A Facebook post, "stop losing your mind over someone who doesn't mind losing you"

I started working on another post (that's not ready to publish yet) about all the crazy things he said that last summer and the ways he blamed me unfairly.  I feel like I am in a place where I am ready to laugh at how wild some of those statements were.  In working on that post, I went back and read the document where I journaled my thoughts in those weeks (late May to mid-July of 2024) and I stumbled on the entry I wrote the night he called it quits.

I had remembered the extreme emotions of that night, the hours we both lay awake after the conversation, hearing him move to the living room to watch something, the early morning drive to the airport to drop him off for a two week visit to see his mom, but I had not remembered how it started until I read that entry this morning.

To give some background of the day that lead up to that night, we had a dentist appointment together earlier and not knowing what else to do, when the hygienist asked, I scheduled the next six-month cleaning for both of us like one of us always did.  Later in the day, I asked him what were the chances we would still be together in January (for that appointment).  Instead of giving me a straight answer, he asked if it truly would be helpful for me to know, which in reality was an answer in and of itself - he still wasn't investing in trying to fix us.

So that evening as we were getting ready for bed, I opened my Facebook app on my phone.  Facebook's algorithm showed me a post that said "stop losing your mind over someone who doesn't mind losing you."  Something prompted me to read it out loud to him.  He responded, "how does Facebook know you so well?"

I wrote the next morning, "During those hours awake, I realized just how truly selfish he has been. To spend years (almost two decades) sabotaging the relationship by not speaking up and letting resentment build and then to the very end putting all the focus on me and what I was doing wrong with no reflection at all as to his half of the dynamic. And to not even be willing to try before running away."

"I’m really sad. Neither of us cheated. We didn’t grow apart. One of us was just never present for the marriage and never willing to be present and so it didn’t matter how much the other worked to maintain it, it still crumbled."

Reading my thoughts from those seven weeks, I'm impressed by my clarity.  I knew what I deserved.  I really saw through his bullshit.  And so my patience was really limited.  I wasn't going to wait around forever for him to finally make a decision about whether to even try.  I wasn't looking for everything to be solved overnight but I wasn't going to keep putting in effort with someone who wasn't going to even try to match that effort.  And I only gave him about seven weeks before I pushed for an answer, that is but a tiny blimp in a two decades long relationship.  I had enough self-respect to not get stuck for too long in limbo with a man not willing to choose me.

I also got so sick of him wanting to spend money to play - buying toys like an RC car and games, shopping, traveling, going bowling, etc.  We knew how to play together.  That wasn't the part of our marriage that needed work.  Although I wasn't against play being a part of a balanced solution, it wasn't a solution that would work on its own.  And on a practical level, any money we wasted would be less money we would have to split and each build new lives if we did divorce, something that was seeming more and more likely.  Plus honestly, it was making it harder for me to separate fantasy from reality as it was easier for him to wear his mask when we were out having fun.

But back to the clarity I'm amazed I found in highly emotionally charged circumstances.  I think that further supports my recent reflections that I had been preparing on at least a subconscious level for this for quite some time before it happened.  And although, I had plenty of self-doubt, because of that subconscious preparation, I had enough self-worth to see the absurdity in so many of his accusations.  

By mid-July, I was still (unrealistically) hanging onto some hope of making it work but I also had written some very clear guidelines for the only way I was willing to try and make it work.  Aside from learning how to face conflict, him not silently holding onto resentments, and rebalancing our efforts by starting with his part of our dynamics (after all the focus on me), I wrote that he needed to 

"Give me back my voice.  Learn to listen and show respect for my ideas, opinions, and input. This doesn’t mean he has to agree with them or we have to do things my way. It means he has to welcome hearing what I have to say and not take it as an attack on him. He needs to see it as a healthy part of being in a couple where partners each share their ideas. I don’t want to hear, “I wish you would just accept what I say sometimes.” That is not what a partnership is. A partnership leaves space for both people to ask questions, gain understanding, and give input."

I admit that this morning I'm a bit in awe at the way I handled that last summer together.  I'm impressed by the clarity I had, all the times I found a way to keep my cool, and the amount of listening I did.  And from my viewpoint today, I see how it all fits into the before and after - the preparations that subconsciously happened before as things shifted in me going back to at least May of 2023, if not before and the way it set the stage for me to start living a solo life filled with joy, energy, community, and a bright future.