Whew….damn it’s been a long road. I’m still recovering from the betrayal of my ex wife. I have no idea how people stay and make it work.

Falling in love/ simping should come with a warning label, caution: Side effects may include, suicidal thoughts, intense emotional distress, compulsive overthinking, mistrust of the opposite sex, emotional unavailability, loss of confidence, self destructive behavior, loss of self respect, increased use of alcohol, and years of therapy. This does not also include to loss of time with your kids, the destruction of your household, and the possibility that your finances will take a huge cut.

This has been an arduous journey to say the least. I watched a video yesterday where this guy was telling an interviewer that he in addition to 3 men he knew were contemplating suicide during their divorces. I wonder to what extent they were also betrayed.

My homegirl and I decided to take a break from the relationship debate for a while. Her attitude towards leaving a marriage due to ‘unhappiness’ is a real turn off for me and a trigger. She says that I have issues….and in certain ways, she’s right, but I don’t think she truly understands what a man risks emotionally and psychologically should a woman whimsically decide that she needs to move on.

She keeps referring me to these videos about ‘husbands’ giving advice about keeping your marriage in tact. I pretty much followed those guidelines in mine (at least in principle) and it still failed. Those guys are in a for a huge awakening if theirs’ fail….especially if they truly love and adore their wives the way that I did mine.

Yeah, I will take ownership and say that perhaps it’s on me that I picked bad. Despite not seeing the ‘red flags’ in the beginning, it was ultimately a choice that I made. But the lesson that I got was that a man should not get THAT invested into a woman. To not love her with your whole heart…..and right now, I’m not seeing the benefits of marrying a person who you don’t love with your whole heart.

My homegirl’s rather cavelier attitude towards happiness being the primary goal of marriage seems contradictory to me. I sent her a video about Tia Mowry’s divorce from her husband and the explanation she gave…..basically saying that she felt it was just time for her to ‘graduate’ from that relationship and move on to other things.

T (my friend)says that she feels that happiness is the primary goal of a marriage. I once told her that me and kiddo were happy in the marriage, but apparently STBXW wasn’t so she decided to blow up our family in search of her own. In my opinion it seems that Tia did basically the same thing. My homegirl was getting on to me asking how it was fair for STBXW to be unhappy, but me and kiddo were.

For me, the answer is that happiness comes from within. She was waiting on external circumstances to bring her ‘happiness’ and because she felt that she’d feel happy where she thought the grass was greener at, she brought unhappiness upon herself. We had a good situation, much better than many marriages from an objective standpoint. But from her subjective point of view, our marriage was “miserable.” How? When we didn’t argue/fight much, had financial stability, lived in a great area, and had no abuse nor infidelity and both split the household duties.

If anything I had reason to complain when the sex started falling off. Or when she had inappropriate conversations with a male friend. Or her lack of transparency and failure to communicate her needs to me. I could have complained that she worked too much and put too much focus on her job rather than spending time with us. But I know she did what she felt like she needed to do and I couldn’t conceive of standing in the way of her ‘happiness’ if that’s what made her feel happy.

Yet and still, despite having all of the basic building blocks of a good marriage, her believing she somehow ‘deserved’ better made her ‘feel’ unhappy. And now we all suffer because of her lack of foresight, misplaced values, and entitled attitude.

To me, this is no excuse to destroy your family and even though she likes to use the buzz word ‘black excellence’…..it sucker punches it right in the face because black excellence “in my opinion” STARTS in the HOME. Raising and keeping your family together is the minimal requirement for that. Standards, values, traditions, honor, respect are more important than the nice HOUSE, fancy vacations, luxury cars, and gram worthy pics. The former being the excellence part, the latter being a possible secondary side effect.

But maybe I do feel entitled. I mean, I’m not the stereotypical black guy (from NYC) she’s probably accustomed to. I’m not as dominant. I am really quite laid back. I’m not flashy. I never even owned a pair of jordans. I’m not money hungry nor materialistic. My opinions on overt consumerism and ideas of working to buy things you don’t need to impress people who don’t like you are simply my opinions on the matter. In the end, maybe we were just not compatible.

I don’t know if this is a chicken or egg scenario…..but I’m not sure if the reason we can’t talk now is indicative that we were never really ‘cool’ like that to begin with or if it’s because she betrayed me. On one hand, you’d think that if we were connected like that, no matter what, our interactions would be organically satisfying on some level. Even if I had to cut her off in order to maintain my boundaries. Was our ‘chemistry’ broken…. or maybe it was never there to begin with.

To be honest, I’m really thinking the latter. The truth is that we just aren’t compatible like that no matter how you slice it. We never really were. This may be a reason I always felt like I was stepping on eggshells and couldn’t be my ideal self around her. I couldn’t just “let my hair” down so to speak and release all of my inhibitions unless there was a heavy amount of alcohol involved. I was comfortable….but I rarely found myself engaging in an ongoing conversation where it just felt, … natural.

To be fair, my social anxiety may have played a role in this. But to add perspective, I have had friendships/relationships where I did feel …. accepted and didn’t have that internal struggle to find the ‘right’ thing to say. Our interactions and conversations just happened like a pleasant form of hiccups. We can talk and talk for hours without ever feeling the need to stop or if we do, the silences don’t feel awkard….or if they do get awkward, it’s just easy to pick back up from where we left off.

Perhaps I was forcing things based on my projections of who I hoped she was as a person, my intense physical attraction to her, and fact that seemed to accept me at the time. But the truth is, we never really clicked like that.

Because this is so rare for me to find, I don’t really expect it from most people. I mean, I’m used to it now…. but it is quite rare to just find a person that I just ‘click’ with. Where I can take my ‘mask’ off and just be ‘me’. A person who I like talking to because I want to know what I’m going to say next. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

I do yearn for that in a partner. I’ve learned that I cannot force it, no matter how much she may accept me nor if the mutual attraction is there. It does make me wonder though if there is more that I can do on my part though to be able to have this type of social confidence with more people. Then again, there didn’t seem anything outstanding or particularly special about the people I have had this with though.

Finding a woman with this quality … along with having mutual attraction, similar goals, values, and not in a relationship would seem to require quite a bit of luck. But I think that I’d just ‘know’ with a few interactions with them. I’m not opposed to getting married again, and despite being scared shitless of falling in love again…..i do think that for the ‘right’ person (based on those qualities) she’d be worth taking a chance on. I wouldn’t even know where to begin looking. She could be anywhere and I may have passed ‘her’ dozens of times, but I wouldn’t know it because I just didn’t take the time to stop and talk to her.

Me and STBXW just aren’t compatible. She love bombed me into thinking that we were….or maybe at one time, she came close to what I had been looking for. Or maybe she truly changed.