onepinkfuzzy

My ex-husband is getting married next week.

He is getting married about six months after they met and started dating. I figured he would've learned his lesson the first time around (we met/married in six months).

For eleven years, he told me he didn't believe in the institution of marriage, that he wanted a divorce (although he wanted to stay in a relationship with me). A paper is meaningless, he said.

This shouldn't bother me. I'm the one who left. I'm the one who initiated the divorce. We had talked about it and talked about it; I agreed to stay in the relationship but the resentment grew and grew and grew and he refused to go to counseling and get healthy like I did and I finally said, enough! No relationship - even after the divorce. Paper or no paper. We're through. End of J/A. Period.

But it does bother me. It's yet another addition to the inconsistencies that I have become more and more aware of, the farther out from the relationship I get. I knew we were dysfunctional. I knew I didn't love him; that I only married him to get away from my family. I knew he didn't want me to leave because it would mean he wasn't loved - it didn't matter that it was *Angie* who left him, just that *he was left*. I knew I had given up of myself to be in the relationship.

But it wasn't until I finally broke free that I realized just. how. bad. we were together. The abusive cycle of power and control. The way he isolated me from my friends and family and told me he should be enough for me - that I didn't need anyone else but him. The way he told me he was the way, the truth and the light. The way he convinced me he was the only person I could trust in, believe in. That he was the only consistency in life. The intensity of his emotions and beliefs. The way I treated him - callous, dismissive, disrespectful - yet cowardly. The way I handed over my brain, my body, my soul, my beliefs. The way I rolled right over the warning signals in my head. The way he could slice and dice with his words on the occasions I spoke my warning signals aloud. I could not compete with his logic, his truth.

And the farther away I get, the more I realize just how flawed and inconsistent and hypocritical this judgmental, always-right person who believes in his truths so intensely is. Just how much he would say one thing and then do another - and then justify it all with his magical way of spinning words so fast and so elegantly and so intensely that the truth at the core of matter was always hidden and my questions and warning signs and fears so quickly mowed over.

This marriage is yet another kick in the gut - another reminder of how this person who convinced me so thoroughly that he was so consistent, so right, so precise, so perfect, so in line with his integrity, just isn't. He isn't who he convinced me he was. And 2 years later, I'm still hurt by that. I'm still mad at myself for falling into that. For believing it for so long.

It seems like he will be happy with her. She seems very nice. Maybe this one will last for him, maybe they won't fall into the same dysfunction that he and I did. Maybe he responds differently to her, and he doesn't treat her in the same way he treated me. And I sure hope she doesn't treat him the way I did. He deserves better than that. I really fervently hope that this marriage is a *good* thing for both of them - and most especially, for my son.

This impending marriage has also stimulated one other emotion in me: relief. He is truly no longer mine anymore. At the divorce, I was relieved that I no longer had to make excuses for him, no longer had to justify his behavior to my (few) friends and my family. But now - now - he will truly belong to someone else.

Relief that I am not married. Relief that 2 years later, I am still living on my own, living my life in the healthy way I want to live it. Relief that I am me, and I am in a relationship where we are equals, where we both choose together what we are doing and why, where I can say no I'm not comfortable with something or that I want to spend time alone and it's okay. Relief that I'm not close to marriage.

Relief that I am right where I want to be: with me.