It’s interesting that you say that. That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking is going on with him. It kills me to see him like this, but at the same time, he’s making his own choices and without any regard towards my feelings…which of course is incredibly hurtful. It’s just so bizarre, it’s like a switch flipped with him. He never communicated with me that anything was wrong with us (we had talked about him being stressed at work and wanting a break from work, etc) and then all of a sudden he is leaving me. I really do  hope he can figure things out. I do think a lot of it is his internal struggle, but I also feel like this is all somehow my fault. How did I not see this coming and I must have been a bad wife, a bad best friend to let it get to this…that’s where my mind keeps going.

Yep, I know exactly how you’re feeling. My ex seemingly flipped a switch, too, and started acting very different behaviorally from what I knew of him. It’s like he made this huge life decision without even consulting me and then, there I was, blindsided and left devastated.

The thing is, you can’t know what you don’t know… or what he isn’t sharing with you. It’s easy to look back and notice signs in hindsight, but you have to remember that those signs are easy to miss when you don’t have the knowledge of what was coming to compare them to. You could have been the most absolutely perfect wife in the world to him, but if he was unhappy with everything else in his life, it’s likely you were going to be lumped in with the “stuff that’s wrong,” no matter what you did or didn’t do. So try to be easy on yourself when you start feeling that way.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by Valora.