We divorced five years ago but can’t move on
Dear Coleen
I was with my husband for 16 years. We loved each other deeply and had been together since we were both 19, but we had sexless marriage and it was driving me crazy.
I had an affair that lasted three weeks and told my husband about it but, despite begging for forgiveness for a year, he divorced me. It was the hardest and darkest period of my life and had it not been for my family and children I would have jumped off a bridge. This was five years ago.
After we divorced he told me he regretted it and that we should get back together. I agreed of course, so I asked him to break up with his girlfriend (a co-worker he had always been very “close” to) and we could take it from the beginning and work on it. However, he refused to end it with her.
Fast-forward to today – he’s still with her and I have a boyfriend now, too, but I know he still loves me and I love him. Every day feels like torture. Whenever we talk about the past there is only blaming and shaming, while the so-called love we have for each other is nowhere to be found.
But when I’m alone I miss him terribly and I keep asking myself how it came to this. We either need to get back together or move on, but neither of those things have come close to happening in the last five years.
I’d love your opinion.
Coleen says
Of course you’re not moving on because you’re still talking about the past and thinking about it all the time. But it’s the past and it’s done.
You say you still love each other, but it’s been five years since you divorced and what makes you think the problems you had then wouldn’t still be present now?
Just because you miss someone and still care for them doesn’t mean you can work as a romantic couple. Because you’re not together, you’re romanticising the past and remembering all the good times, while forgetting all the times when things were bad and it didn’t work.
Do you want to go back to a sexless marriage and to someone who accepts no responsibility for why things went wrong? It seems to me as if you’re leading each other on while knowing it’s not right.
Maybe he is regretting that knee-jerk reaction to your affair because he was angry and humiliated at the time. But you both need to let go of the past, which is perhaps harder because you got together when you were just kids and you’ve been a hugely important part of each other’s lives.
But I think the only way of moving on is to stop being in contact, other than to discuss your children.