Dear Elizabeth:

Before reading your recent post, after reading Brandy’s excellent post,  I decided to re-read your earlier posts with a different attitude, an empathetic attitude toward your now estranged husband. I figured I probably missed something once I judged him negatively and therefore closed the door on further insight.

This is what I understand following re-reading with this new attitude: the move east, being physically close to his parents and other family members, was a bad choice for his emotional health and for his relationship with you.

Away from his parents, in Utah and Colorado,  he was “an incredibly caring, thoughtful, kind, giving person… he doted on me and it was so clear that he genuinely loved me”.

Let’s look at the talk you had with him Nov last year: “told me that he was incredibly unhappy. That he’s been unhappy for years, that he hates owning a business, that he’s not sure he wants to live in the town we’re in… he had no  idea what he was doing… he’d had some really dark thoughts”.

It often happens that when an adult child returns to his childhood home or close to his parents, that old conflicts and old distress gets reactivated. I think that this is what happened to him. “we had a great life (especially prior to the business opening)”- but it is not just the business opening that happened, he was also in close contact with his parents who helped him financially, you shared.

When he left you, he also distanced himself from his parents: “His parents are devastated… he has stopped hanging out with all”.

He told you Nov that he has been unhappy for years, that is before the starting of the business, before he met you. I don’t think it is only the death of his brother that was his problem but his relationship with his parents before his brother’s accident and death.

*  If while living with him back east, near his parents, if you supported his business endeavor and befriended his parents and his cousin/ family, and because of that he saw you and his parents/family as a unit, it is possible that in his mind it became not only his parents/cousin vs him, it was his parents/cousin/wife vs him. In other words, his old distress regarding physical closeness with his family enveloped you in it.

Distressed for a long time back east, near his family, financially entangled with family, spending too much time with them, he indeed “gave up the second a shiny new object (his 24 year old employee) came onto him”, like you wrote. His solution to his distress was to stop spending time with his parents and family and most of his friends, and having a new focus: “he’s spending all of his time with his new girlfriend”.

I think that Utah and Colorado were places for him where he could relax, put distance between his troubles back east and himself. Back east, presently, it is his new relationship that gives him that distance. His new relationship is his get-away.

What do you think?

anita