My wife decided to divorce me about 2 months ago with no willingness to work on things and no openness to reconciliation. We have 3 young kids together and I’ve never felt pain like this before. I was suicidal (but would never do it because of my kids) and my self-esteem was destroyed and centered around what she thought of me, which was basically that I was a terrible person and the divorce was all my fault. I’ve been in tons of therapy now and I tried countless times to show her I’ve changed and plead for another chance but it never made a difference. She was always able to find something from our past or some minor thing said in the present to use to justify breaking up our family with divorce. It was all about her and her needing to heal and her needing space and her, her, her and never really me or the kids. I couldn’t focus, I could barely function, I couldn’t stop ruminating about the fact that she was divorcing me. Until recently, when I feel like I underwent a major awakening.
One thing I can tell you from lots of therapy and recently spending time around her is I realized I had been only remembering her good qualities and putting her on a pedestal in my mind. When we actually spent time together I realized how totally not self-aware she is, she’s entitled and selfish, she has a totally screwed up sense of emotions and thought that I should never be upset about anything (as if anger isn’t a natural emotion and automatically means you have anger issues rather than that there’s something to be worked out). She’s controlling. She constantly plays victim or bully. And I let what she thought of me totally control my self esteem. I’m now realizing I don’t have to abide by her fucked up understanding of emotions or how people should interact because it’s not normal or evolved. We can be friendly with each other but I’m not going to walk on eggshells around her or think there’s some magic way that I can behave that’s going to open her eyes and see what she’s giving up by divorcing me. I went down that road too long and it made no difference whatsoever. So while it’s still sad I’m being divorced and I think she’s making a huge mistake, I also realize she’s not mentally healthy enough to realize it and it shouldn’t dictate my own self-esteem. Though I’m still grieving, it’s helped me come into acceptance that this divorce isn’t my fault and that there’s also nothing a healthy person can do to change the mind of an unhealthy person making a decision that makes sense to them. I’m not the bad guy she made me out to be. I had issues but so did she and we could have worked through them but she wasn’t self-aware enough to see that. And now that I’ve been through a ton of therapy and she’s barely been through any I’m able to see our situation more clearly. I still wish it wasn’t so, but now I can move toward getting over it with time and a better understanding that in reality I shouldn’t be in a marriage with someone like her. Ultimately if she’s too unaware to see what she’s giving up in divorcing me, than we shouldn’t be together anyway. It’s taken me a while to get to this point and it has been very, very painful getting here but hopefully this explanation helps.
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