Is this relevant to my struggle with not being able to imagine a life without my A? Has my experience with my XH taken me to a place where I think "just be nice to me and I am yours forever"
I'm not a therapist but my story goes like this:
I was in love with this amazing man who had three kids from an earlier relationship. I honestly thought he was my soulmate (hate that word now) and that we were meant to be together. So imagine my shock when I picked up the paper and saw that he had married the mother of his children. He had been seeing both of us simultaneously. I crashed. Totally. And it was in that state of mind that I met AXH. Who wanted to marry me.
I think I somewhere thought I didn't deserve better.
That I couldn't do better.
And I also think I didn't
know what a good relationship looked like.
I think the conclusion I've come to is that until I'm OK with being on my own, I'm not ready to be in a relationship. I'm married to a great guy, we have a fantastic partnership, I love him to death, HOWEVER... we both have bad marriages behind us, and we've both been very upfront about the fact that We Will Take No Sh*t. We choose to be together. We'd be fine on our own. But we're together because we want to be. Not because we can't be without each other.
And I think that's the big difference. We aren't going to put up with abuse, addiction, meanness, cheating, etc. That doesn't make him optional to me -- it makes him very valuable, and it makes me never take him for granted.