nsw1222 Posted January 7, 2010 Posted January 7, 2010 My current situation is, L, with whom I have been with for roughly 7.5 years and have a 3 year old daughter with, moved out of our home roughly four weeks ago (the start of December) and moved in with her father and her father’s girlfriend. While I am trying to not contact her (in Limited Contact), we see each other/have contact almost daily due to our daughter and our sharing of visitation with her. I am so in love with L, and even with our brief contact on a daily basis, I’ve been able to see that the sweet and caring girl I fell in love with and who promised to always love me is still in there. She seems to be shielded by a lot of hurt, anger, and resentment though, and as a result, I’m not able to reach or hold on to that person so to speak. In the past, L has frequently threatened to leave whenever we’ve gotten into an argument that hasn’t gone her way, and this time she made good on her threat. We had gotten into a discussion over a month ago about her using her vacation time to do something on her birthday as opposed to using it to spend time with family at Thanksgiving, and that was when she gave the “we need to talk” speech. It was a mistake that I will likely regret for the rest of my life. At any rate, she said that she’d had enough, and as soon as she could find a place to go, she was going to move out. At the time, she said she didn’t feel comfortable moving in with her mother or father. Fast forward to the beginning of December, and throughout November I had been trying to reach out to her, do nice things for her, to improve things between us, with all my efforts being rejected/ignored. One morning we got into a discussion about our relationship and I got upset at her not wanting to try to work things out and her still intending to leave, and she ended up contacting her father right then to come help her get some of her things so she could move out. The two main reasons she cites for not wanting to be with me is that she isn’t “in love” with me anymore, though she said she doesn’t hate me and does love me as the Father of our daughter, and she says that for the past three years she’s been “miserable” living with me. Both of which caught me by surprise, to a degree. We’ve had disagreements in the past, but we’ve always managed to work them out…usually by one of us giving in, which she claims she is the one who always did. Therefore, she didn’t really “seem” to be “miserable”…as up until the November morning we argued about that time off from vacation, we were intimate, and even that morning she came downstairs and fell into my arms in an embrace. As far as L “giving in” goes, she has mentioned to me that for the past three years, when she claims she was so miserable but didn’t openly, or frequently at least, show it, that I always got my way. She says that it was all about what I wanted, and that now its time for things to be all about her and what she wants. L always had issues with the way I took care of our daughter, as I was very meticulous at to how things were done, and did most of the caretaking, to the point that she said I put our daughter in a virtual bubble. Another issue L seems to have had is the fact that we didn’t do anything together as we used to and our common interests dwindled. It seems that after our daughter came along, most of my attention went from L and our relationship to our daughter. In the past three years, we haven’t gone out on many dates like those that we used to, not without our daughter. L said she is not interested in going to counseling, as no matter whom we go to, they will tell her that she is doing the wrong thing. As I understand it, one or two members of her family have already expressed similar notions, that she’s going about this all wrong and doing the wrong thing. One person that I doubt feels this way, is her father, who L told me she overheard about 9 months ago discussing with his girlfriend trying to get L and our daughter to move in with them, despite there being no problems between L and me at the time. In the past three years, he has not seen our daughter as much as he probably would have liked, and that was his own doing as much as it was anything else. Now, with L living there, he’s seen our daughter more in three weeks than he has in the past three years and is unlikely to want to give that up. Another person who may not be upset at L being out of a relationship is her friend, who’s also her father’s girlfriend’s sister and who is roughly twice L’s age. She recently separated/divorced her husband, and I think it’s possible that she’s supportive of L leaving me so that they can hang around together. It wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility for L to feel the same way, considering that about 5 years ago, L broke up with me for about 4 months under similar circumstances when her friend at the time, S, broke up with her boyfriend. As well as I can remember, her reasons for breaking up with me then were that she needed space, and she just wanted to have fun and not be tied down…essentially allowing her and S to hang out and party without anyone being a 3rd wheel. Back then, she told me she wanted to remain friends. I was able to get back together with her then by romancing her a little, as well as to remind her of the great times we’d had up to then, and eventually spending time with her little by little. Currently, with her working almost every day of the week at night, along with the fact that we now have our daughter to care for, and the fact that she claims she was miserable for so much of the past few years, such a strategy seems unlikely if not impossible to work again. In fact, I found the scrapbook I had made for her when we broke up the first time, and showed it to her recently, and she flipped through it as if she was skimming an operator’s manual for a toaster…no emotion. She stated that it has been so long since we had these good memories, found fault with some of the photos etc, and was generally annoyed and disinterested. I have acknowledged and apologized that I was overprotective of our daughter, and that didn’t let L do much for her or around the house without seemingly checking up on her. I told her that I was committed to changing and being a better person, and she said that I hadn’t changed in the past when I said I would, so why would I do it now. She also said that it’s likely “too little too late”…that even if I do change she isn’t sure she would want to be with me again. She’s said “sometimes people figure things out too late.” I’ve tried talking to her about our situation, in a calm and polite manner, but it seems that the more I tried to talk about our relationship, the worse things get. She said that she doesn’t like being pressured and the more I try to talk to her about things, the more I’m pushing her away. As far as that last part goes, it leaves me wondering, if she feels she can be pushed away further than what I already thought was the end and a hopeless situation, then is it possible that we can work things out and get back together? As I said, I am trying to limit contact, though as I said with our daughter it’s almost impossible to have no contact. Our daughter is the variable in this situation that may make things much more difficult to resolve than our previous breakup or if I was able to implement no contact completely. Additionally, once an appropriate amount of time has passed (30+ days) and I’m feeling good enough about myself to consider initiating regular contact with her, I’m concerned we won’t be able to meet up like most couples. At any given time, one of us will have our daughter and to suggest doing something without her will be conspicuous and difficult to do. She hasn’t said she wants to be friends like last time…at least not in so many words. Some say the “I love you but I’m not in love with you” is another way of saying she wants to stay friends without allowing me the more intimate side of her. I’m wondering if I should go for that approach and, like last time, use that friendship, hanging out, etc. as a path to open her heart again. I’ve heard conflicting advice about remaining friends after a breakup…one the one hand it, as I said, could be a good doorway to getting close to her again. On the other hand, it could be a bad way to let her absolve herself of guilt and make this breakup easier on her…she would have me to cushion her as a friend while she moves on and I don’t…then if she meets someone else, assuming she hasn’t already, I’m left to watch them enjoy what she and I once had. At any rate, as upset and down as this situation has gotten me, I’m trying to be happy and pretend that I’m not bothered by the situation, as well as trying to limit my contact with her, but it isn’t easy. When the one person in the world that I love the most, who I always thought would be there, says she’s no longer in love with me and doesn’t want to be with me, and that is the one person I would normally turn to in a time of crisis like this, it turns my world upside down. I'm doing many things to try and help myself get past all this and prepare myself for a possible reconciliation should it come. I joined a gym and have worked out there almost every day, I bought some new clothes, etc...all to try and get myself "normal" again. While I want to get back with L, I've come to learn that neediness and desperation are unattractive, and reading between the lines, she's basically said she's lost her attraction to me, so as I said I'm limiting my contact with her to give us both time to heal and grow...and hopefully get myself in a better place to some day re-ignite the "spark" between us...for both my sake and our daughter. It's a lot harder for me to do than her. Some people say it takes a lot for a woman to leave her family...but in this case that doesn't seem to be the case. From what I've seen of her on a daily basis, she doesn't seem to have a problem with it. Of course her father is now paying most of her bills, and as long as he's doing that to fulfil his own agenda, the grass may indeed continue to look greener on the other side. It's been a little over a week since I decided to implement Limited Contact, where I only contact her about our daughter and try to remain business-like when she picks up/drops off our daughter. I have floundered from that a bit in our in person encounters, as there was one day when she was here, she was all dressed up and looking great b/c she had a party to go to...so we engaged in minor flirting via my complimenting her. Another recent development is her having serious wisdom teeth problems and needing surgery...a topic that has entered our conversation when she's been at the house and, due to my lingering feelings has caused me to reveal/show concern for her. That's pretty much my situation it in a nutshell. I am wholeheartedly interested in/committed to reconciling with my ex, and I know its not something that will happen overnight, if ever. At any rate, I would appreciate any comments and/or advice anyone has to offer...bearing in mind that I'm already trying to limit contact and move on as if things arent going to work out. Thanks for reading.
Author nsw1222 Posted January 9, 2010 Author Posted January 9, 2010 Anyone have any suggestions...or maybe a similar story where you were in a LTR and have a kid and things worked out well?
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