I left my husband of 20 years suddenly when his abuse and alcoholism became so outrageous that I could not stay and endure the trauma anymore. Our marriage had been intense - intensely good and intensely bad. He had a wicked funny sense of humor and could make me laugh and was a brilliant thinker and fascinating to talk to. He captivated me, yet I let him devastate me and my sense of self. Perhaps that is why I say "captivated". It has been two and a half years now since I left and subsequently divorced, and I understand exactly what you are writing about.
For me, there is grief to this, and I have gone through the stages of grieving, back and forth through some of them. You might read about Elizabeth Kubler Ross' writings on the stages of grief about death, because losing a life partner is a death of sorts. The important thing to know here is that these are stages, not life sentences, and you will, in time, pass through the stages to a better happier place on your own, for yourself.
You appear to be viewing yourself through the lense of your former partners more through your own eyes. You feel unloveable because they didn't love you, not because of your own self worth or lack of it. If they left you, you must have been insufficient. This is where the opportunity comes, in my eyes.
We have lived in certain ways, and have beliefs about ourselves that come from how we have lived, and we have not necessarily questioned those beliefs. Our lives become run-on sentences where we repeat and repeat what we have done before, with different players. This is a chance to insert a semi-colon into that life story, or perhaps even a period signifying the end of a pattern, the end of an era.
It takes a lot of work, a lot of introspection and courage to look at what you believe about yourself and why you believe it. For me, it involved looking at why I, now in my 60's, have chosen men like my husband - brilliant, commanding, dominant, narcissistic - throughout my life even though I had been a successful, independent and powerful business woman in my own right. I found an alcoholic abusive father in my history, also a brilliant executive, who as a child, I literally thought of as "Good Dad/Bad Dad" depending on which Dad I saw walking down the path home after work each night. Some nights were good; some nights mean furniture upended, and capture at the dining room table in a corner of the room with no escape for hours of abusive rambling and threats and worse.
With my husband, I gave myself up and let myself be subverted by gaslighting, Stockholm syndrome and terrible emotional and verbal abuse. With my father, I used to sit on the stairs just out of reach when told to go to bed without a peep, and say "peep, peep, peep." So that will to live as myself was still there, just deeply buried. The man I chose as my lover was an echo of my father's abuse. Yet when I met him, he was passionately in love with me. I just couldn't see when the path changed after we married.
For me, the way out of this has been going through it, and with therapy and support from my grown children and this SR forum, re-forming who I choose to be. You might read Melody Beattie's book Co-Dependent No More to get some clues as to where you submerge yourself in someone else's needs instead of your own.
If you let yourself feel whatever you feel during this time of transition, and get into a process where you can decode what you feel and the choices that led to this situation, you can grow enough to never choose a similar partner again. For me, that is worth the price of admission.
I read that during childbirth, women have a hormone (I believe it is pitocin) which makes them subsequently forget the pain of birthing a child. It is has been studied and found that people in trauma also have that hormone in their bodies. So there is an actual physiological reason that we don't remember the bad parts of our relationships as much as the good parts. And that leads us to longing for what we remember - the good parts of our lovers - even though that is only half of the package.
Here's an anecdote about Mr. Klopman. (Apologies if that is anybody's real name...) Mr. Klopman owns the most gorgeous, huge, sparkly, revered, famous, incredible diamond in the whole wide world. You can have the diamond, but the catch is, with the diamond comes Mr. Klopman, who, yes, is exactly as his name sounds - - slow witted, ugly, obnovious, punitive and unbearable.
In the beginning, I thought that there was EITHER good OR bad. So I either did the totally right thing to leave or the totally wrong thing to leave.
Eventually, the good memories come back in the context of the whole relationship. What I mean is that we are able to accept the good memories without that dictating that there were NO bad memories. In the beginning, for me, it was starkly "either/or". If if felt the pull of the good times, the laughter, and companionship and the love that my husband and I had, then I had made a terrible mistake in leaving him. I must have been wrong, and I must have ruined my life.
But that was not true. For every time I saw that sparkly diamond of our relationship, I felt the abuse of the terrible Mr. Klopman as well. The bad times happened, too. We did feel the pain we know we felt, and it was severe enough to leave.
This, for me, is where I got stuck in a conundrum of disbelieving myself. What I didn't understand, and then didn't accept for a long time was this. I thought I had the power to make our relationship good and whole. I thought I could make him behave the way I wanted him to. I was wrong. He didn't want to, and that was his right. His narcissism required that he be top dog, and that he work out his own emotional anger and angst by blaming someone else. Me.
And he was not about to change that emotional underpinning. I couldn't make him. This is where the Alanon saying "You didn't cause it; you can't control it; and you can't cure it" comes in. It was my own meglomania that seemed to me to give me the power to make him treat me like I wanted to be treated. Alanon calls that co-dependence, but underneath I believe is the dark side of myself, my surety that I was right and I knew how he should live.
No one has that right regarding someone else. We all get to do what we want, and if our partner is unwilling to change to meet our needs, they get to do whatever they want, and we get to choose what is healthy for us. And that, for me, meant leaving and moving toward understanding who I am and what my boundaries are. That applies both to what behavior I will accept from someone else, AND how I now understand the limits and boundaries of my own being. I cannot choose someone's life for them. I can, however, leave and choose a healthier life for me.
So, after time and reflection, that knowledge gives us a gift. We can remember the good parts without denying the bad parts. We can own both the good and the bad, and understand that we didn't ever have the power to choose only what we saw as good. Eventually, we can accept that both good and bad happened, and we want to choose differently now. I still struggle at times, but more and more, that gives me peace and the impetus to move forward to what I want to create next.
My best to you on this journey; keep coming here and keep posting because the people on this forum do truly understand what you are living through.
ShootingStar1