Thank you for your post. It is helping me in ways that you couldn't possibly understand and which I can't explain, and I've been divorced since Septemeber 2001. I'd like to make a few comments on some of the things you wrote, not to start an argument with you, but hopefully to help both of us see some things more clearly. One of the reasons I post here is that it helps clarify some things for me and, hopefully, clarity to anyone else who reads my posts.

You said that your x2b asked you if it was more important to live your life as an individual or a wife. That's a false choice. While being a husband or wife does require sacrificing some of your own agenda for the other persons, if a man really loves his wife, he would want to encourage her to be who she is and encourage her to express herself as an individual. It's not a case of being an individual or a wife, it's a case of being an individual who fulfills her role as a wife.

As far as his giving you nothing for your birthday while telling you how happy he was about getting just the right thing for other women, I don't think I can even begin to imagine the pain you must have felt, though there's another possibility that would fit into your denial. That possibility is that, in order to avoid the pain, you either convinced yourself either that what was happening wasn't happening or you did as I did for years in order to avoid the pain of sexual molestation as a teenager and excused his behavior. I'm not a psychologist and so I don't know the psychological term for it, but what I do know is that both you and I were deeply wounded and you can't heal a wound by pretending that it's not there.

It's good that you're tracking your progress. I highly recommend journaling, something which I used to do diligently but have recently neglected, but I've begin to do so again because, while I'm not going through a divorce, I had a recent break up with someone and, while the pain is nowhere near the pain of divorce, I still miss her and I'm still having a hard time dealing with the emotions involved.

I was married 27 years and I can't even imagine that I'd ever have had the nerve and been so cruel as to ask my wife if I could take another woman out to dinner. You must be a very determined woman to even agree to try to fix the marriage after that, but I think that's a positive trait.

I certainly understand the desire to want to go back to the way things were before, or more accurately, and you seem to realize that, the way that we want to pretend the way that they were. From what you've written, you were in a marriage where your husband made little or no effort to love you, and as far as to whether or not true love exists, I'll get to that in a moment. The truth is that we can't turn back the clock and relive the past. Once we've lived the past, the past is over and this would be true even if you were still in a relative healthy and happy marriage.

As far as bargaining sex, it may be what you said, your need to love and be loved, or it may be something else. Sex and other things, such as alcohol, food, etc. are sometimes used to mask our pain when what we need to do in order to expedite our healing is to embrace the pain, i.e. feel the pain and work through it. Once again, you can't heal a wound by pretending that it's not there. You asked how to protect yourself. I can't necessarily answer that for you but I can share what I'm doing and you can decide whether or not any of it would work for you. I don't want to make this thread about me but about you and your issues, but let me briefly share something so that I can share how I'm trying to protect myself.

I told you that I recently ended a relationship, one in which I'd been nearly the entire time since my divorce and which I may have used to mask my pain because it was definitely a codependent relationship. We had briefly broken up before but, after a few days, she'd call and we'd reconcile. This has happened many times, but it's never been this long before and so I'm convinced that it's really over. Almost as soon as I realized that it was over, I found myself on the Internet trying to ease the pain of missing someone by artificial and superficial sex. Like you, I felt terribly empty afterwards but then I found that, despite the negative feelings, (I felt not only empty, but also guilty, ashamed, worthless, hopeless, and helpless) I went and did it again and found that I was beginning to get obsessed by it and so I've sought counseling, gone to 12 step groups on this, and also prayed and made a lot of calls to some friends to whom I can tell anything and who will help keep me in line. I just started the therapy today, and the only tool the counselor has given me so far is what he calls "the stop thinking technique." Sexual temptation always begins in our brain, so he told me to counter the thoughts with another thought, a big red stop sign, and to find a way to divert my thoughts. I know that this won't be enough, by itself, but, so far, it's worked for me. At least today, so far, while I've been tempted, I've managed to avoid the temptation.

It also helps if I remove the opportunities to do this to the extent that I can. Because I live alone, I can't do that completely, but I have made it a lot harder. Also, I try not to spend too much time alone and, so, tonight, I went out and sipped coffee for a couple hours. For you, I'd suggest that you keep yourself out of situations where you might find yourself vulnerable. That would mean not being alone with a man as well as having some other women to whom you'd hold yourself accountable if this is, in fact, a problem. It's hard for me to accept this but mine is a sexual addiction. The strange thing about this is that the reason my gf gave for breaking up was my refusal to have sex with her. I have chosen not to have sex with someone to whom I'm not married, and marriage didn't seem to be a good possibility for us. Yours might be a love and relationship addiction, but it's still possible that it's an addiction and it might be something for you to investigate.

You asked if there's any such thing as true love. The answer is yes, but the problem is that our culture has thrown the word, love, around and distorted its meaning. While there certainly is such a thing as romantic love, love derived from feelings and sexual desire, that kind of love is emotional and, like any emotion, it won't last very long unless it's continually fed and its best diet is a good dosage of active love, i.e. choosing to love someone even when they don't seem very lovable, even when we know that our love can't be returned. It's the kind of love that is willing to sacrifice anything, even one's own life, in order to protect the object of that love. I believe that's how men are supposed to love their wives in a marriage. I've seen women, who would give their lives to protect their children from harm. I've seen people stand by their spouse when their spouse had Alzheimer's or dementia including changing their diapers if necessary.

Romantic love is controlled by our right brain, our emotions. It can't see the flaws in the other person. It's passive. In the short run, it's beyond our control. The chemistry is either there or it isn't. Active love is a choice and it's controlled by our left brain, our logical thinking. It sees the flaws in another person and chooses to love them in spite of their flaws and, in its highest form, is unconditional, expecting nothing in return. It, by itself, has nothing to do with how we feel about another person. We can actively love another person even if we don't like them if we choose to do so. In nearly all cases, active love will cause an emotional bonding. Usually, this is what we call brotherly love. If I help someone in need without expecting anything in return, eventually I'll start caring about them not just in my head but also in my heart. If that person is someone other than my spouse, that's called fraternal or brotherly love. If I actively love my spouse, even if the romantic feelings were absent, they'll soon reappear. Part of the problem in our culture is that we generally are first attracted to someone via romantic love and so we conclude that the action follows the feeling but doing loving actions for someone with whom we feel in love doesn't require much effort and really isn't love at all. Unless we continue to perform those actions, that love will quickly die. The feeling always follows the action, not the other way around.

So, welcome to DCS and so sorry you had to find us.

I know that this is a long post but let me add just a few things that you might find helpful. Embrace the pain. Don't try to avoid the pain. I wish there were a way that we could heal without going through the pain but it's the pain that motivates us to heal. Take things moment by moment, day by day. While it sounds like you've made a lot of progress, there are going to be times where it's going to be 3 steps forward and 2 back. That's one reason why it's important to journal. Don't try to rush or shortcut the grieving process and recognize that there may be times where it seems like you've gone backwards. Those steps don't always come in order. As far as skipping the depression stage, there are certainly some things that you can do to minimize the depression, but it's still going to be there and, if I had to guess, you've already experienced some of it.

Finally, be both patient, very, very patient with yourself and be kind both to yourself and others. You deserve to be loved and others deserve your love and, by love, I don't mean sex or even romance. I mean following the golden rule, i.e. treating others as you'd like them to treat you and that includes your ex.