Breakup of first serious relationship - DEVASTATED!
Hi-
First post to Reddit, apologies if it's janky.....
48/M, currently a little over two years separated from wife of 20 years. Emotionally barren marriage, it probably should have ended 10 years ago. The decision to move on was easy and I really didn't have second thoughts. At this point it's just the most complicated business negotiation I've ever been through, and I'm sitting across the table from an irrational player.
Dated casually almost immediately upon separating. Never went on apps, never really went looking, things just sort of came up organically. First woman was exciting, fun, wild, adventurous.....and ultimately revealed she was crazy. Like, DSM-diagnosable crazy. After that wrapped up, went on a couple dates with a couple of women that didn't go anywhere, and had two relationships that were mutually just physical outlets.
Almost a year ago I was set up with a woman by a mutual friend. She was 51, divorced 12 years at that point, and we just hit it off. The relationship became very intense very early on, with her being the primary driver.....lots of meaning-making on her part, talking about the cosmic significance of our connection, telling me "I love you" at one month, talking about living together shortly after, discussing how marriage was important to her within the first few months and one day telling me she had fantasized about taking my last name.
I was by no means a bystander in this. After 20 years in an emotional desert, the connection, the truly being seen by someone and truly seeing them, felt wonderful. I've come to learn that's how we as humans connect, and I was particularly susceptible to it given the history of my marriage. I echoed what she was saying.....it's like we were building a house and she kept building giant ceilings, but I kept on raising the floor to meet her there.
When it came time for the intense emotional relationship to develop some structure though, she started to change. She has a fiance of 6 years who is still awkwardly in the picture (sort of a surrogate dad to her 23 year old daughter, whose real father sadly wants nothing to do with her), and also an established part of her social circle. I tried to make allowances for Modern Family kind of situations that I figured came with dating in the second half of my life, but then it became clear that he still had emotional access to her, and she had some emotional connection with him as well. She also described to me all the work that she did to learn to be independent and not lose herself in relationships, and it seemed that as things got real and required stability and structure, the very intense connection she tried to build at the start was the very thing that scared her off. I talked with her about my discomfort with said fiance, told her that if we were building something together going forwards that I couldn't do that with a third person's residue in the picture. I told her I wasn't asking her to remove him from her life, but that I hoped she would consult with me about his continued role in it (this all stems from a dinner at thanksgiving.....we were apart for two weeks and had one night together in that time period. She requested that we put it aside as a special dinner for us. Her daughter ended up unexpectedly being there, and she told me that the fiance was coming, hope that's OK. I didn't go to dinner and later told her look, I'd appreciate it if you could at least talk with me about is, something like "I know that this is an awkward situation but he's here because of my daughter. I know this is uncomfortable for you, so how can we make this work?")
Here's my problem.....even though I understand what happened intellectually, I can't seem to get over it. At first I was experiencing anxiety and even occasional panic with her no longer in my life. I started working with a CBT therapist to learn how to cope with that situation, and as the anxiety starts to pass, it's replaced with this really heavy grief. I know that part of the grief is for her and the times we had, part of the grief is for how I felt about myself when I was with her, and part of the grief was for the fantasy of the future that I had imagined with her......but damn, I'm struggling hard.
We went our ways at the end of January, tried to reconnect for a couple weeks in March, and then had coffee last weekend, at which point she gave me the final no. I know I need to move on, that this was just an intense start that couldn't sustain itself, but man, am I crushed.
Please tell me this feeling goes away eventually......