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  • Bad.

    My wife and I broke up several days ago. We were never legally married, and I suppose that makes it a lot easier, but still not easy.
    We both had severe emotional control issues, for different reasons. I tried countless meds to help, and keep myself, and us, together. Tried therapy. But in the end, more often than not, there was no voice of reason in our relationship. We could reach points where we'd go a month or so without fighting, but it'd always happen again some day.
    Finally, at a time where we were both calm and unemotional, we came to the decision that we needed to work on ourselves separately. When the consequences of our mental illness were not just hurting ourselves, but each other, it was just too hard to cope with.
    We're still friends. We're still supporting each other, but I feel like I've lost the best thing I've ever had in my life and it's my fault. I'm happy that she no longer has to feel chained down by my angry outbursts, my constant panic attacks, and wondering every day if I'm still going to be with her tomorrow, but I wish none of those things existed in the first place, so we could be happy together.

    On top of all this, the catalyst for making this decision in the first place was that there was a new guy, who was very interested in me. When he found out I was already taken, he tried to back off, but.. I guess now my ex-wife encouraged him to keep going. We'd been open to the idea of polyamory from the beginning of our relationship, so that's how we were hoping it would go. Unfortunately, it turned out he couldn't be comfortable with polyamory, and wanted an exclusive relationship.
    And that's when we suddenly realized that there was a choice. I could try to stay with her, hoping one day things would get better, or find a new relationship and hope it doesn't end the same way. We realized quickly that the second was the only healthy option, even if we really, really didn't want that.

    And now, several days later, this new guy is already telling me he's in love with me. He said it was love at first sight for him. I told him I'm going to need a long time before I can even consider anybody else romantically, and he's told me he's willing to wait however long it takes, but the concept scares me.
    My last relationship ended largely because of emotional and psychological problems that feel insurmountable. I'm terrified if this goes anywhere that I'm going to screw it up the exact same way.

    I just don't know what to do anymore. I've checked up on my ex a few times, and it feels like she's handling this better than I am. At the very least, she'll survive, and that makes me happy. I was friends with her for a long time before we even started dating, and I'm just really hoping I can learn to see her that way again. But this is the hardest thing I've ever had to deal with emotionally and I don't feel like I'll survive, even if I know consciously that I will get through it.

    • Hang, in, there. I can't understand nor relate to your situation, but you'll find with time and reflection that things, did in fact, stabilize. Just know there are people that care about you and that you generate meaning and joy for people in your life.

      • I don't know why, but the support I get from people who can't understand but still want to help means the most to me.

        Luckily, I've had a load of messages from a million people on just about every platform I knew anybody on filled with support and encouragement. Everybody's making really sure I don't feel unloved.

    • It doesn't sound like it was all your fault, nor was it all theirs. It sounds like two people who care very much for each other realized that the patterns they were reinforcing were not good for either of them, and took painful steps to keep the relationship they could. I'm really sorry you're in this position now, but I'm also really hopeful that you see the good in your decision and that you were able to make it calmly despite the emotions of the situation. That's a crappy consolation prize but maybe you'll learn and grow your emotional toolkit to make the ability to handle situations like that even stronger.

      Something that helped me to become better at communicating my feelings (and communicating when I couldn't manage it well) was reading about mediating other people's conflicts. Self help / self regulation books and the like weren't helping me to navigate these situations but ones about mediation in the workplace or at home helped me to see the types of patterns that played out in my relationships. Discussing these techniques - like lots of "I feel" statements and no "you make me" statements - with my partner and agreeing to try them gave us the emotional space to really start practicing better management of ourselves.

      I hope I'm not overstepping with this, but I am scared alongside you about starting anything else this quickly afterwards, and especially this intensely. It doesn't sound like you're being kind enough to yourself to give enough time to process, or to build up the emotional management skills you're hoping to. Coming on so strongly to someone who's just been through something like this doesn't speak very highly of this guy's character either, from where I'm sitting (just north of total ignorance, but still).

      Whatever happens, I hope you find the space and peace to train those relationship and emotional skills you want for yourself, and the person or persons who help you to reinforce them.

      • Your suggestion in the second paragraph sounds good. Most of our fights were more or less caused by extrapolating information incorrectly due to our high strung emotions. Things like she'd mention a famous person in passing, and I would happen to know said famous person had a horrific controversy, and I'd suddenly go on high alert thinking she supported said terrible things, which would snowball into "If she supports that terrible thing, she must support all these other terrible things as well," at which point I'd explode, she having no idea why because she didn't know about said controversy and didn't even like said famous person very much in the first place.
        When she'd blow up at me, it was usually because I ignored a load of warning signs that she was in a really bad mood, because I felt bad not helping when she felt bad, but the only help she actually needed was for me to leave her alone until she could settle down.

        As for the new guy, the situation is a little complicated by the fact that he did actually try to do the polyamory thing at first, and a bit into that is when he first confessed that he was in love with me. However, we realized that what he was really hoping for was that I'd fall for him so hard I'd decide I wanted to be exclusively with him. Once he realized that, that's when we realized polyamory wasn't going to work and I had to make a decision.

        It still disturbs me a bit that that happened so fast, but I don't feel like I should be judging since I was exactly like that with my ex before we started dating. Just fell so deeply in love that I couldn't bear not telling her.
        At the same time though, maybe that should make me more worried, because I was absolutely off my rocker back then and the first year of our relationship was almost entirely her reigning me in and teaching me how to approach relationships in a more healthy way.

  • It's been a bit of a shit one. Finances are rough right now as I've been looking for a job for quite some time, and I learned just yesterday that my roommate is moving out on the first of February and didn't think it was something she really needed to tell me in advance. So I'll be on the hook for the full rent amount, which is around twice what I have in my bank account right now.

    I did apply for a really cool job with a queer non-profit, so fingers crossed I'll get that and my luck will start turning around!

  • I'm American and yesterday I realized I made a mistake on my taxes less than an hour after I filed them. Some googling told me it's not a huge deal, just have to file an amended tax return after my initial one is accepted but I can't ignore it because the IRS will know I did it wrong because they will have received a form from another party with the numbers I forgot to put in. It's baffling to me why it's a weird negotiation to pay taxes instead of them just telling me what I owe since they do know what I owe.

  • Pretty good, got a date on Saturday with this super cute girl that has similar interests with me and has autism (like 1/2 my friends have either ADHD/Autism and that seems to magnetize people with either together in a weird way, so that looks like it might work out well), then I have another date not currently on the books but theoretically planned with the girl that I mentioned who was asexual on the Sunday, but not 100% if that's actually a thing yet.

  • We got some good snow overnight and I took the skis out to make some trails for myself. The skis were great but now I've got to go replace my boots. I still went and took pictures for you all because it was so lovely. Still, I'm a little sad that my time on the skis ended like this:

  • Fixing things that made Sopuli crash so often in the last few days. Apparently some swap space is necessary to prevent kswapd0 gobbling 100% of CPU which also causes all user processes to freeze. This is so tiresome.

  • Today's date with the chef girl went very well, we had a great time chatting and getting dinner, then she shared her fav memes with me till my ride arrived and she was trying to extend the date as long as possible, tbf I was too lol. She asked for a second date immediately. Meeting next Saturday again this time in my city :)

  • Boo, the nice asexual girl I was talking to and planning on a date with just silently unmatched me on bumble without a word, feels great man. Like I get the fact I am likely option #20 on the number of potential dates but it still feels really shitty to do without a word.

    Still have two other dates with two other girls but this really bums me out since I liked her the most so far out of all of them.

  • Better than last week, so far. I made a decision earlier in the week to try something that I've been wanted to do and pitched a cowriting project to my sister, who was really enthusiastic about the idea. We've both struggled to write in the past, I think we both have a hard time getting stuck on details. I feel like there's a real chance that having a writing partner will help us both push through those times when we get stuck on a word or phrase or detail, because we tend to obsess about different things.

    Also, she's better at punctuation than me, which is good because my approach to commas is usually just to sort of sprinkle them liberally wherever I would naturally pause. I know that isn't right but so far it's a habit I haven't been able to break.

  • slowly recovering from tonsil surgery! pain's still a problem but i'm most of the way back to eating normally which is nice.

  • the foster dog still has a limp in her right front leg after she’s been napping, so i’m setting her up for a vet appointment.

    RAGBRAI (largest organized cycling event) announced the route for this year, which will be shortish but also very, very hilly. guess i’ll need to get some hill training in before july!

    i’m taking some time off alcohol, currently on day 10 with the plan being to stay sober until valentine’s day. i really only drink on weekends when i am drinking, but it had gotten a little out of hand with the holidays like it tends to, so a break was much appreciated.

  • Thanks for asking. Doing better this week than last; feeling better and handling things better. Kiddos are still annoying, but not as as stressful. Work stuff is still anxiety inducing. trying it ignore it.

    How're you doing Alyaza?

  • EDIT: Listening to Everywhere at the End of Time by The Caretaker didn’t help lol but I don’t know, it was so gripping I couldn’t stop listening… it was like looking in the abyss… and feeling like loosing yourself. I want to make some music like that.

    My mind has been conjuring the worse nightmare and sad shits I thought I could imagine. To fight this I decided to release some of my music. There aren’t much people that listened to it (30!!) but the good comments help me get through the last days.

  • I'm waiting for the conclusions to things that are completely out of my control, but that will also have a heavy bearing on my future happiness. I won't know how these things will turn out for months, but that certainly isn't stopping them from impacting my ability to enjoy life today.

  • a wonderful new year update: we are currently paying $1,600/mo for this shitty apartment. love landlords

37 comments