Yahoo! so that your "real" e-mail address isn't subjected to spam or "weird" people. <P>It helps to know that there are women out there who want to communicate with you, and that you can even find people who are the kind of people you want to be with (there are a number of different ways to look at the system's look of nearby women ... you can see ones that match what you want, ones where you match what they want, and ones where your wants and their wants come closest to matching, as well as newer ones, etc.).<P>I'm not shilling for this bunch, I don't have any financial connnection to them and haven't even used them in months. For all I know there is something better out there now. But I kind of doubt it. <P>BTW, I've been with the woman I found on udate since September of last year. Things are going great.