Jay73
12-10-2010, 03:34 PM
I’m a new forum user looking for advice on a current relationship.
I’m 37, male and divorced with two kids who live quite far away with their mother. I get to see them about once a month and the only practical way to do that is to fly. I spend a lot of my free time being with them including a lot of holidays.
I came out of school with self-esteem issues that caused me to develop a knack of choosing the wrong person to have a relationship with and allowing myself to be walked over. That resulted in several relationships where I was cheated on which only served to reduce my self-esteem further. I have (or thought I had) got past all of that and nowadays I can look in the mirror and see a fairly good-looking guy with a lot going for him, and have learned to stop letting myself be mistreated and putting up with situations that aren’t right for me.
My marriage ended about six years ago in spectacularly bad circumstances. Looking back I had spent much of the marriage unhappy and lurching from crisis to crisis. You’re only hearing my side of the story but my ex-wife is neurotic, was convinced from the start that it wouldn’t work and that I would cheat on her, made every issue we faced into a horrific drama and caused me so much stress I was frequently ill. We met when I was only 22 and she was 33, and with hindsight I was too young and not over my own personal issues enough to recognise that I was making a mistake. I can’t bring myself to wish I hadn’t married her because I have two beautiful children. Now, older and wiser, I have spent the past four or five years starting again.
A couple of false start relationships followed until a couple of years after my marriage ended I met someone who I fell for and we got engaged. Within a few weeks of our engagement she seemed to transform into a dangerous mad person, who picked about five fights a day and wouldn’t even let me leave the room to stop fighting and wouldn’t quit until I was furious, shouting and stressed out. She had a fabulous knack of saying the nastiest, most abusive thing a person could think of without any provocation as a way of taking out her frustrations with work, life, health etc on me. (I know what you’re thinking. “He knows how to pick ‘em, doesn’t he?). Looking back I had ignored warning signs about her behaviour that later came out in full force. I broke up with her and swore that was the last time I fell into the same old trap. That was three years ago.
That’s all in the past and I have met a really wonderful, gorgeous woman who has made me realise what a really good relationship is all about. We’ve been together for just over a year and we are talking about buying a house and moving in together. I know this is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with and once I feel like we are definitely on a secure footing and the kids have got to know her better I will be thinking about asking her to marry me. But I’m trying not to rush because of previous experiences. If she is The One like I think she is, we can take this step by step and we’ll be fine.
There have been issues as there are in all relationships, but really not that many. The biggest one was there have been times when she has said she was not sure whether she really wanted to end up with someone who already has kids. At times when I have made arrangements to see the kids she has felt like she’s not a priority and to be fair I do find myself spending Easter, Christmas and most of my time off with the kids. I’ve promised to redress that balance without making anyone feel left out. But at times this has been a problem for her. She has a tendency to say something that sounds very bad for the future of our relationship when she’s upset, and then later when she has calmed down says (without any prompting) that she didn’t mean it and that she feels very optimistic and positive about us. Lately she has been a lot more confident that we can find the right balance between quality time with each other and quality time with my kids. Unfortunately it’s in my nature to retain vivid memories of things she has said in the heat of the moment that cast doubt on how much she wants this.
The problem is, the more I have thought about this woman being The One, combined with those moments where it has sounded like she wasn’t sure we had a future, the more I have started to worry about losing her. She also has a habit of making little jokes to tease me, most of which are fine but one recurring theme really bugs me, when she says thinks like she wants to “spread the love and I have to learn to share” her, and variations on the theme that involve her talking about sleeping with someone else. I know she says things just for a joke but having been cheated on I find it in bad taste and it’s hard to drown out the little voice in the back of my head that says sometimes people say things as a joke but actually mean them…
The discussions we had about whether she can see a future given my other responsibilities combined, then, with me taking a particular running joke badly, but also with the inevitable slow down in our life. After the first six months her appetite seemed to reduce substantially, mine stayed high and this was another golden opportunity to worry that she was losing interest. I know that by itself would be silly but what bothered me was that started to feel like something she was only doing out of a kind of sense of duty, she seemed to be enjoying it a lot less, and getting it over with quickly and not making a mess started to be more important than anything else. I stopped initiating almost completely because I would never be sure if she was actually in the mood. We’ve talked about this and we’ve agreed that with both of us working and busy we need to make time for it, quality rather than quantity etc, but only time will tell if this is something she sees as important enough to make an effort for. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on but it’s hard not to see a major loss of interest and effort as a problem.
So in short, I probably make too much of things and I firmly believe that all of these things can be resolved and are just part and parcel of any relationship. In the main we are blissfully happy and while the above issues have led to some discussions there have been very few fights and anything we talk about, we talk about in a positive and constructive way.
But as the prospect of making a lifelong commitment looms ever larger, her previous doubts and my insecurities have started to magnify. I’ve been cheated on in the past, and I married one woman and that went wrong and I got engaged to another woman and that went spectacularly wrong. My girlfriend says (with some justification) that she wouldn’t be considering buying a house with me if she wasn’t sure she wants to be with me, although in the same breath she will say she needs to protect herself in case it doesn’t work out. She also says (again with some justification) that I need to let go of the past and not keep letting old problems keep affecting me.
Some of these issues came to a head recently and with alarm bells ringing about trust and fidelity, I crossed a very big line and checked her phone. For which I deserve the cyber kicking I will no doubt get. On her way home from a night out where she stayed out late without telling me, she had sent a text to her best friend saying “I haven’t told (my name) about (another man’s name) as he’ll just get upset.” This other guy is an older guy who she used to work for/with who is very successful and wealthy and takes her out to dinner from time to time, just as friends as far as I have been told. So what is it that she isn’t telling me that would upset me? Is there some history (or worse) with this guy that she has been keeping from me while going out for drinks with him and letting him buy her dinner? It ate away at me and eventually I confronted her and she said I had taken the message out of context, the man in question happened to say he thought she was “hot” while they’d been out that night and that was (she said) what she wasn’t telling me, because I had been upset and insecure in an argument the previous week about some of the issues above. It is all innocent she says, and I have let my suspicions run away with me. This is the first time I have been openly suspicious of her and of course she was upset and disappointed in me for looking at her phone and not trusting her. I guess with all the doubts I mention above I have been looking for signs that I am making a bad decision committing to this woman and part of me wouldn’t stop looking until I found one.
So how do I tackle this? While I need to stop feeling the pain of past experiences, surely there are lessons I need to learn from them? I want to be able to separate genuine alarm bells about someone’s behaviour that should tell me there’s something wrong, from alarm bells going off in my head just because things have gone wrong with other people before. I want to give complete trust, and I want to make a commitment to this woman that I am very sure she wants me to make too.
I’m 37, male and divorced with two kids who live quite far away with their mother. I get to see them about once a month and the only practical way to do that is to fly. I spend a lot of my free time being with them including a lot of holidays.
I came out of school with self-esteem issues that caused me to develop a knack of choosing the wrong person to have a relationship with and allowing myself to be walked over. That resulted in several relationships where I was cheated on which only served to reduce my self-esteem further. I have (or thought I had) got past all of that and nowadays I can look in the mirror and see a fairly good-looking guy with a lot going for him, and have learned to stop letting myself be mistreated and putting up with situations that aren’t right for me.
My marriage ended about six years ago in spectacularly bad circumstances. Looking back I had spent much of the marriage unhappy and lurching from crisis to crisis. You’re only hearing my side of the story but my ex-wife is neurotic, was convinced from the start that it wouldn’t work and that I would cheat on her, made every issue we faced into a horrific drama and caused me so much stress I was frequently ill. We met when I was only 22 and she was 33, and with hindsight I was too young and not over my own personal issues enough to recognise that I was making a mistake. I can’t bring myself to wish I hadn’t married her because I have two beautiful children. Now, older and wiser, I have spent the past four or five years starting again.
A couple of false start relationships followed until a couple of years after my marriage ended I met someone who I fell for and we got engaged. Within a few weeks of our engagement she seemed to transform into a dangerous mad person, who picked about five fights a day and wouldn’t even let me leave the room to stop fighting and wouldn’t quit until I was furious, shouting and stressed out. She had a fabulous knack of saying the nastiest, most abusive thing a person could think of without any provocation as a way of taking out her frustrations with work, life, health etc on me. (I know what you’re thinking. “He knows how to pick ‘em, doesn’t he?). Looking back I had ignored warning signs about her behaviour that later came out in full force. I broke up with her and swore that was the last time I fell into the same old trap. That was three years ago.
That’s all in the past and I have met a really wonderful, gorgeous woman who has made me realise what a really good relationship is all about. We’ve been together for just over a year and we are talking about buying a house and moving in together. I know this is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with and once I feel like we are definitely on a secure footing and the kids have got to know her better I will be thinking about asking her to marry me. But I’m trying not to rush because of previous experiences. If she is The One like I think she is, we can take this step by step and we’ll be fine.
There have been issues as there are in all relationships, but really not that many. The biggest one was there have been times when she has said she was not sure whether she really wanted to end up with someone who already has kids. At times when I have made arrangements to see the kids she has felt like she’s not a priority and to be fair I do find myself spending Easter, Christmas and most of my time off with the kids. I’ve promised to redress that balance without making anyone feel left out. But at times this has been a problem for her. She has a tendency to say something that sounds very bad for the future of our relationship when she’s upset, and then later when she has calmed down says (without any prompting) that she didn’t mean it and that she feels very optimistic and positive about us. Lately she has been a lot more confident that we can find the right balance between quality time with each other and quality time with my kids. Unfortunately it’s in my nature to retain vivid memories of things she has said in the heat of the moment that cast doubt on how much she wants this.
The problem is, the more I have thought about this woman being The One, combined with those moments where it has sounded like she wasn’t sure we had a future, the more I have started to worry about losing her. She also has a habit of making little jokes to tease me, most of which are fine but one recurring theme really bugs me, when she says thinks like she wants to “spread the love and I have to learn to share” her, and variations on the theme that involve her talking about sleeping with someone else. I know she says things just for a joke but having been cheated on I find it in bad taste and it’s hard to drown out the little voice in the back of my head that says sometimes people say things as a joke but actually mean them…
The discussions we had about whether she can see a future given my other responsibilities combined, then, with me taking a particular running joke badly, but also with the inevitable slow down in our life. After the first six months her appetite seemed to reduce substantially, mine stayed high and this was another golden opportunity to worry that she was losing interest. I know that by itself would be silly but what bothered me was that started to feel like something she was only doing out of a kind of sense of duty, she seemed to be enjoying it a lot less, and getting it over with quickly and not making a mess started to be more important than anything else. I stopped initiating almost completely because I would never be sure if she was actually in the mood. We’ve talked about this and we’ve agreed that with both of us working and busy we need to make time for it, quality rather than quantity etc, but only time will tell if this is something she sees as important enough to make an effort for. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on but it’s hard not to see a major loss of interest and effort as a problem.
So in short, I probably make too much of things and I firmly believe that all of these things can be resolved and are just part and parcel of any relationship. In the main we are blissfully happy and while the above issues have led to some discussions there have been very few fights and anything we talk about, we talk about in a positive and constructive way.
But as the prospect of making a lifelong commitment looms ever larger, her previous doubts and my insecurities have started to magnify. I’ve been cheated on in the past, and I married one woman and that went wrong and I got engaged to another woman and that went spectacularly wrong. My girlfriend says (with some justification) that she wouldn’t be considering buying a house with me if she wasn’t sure she wants to be with me, although in the same breath she will say she needs to protect herself in case it doesn’t work out. She also says (again with some justification) that I need to let go of the past and not keep letting old problems keep affecting me.
Some of these issues came to a head recently and with alarm bells ringing about trust and fidelity, I crossed a very big line and checked her phone. For which I deserve the cyber kicking I will no doubt get. On her way home from a night out where she stayed out late without telling me, she had sent a text to her best friend saying “I haven’t told (my name) about (another man’s name) as he’ll just get upset.” This other guy is an older guy who she used to work for/with who is very successful and wealthy and takes her out to dinner from time to time, just as friends as far as I have been told. So what is it that she isn’t telling me that would upset me? Is there some history (or worse) with this guy that she has been keeping from me while going out for drinks with him and letting him buy her dinner? It ate away at me and eventually I confronted her and she said I had taken the message out of context, the man in question happened to say he thought she was “hot” while they’d been out that night and that was (she said) what she wasn’t telling me, because I had been upset and insecure in an argument the previous week about some of the issues above. It is all innocent she says, and I have let my suspicions run away with me. This is the first time I have been openly suspicious of her and of course she was upset and disappointed in me for looking at her phone and not trusting her. I guess with all the doubts I mention above I have been looking for signs that I am making a bad decision committing to this woman and part of me wouldn’t stop looking until I found one.
So how do I tackle this? While I need to stop feeling the pain of past experiences, surely there are lessons I need to learn from them? I want to be able to separate genuine alarm bells about someone’s behaviour that should tell me there’s something wrong, from alarm bells going off in my head just because things have gone wrong with other people before. I want to give complete trust, and I want to make a commitment to this woman that I am very sure she wants me to make too.