Dee

I am going to take a different tack on this matter and sort of disregard you calling him sketchy (but I would agree that is likely something you should pay attention to honestly).

Did he already know a bit about you? While talking about himself might seem shallow and narcissistic, if he already was acquainted with you and your life, perhaps he was attempting to fill in that blank for you.

When he asked you to make plans, did you flounder on it at all? Like say yes, then at the last moment cancel or something? I ask because if I was interested in a woman and attempted to make plans and she floundered or she was rude in saying no or a little too enthusiastic about squashing the idea, then I too would likely break contact and allow you to make the next move. He tried his move. You rejected it. As a man, not only does that bruise our ego, regardless of how he played it off, but it makes us feel like you are uninterested so we sort of put the ball in your court.

As for his multitudes of women and looking at their photos, was he not doing that with you as well? It seems a bit odd that you would find nothing wrong with him liking or loving your photos, but find it “sketchy” that he does it to other women’s photos. Yes, the part where he doesn’t even know some of them is creepy (I think I have one person I don’t really know as a friend, and that was to help keep in contact with an actual friend), but we are men. We have sexual desires and urges just like women do. And while some of them can be quite offputting, I don’t think this specific brand of “lurking” is anywhere near as sketchy as you might think. It is weird though, I will agree with that.

I would say that perhaps he also sees the sort of environment we are in now. I am having to come to grips with possibly having to date again soon if my wife decides the divorce is final, and it sort of scares the shit out of me. Not because I am clumsy with women, although I totally am. But rather because now if you pursue a woman with too much gusto, she could accuse you of sexual harassment or worse. I heard a woman claiming a man at work had sexually harassed her because he had dared to ask her out TWICE over the span of 4 years. Today’s climate is kinda terrifying for us men, especially those who aren’t used to navigating this minefield we now find ourselves standing in.

I’m not saying anything here that I have said is the case. I am just sort of looking at it from outside the box and attempting to maybe see it a little from his perspective. I will say though, the mere fact that you have made a judgment call about him being sketchy already should serve to answer your question about breaking it off, but it might be worth maybe digging deeper into some of this I mentioned before doing so. Maybe that observation is a flawed one because you don’t have all of the info.

SharonaL

I got hurt, and blubbered and begged and promised to change. That was mistake number one. Then, I got angry and petty and vengeful. That was mistake number two. As I told Sierra, there is nothing we can do if the person you love doesn’t want to love you anymore. For instance, I have spent the past week and a half watching every video from a “relationship guru” I can find in an effort to get an idea of how to play this now. Some say to break off all contact and make them miss you. Others say that only works on men and women are likely to leave you behind and get over you faster if you ignore them. But they ALL agree on one thing: work on yourself. You likely cannot ever be who you were when you met them, especially with the lengths of both of our relationships (yours 18, mine 15 years). Hell, I was 24 then. I likely had not even become the person I was going to be yet by then. But you can reignite the spark of attraction in the other person, and a lot of that just spawns from letting them go and bettering yourself. I know I told Sierra that success without them is the greatest “revenge”, but more appropriately, it’s how to make them regret letting you go.

If you truly want this to work, then this is your best way. It makes the most sense in a psychology sort of manner. My wife and I ceased being two people a long time back. When we first met, we were independent, happy and driven people. But as we grew together as a single entity and lost ourselves in the process, we lost some of that drive, and a lot of that happiness because of it. My wife has said that she wants time to “find herself” but is adamant that our marriage is over. I don’t want to discount her feelings, but I highly doubt she is as certain as she claims to be. But she IS right. I need to find myself again. She needs to find herself again. And should God or whatever force you believe in sees fit, those two new people might want each other again. We did before. The thing you must remember is that they married you, so they found you physically attractive. So that is one problem you don’t have to worry about anymore. But if your career stalled out, or you stopped doing fun things, or like me, just sort of fell into a rut of the same old, same old for years now, you have to break those habits and live your life like today is the last day on Earth. Your husband will see the change. He might start to rethink his decision. Or he might not. But living your life for yourself will make it so it doesn’t matter. You will be happy no matter what.

It’s gonna take some time. Trust me, last night was filled with dreams of my wedding day and my beautiful bride standing across from me, and for the first few seconds of the morning when I woke up, I was happy again….because for those brief seconds, I had forgotten reality. And then it all swept in again and sadness hammered me. It also doesn’t help that I have a son and 3 little girls who are shattered by all of this and constantly crying (yeah, try not to be sad around THAT) about the divorce. I have found a good way to deal with that sadness is the gym. I know that sounds really cliche, but I mean it. You can focus all of that energy and sadness into working out, get a good endorphin rush, and at the same time, you are actively working towards bettering yourself, which as I mentioned, is a great way to spark that attraction between you and your ex again.

I will ask this, however: Do you KNOW he is having an inappropriate relationship with the woman at work? Or do you just think he’s having one? Because I can tell you from experience in my past (not my own) that accusations with no evidence often backfire. Not only does it broadcast that you don’t fully trust the person, but as a friend of mine found out, it can actually facilitate the action you are accusing them of. He had often thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. He would confront her about it often and finally she did. When he asked why she would do that to him, she simply stated “You were sure I was doing it anyway, I might as well have the fun associated with the accusation”.

Long story short, don’t sit around moping. Get out there and live your life. Better yourself, keep contact limited (I likely wouldn’t do the “no contact” thing….it just seems counter intuitive) and let the man see what he is missing out on. If he truly wants to be with you, and you look like you are bracing yourself to move on without him, he will come running.

I will say to not do some of the more counter productive actions that often times are associated with this sort of thing like rebounding with someone to make him jealous, or attempting to disrupt said relationship with the other woman. Let him think it doesn’t bother you, be out and about having fun (which I know sounds hard right now), and trust me…..even if he doesn’t come back, you learning to live without him will happen while attempting to do so.

Sierra

I have learned in the past 2 weeks of my 15 year marriage crumbling a single, immutable fact:

You cannot control what they feel or think. It would be great if we could, but it just can’t happen. So you should control what you can. And that is you. It may feel like the end of the world right now depending on how long you were together, but this too shall pass. I would say that the best revenge at this point is not running out to find someone new to flaunt it in his face or attempting to derail his new relationship, but rather to live your best life. That is what I am doing. Somewhere last night in the soul searching about what I wanted to do and what I could possibly do to save my marriage, it occurred to me that I can’t. Only she can. She is the one who ended it, therefor she is the only one who can save it. So I could sit around and mope and be sad, or I could live my best life. You see, the best revenge is success without them.

I have put in with a firm I have put off applying with for several years as it was kind of out of the way and I already had so little time with my wife and kids, only to find out the schedule is a 4/3-3/4 schedule where you work one Wednesday every other week and get 3 days on, 4 off or vice versa depending on the week. This puts me at an entirely new wage bracket and finally fulfills my quest to find a job using the degree I got a few years back.

I opened a gym account today and started working out again, I got a nice haircut, I bought myself some nice clothes. I made plans with friends that I could never see because of my wife’s jealousy and have started really deep diving into the man I want to be. Partly for her, because I cannot lie to myself, I would like to save this relationship if I can, but there would definitely be caveats in it, but mostly so that I am just better. With her, without her, with the next her. Life will go on, and I do not intend to allow it to go on without me. This might seem rather coarse to say since it was a 15 year marriage with 4 kids, but it is the sad, honest truth. I cannot control what she feels and thinks, I can control how my life is from here forward. If luck has it, it might be me finding myself and allowing her to do the same that lets us find each other again. So that is my advice. Live life out loud. No one regrets traveling, having fun and loving life at the end. They regret all of the times they COULD have done something and did not. So get out there, have fun, be constructive and not destructive while doing so, and he will be a memory that you might think of fondly one day as the catalyst for you changing your entire outlook on life.

Tanya

I am so happy to see that you are able and willing to take some self stock and introspection. It’s really going to help you move past that mistrust of men. And I get it. My wife damaged my trust many years ago. It festered and I thought I was over it, but every time she did something that was a precursor to that violation, I jumped on it. Mostly not because I thought she was violating that trust again, but rather that I had ignored signs before that something was up, assuring myself I was overthinking it, or my mind was just running amok. I had learned to trust her again, but the wound was just too great in the end. We ended up never talking about it. I tried to act like it never happened but when those instances came up, she took it as an attack on her. Both of our unwillingness to stop and take some time to just speak to one another about a rather important issue cost me my marriage this week.

So if I can stop that from happening for one other person, to stop this pain and suffering that is completely avoidable, then I will. Again, remind yourself that he is not those men. Talk to him about what happened to you. If he does things that remind you about those men and what they did, ask him about it. But realize that too much of that will make him think that you believe he is just another one of those men. And that might spell the end as well.

Mark really hit it on the head. Our first major relationships are often fraught with mistakes, mostly because we have not fully learned to love ourselves yet. If you cannot love yourself, you cannot love anyone else.

That being said, if this were my daughter telling me this story, I know what my answer would be. Five years is a long time to support someone and care for them as if they were a child. Perhaps the past women he did so much for treated him badly, and this is his misguided way of “getting what’s his”? I can’t really tell. I have known some people who did that. I have known some who honestly were just lazy. And I have known some who are in that sort of funk and are DEEPLY depressed. That depression leads to no work ethic. Hell, sometimes it leads to not wanting to leave the house. So I guess it all depends. If he is happy go lucky, that doesn’t mean he isn’t depressed. My friends were all amazed when I told them years ago that I was clinically depressed. Maybe just ask him about it, and be warned the conversation is likely to be an argument if he really is either lazy or depressed, because both are things that person will know about themselves but not want to hear. Perhaps bring up depression first, then move out to outright laziness. See which one you get the biggest rebuttal over.

As I said, if this was my daughter, I would be driving over to pack your stuff and leave him behind. But we don’t know the whole story, so making that sort of knee jerk reaction to it could be quite bad. What do you think? You think he might be depressed? How is the economic environment in your area, ie are there many jobs open. Thinking he isn’t wanting a job and being unable to find a job are two different things. We all hear that the jobs market is booming but fail to realize that isn’t a universal thing in the entire world/country. Just spitballing here.

Oh dear, where to start.

The term “knee jerk” comes to mind. I do it often. I see something that doesn’t make sense and instead of asking about it, I assume the worst and let my mind run amok. It is a VERY bad habit if you intend to have any meaningful relationship.

I am going to take a guess, and this is in no way meant to be like a snarky shot at you or anything, but I am going to guess you might be on the younger side? Lower to mid 20s I would guess? Because this seems like the sort of silliness one hasn’t quite grown out of from high school and we let infect our relationships later in life until we learn to not do them anymore. I want you to learn it now, and save yourself some grief and hopefully, your relationship. So a few things:

• If he wanted to dump you, he would have fully ghosted you, not selectively banned you from a single app.
• There are several other reasons he blocked you, from “accidentally sat on his phone in just the right way” to “phone malfunctioned and kept giving him WhatsApp updates from you without you actually doing anything (which I have had happen…..guess how you get that to stop?)” to “You incessantly attempted to contact him a few dozen times while he was working and he was getting in trouble”. That last one is not an accusation, merely an observation of yet another reason he might have blocked you, and something you may have omitted as I have in the past to make the story a bit more favorable to your side.
• He contacted you again. Not exactly the move of someone who doesn’t want to see you anymore.
• Finally, and this is key: stop playing games. Stop dumping him on a whim because of stuff like this. Stop playing silent treatment with him because you don’t buy his answer. Stop, stop, stop. As a man, I can tell you there is nothing more aggravating than a woman who knee jerk reacts to everything and then plays passive aggressive games when we meant nothing by what we did.

The big problem I see here is you are arguing your feelings. Even in your response to him, you said you FEEL he blocked you. Since there is no possible way for him to prove otherwise, you are putting an unreasonable amount of pressure on him to prove your feeling. If he says he didn’t, that’s all you can do. Pushing it further WILL end up causing problems, so you must decide whether you believe him or not. It appears you do not. Now you must decide what the penalty for that is. If it is breaking up, then be up front about it and don’t string him along or play these passive aggressive games with him. Even if you aren’t together anymore, after you both get over what I will admit I find a silly reason to end a relationship, he will be able to respect that you didn’t toy with him or play games about it.