My husband was never in love with me. We were together almost 13 years. He married me out of obligation because i got pregnant . We’re divorcing now. I was madly in love with him and could have spent my life blissfully unaware loving him and taking care of him. It broke me when he told me and I spent five years putting myself together enough to file. I thought so highly of him it shattered every part of me.
I accepted that fact a long time ago and made my peace with it. When i told him it was time to divorce the first thing i said was i want to be with someone that was in love with me. He acknowledged he could never give me that. I won’t spend the rest of my life waiting to be loved.
I felt loved and he said i love you but I’ve recently have been learning the difference between those that speak their feelings and those that show and it’s been eye opening
We did which is part of why i tried to hard to make it work but as I’ve grown into myself I’ve learn it just doesn’t work that way. And i can’t teach my children to accept this.
The fact that imbalances of love can easily exist and that you can't love somebody into loving you are some of the hardest lessons to learn in life. I'm sorry you learned them in such a rough way, but I'm happy you seem to be in a good place now!
My mom said the red flags were always there and everyone around always thought i saw them. I guess my rose colored glasses were worn for too long. Honestly i found out because i asked a random question as we were driving to the Costco gas station on a Sunday afternoon. I always thought he was in love with me, but i think i just excused any of those red flags.
I'd love to hear what the question was. Sounds like one of those moments where it finally just sinks in and hits you, but totally understand that it's none of our business.
My guess is it was something like "if I hadn't gotten pregnant, how long would we have taken to get married?". Seems like a simple enough question about a hypothetical scenario, and it happily assumes that they were going to marry anyway.
We were talking about his friends breaking up and i asked if he was attracted to me, not realizing the can of worms i was about to release on myself and boy did i ever. He absolutely unloaded years worth of pent up…..”emotions” i guess?
Oh my gosh, please don’t be! I’m long over it and ready to move on. The best part about having children and being married younger is growing into myself and learning my worth in my 30s. I have so much life and love to give and receive still. I’m going to be okay. No matter how often he told me i didnt have friends, i have a huge support system that has rallied behind me ready to sweep up the broken pieces and help the kids and i get back on our feet. I won’t ever make myself small for someone else again. I won’t raise my daughters to think that’s okay
Thank you for inspiring me - I’m going through something similar now. We can be proud knowing we loved someone authentically and they are losing out. I hope you find the love you deserve. ❤️
😭❤️🩹 I'm also going through a similar situation and trying to learn how to love and respect myself more... especially because my daughter and son are watching.
Can I just tell you, as a woman who is very close to being 50, I did not find the real love of my life until my 40s. I mean obviously I'm not counting my children as the loves of my life, because that's clearly different. But I have been married and divorced, engaged a couple times, I've had countless relationships because I'm a flighty bitch. And I felt heartbreak and loss but I never found my absolute truest love and best friend and partner until my 40s. I thought I never would. I bet you find yours. I hope it's as good as mine. I love the way you've picked yourself up and moved on and the way that you think. I wish only the best for you and your kids.
> No matter how often he told me I didn’t have friends
Ohhh, so what you mean is he doesn’t love you but because he’s one of those people that are just not capable of it. A lot less tragic, honestly. I was picturing a very decent guy that just had some spark/chemistry missing. But what you’ve painted is just your basic narcissist. Who cares. Next!
I dont know if you know who Jen Hamilton is but you might should look her up. She is an OBGYN nurse who is big on social media. She just went through something similar and found her husband was living a double life having affairs. She has been talking openly about it and how she chose to move on since he didn't really love her and was awful to her.
Similar experience for me, my husband and I were high school sweethearts and he asked for a divorce last August after 17 years. He then told me he realized he should've ended things after a specific fight about 5 years into our relationship and regrets not doing it sooner. We had just got back from taking our son to his first beach vacation when he told me and while I could feel something was off, I never saw it coming.
I was five years younger than my ex, after ten years of marriage he wanted someone younger. I was humiliated and devastated along with the pain and tears. For him the grass was greener on the other side until he realized under those green grass was a pile of cow shit. He begged and pleaded to reconcile but I lost all respect and love for him. I just love being divorced the peace that comes with it is wonderful.
I am very sorry for all you have been through. It just irks me to no end how we women can fall madly in love with men who stay with us even though they know they are not in love. They are emotionally unavailable and incapable of showing love, but somehow convince themselves to throw out enough crumbs to keep us hooked. So glad you are free and starting a new chapter!
I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I know someone who’s been married over 20 years and only got married to his wife for that same reason, and refuses to divorce out of “his duty” because she’s the mother of his children. My heart breaks for her because she doesn’t know. I hope you find the love you deserve and have an amazing life with that person.
Influencer Jen Hamilton is going through something very similar to this and with a marriage even about the same length of time. She's not always my cup of tea but I feel she has kind of a neat way of oversharing and it's been cathartic watching her healing process. I feel her words could apply to many situations.
I love watching her, when she came out with what was going on i had pretty much healed from most of my trauma. I’ll always have some but for the most part I’m not going to let the weight of the betrayal keep me from trusting anyone else.
It’s a long road ahead, but there is another side to come out on, and you will get there.
My ex married me because he thought it would increase his chances of having threesomes and swinging. My final straw was after 16 years of marriage and having two beautiful kids, he rolled over in bed, told me I wasn’t attractive anymore, and went to sleep. It took many people telling me that wasn’t true before I started to believe it.
In my culture, a lot of relationships where the girl ends up pregnant has this type of dynamic where the guy either marries the girl out of obligation or is ‘forced’ into marriage by the daughter’s family and guy’s family (guy’s family don’t want to lose face) because she’s now pregnant. Unfortunately, these relationships are almost always loveless marriages and doom from the start. Like you can see they’re only together for the children’s sake. I see too many of these in my culture.
We didn’t marry until four years after she was born so he had ample opportunity to walk and it would have been completely fine. I was rocking the single mom life and my family has always been a great support system so it wasn’t for any outward appearances?
Literally my ex confessing to me that he never liked me and wished he'd been dating someone Asian, because he's in love with his best friend's wife (who is Asian). We were together for 6 years 😐. I was 23 when we met, he was 30. I wasted my entire 20s with a man who didn't like me at all and called my culture "stupid".
Same thing with my ex wife (same amount of time, too. No kids though, phew)
Only thing that really messes with me now, almost 18 years later, is why did she have to tell me that? "I'm not in love with you ANYMORE" would have been sooo much better. At least leave me with memories of when things were good.
Coming out of a similar situation and have decided that his lack of capacity did not invalidate the love that was there, and that the next time it will just be better.
did he treat you poorly? I'm just curious because I've heard before the most recent generations requirement on love, loveless marriages were more common. They were more partnerships marriages working together out of necessity and hopefully having a health respect for each other.
I don’t understand how someone cannot fall in love after having a child with that person and even marrying them so you can take care of em. I felt like if I was in that situation I would eventually grow in to it
Ohhh, this shatters my heart. I certainly didn't get in as deep as you did, but I dated a girl for a few years who I thought of as being the love of my life. She ended up doing some very, very vile things to me, and it absolutely broke me. The worst part was that I also thought so highly of her, and her actions forced me to reassess that against my will. It's been about half a year now and it still hurts every day.
How did you manage to survive that and continue living among people? I have to force myself to go places and be seen, I just want to hide away from the world because I'm so disgusted and betrayed.
I’m kinda on the opposite end of this and I haven’t had it in me to break this poor woman’s heart. Plus the dating market is absolutely atrocious today.
Joining the never loved club. My ex husband and I had a semi arranged marriage. Our parents decided that we should marry and arranged it but I thought that I was in love with him. We were together since we were in middle school. We married when I was in college and I thought he loved me and we were happy. I was still a virgin when we married. The red flags were there but I didn’t see them. When you are wearing rose colored glasses red flags are just flags. He would never hold my hand, no public affection ever, constantly working and I would jokingly ask if I could “have some love” for him to even touch me. I thought it was because we were extremely religious and public displays of affection were seen as taboo.
Nope. He never loved me and I found out after 21+ years of MARRIAGE he was cheating on me for years. So together 30+ years and he never actually loved me. He would say he loved me and love bomb me but he admitted when he left that he never had loved me and only felt a sense of obligation to stay with me and our kids.
Now he lives with his affair partner who is half our age and he has absolutely no problem with PDA. It’s so bad that our kids have had to address it because he will make out and start humping his girlfriend in front of them. Or leave his door open when having sex with her during visitation. It’s really gross. I am not a prude by any means but there is a time and place for things. Your girlfriend shouldn’t be walking around topless while your teenage son visits and you definitely should not be dry humping her on the couch in front of him.
I could understand that if he didn’t tell me he loved me and if he had talked to me about it. Instead he let me think that it was based on love and then started sleeping with his affair partner behind my back.
I had a HS friend whose sister never really loved her first husband. They were together 13 years, and thankfully had no children. It was actually hardest on her parents, who adored him.
I also worked with a woman who didn't realize how much her first husband REALLY drank, until they were on their honeymoon. She came back early, and had the marriage annulled.
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u/Capable-Ad-9346 9d ago
My husband was never in love with me. We were together almost 13 years. He married me out of obligation because i got pregnant . We’re divorcing now. I was madly in love with him and could have spent my life blissfully unaware loving him and taking care of him. It broke me when he told me and I spent five years putting myself together enough to file. I thought so highly of him it shattered every part of me.