We had such a profound discussion at the last session of the Hearts & Minds Divorce Recovery Group about how much the women devoted to their marriages during all those years and the fact that their husband, in the end, walked away from it all as if it had no value to him. They were questioning, how do I think about all those years of being together? Was it real? Does how he left mean that it was all meaningless?
Members of the group talked about how much they’d invested, fully expecting to be together with their husband till death do them part. They gave wholeheartedly - was it under false pretenses?
One woman said that she felt she’d been robbed. She can’t “cash in” to take advantage of everything she’d contributed. Cashing in means enjoying later years together, travelling, spending time with family together, creating a home, feeling that life’s value grew and grew and that it reached a comfortable point at which she could sit back with him and enjoy the glow.
Another woman said that she felt that all those years of her life with her husband had been tainted. She wants to wipe it all out - it’s too painful to think about.
Another, an engineer, gave a metaphorical explanation of covert narcissism. She suggested that it’s like a bridge that has a latent defect. Let’s say that the bridge can support the daily traffic but it has a weak joint that no one knows about. One day, an extra car is on the bridge and that weak joint gives out.
Our husbands are like that bridge. They’re fine to a point, but there’s a weak joint in their makeup that means that once they feel it’s all too much, they just give up. You don’t know there’s a problem because it only becomes visible after the whole thing cracks.
I was thinking about how, in all the years I’ve worked in this field, most women in the Runaway Husbands community describe their marriages in very positive terms. It’s very rare for someone to say, “Aw, it wasn’t that good”. After the husband leaves, we tend to highlight the good things that happened. It’s called a Positivity Bias. Here’s the definition: Positivity bias may denote three phenomena: a tendency for people to report positive views of reality; a tendency to hold positive expectations, views, and memories; and a tendency to favor positive information in reasoning.
Does our perception require us to view the marriage in glowing terms? A lot of women blame themselves. Yes, you weren’t perfect, but he wasn’t perfect, either. I’m sure he was annoying and selfish lots of times.
That evening at the group, as everyone was talking, I was thinking, how can I encourage them to find value in every precious day of our lives? He wasn’t perfect and in the end, his weakness became visible. But I believe that during all those years, when the bridge was holding up, it was real. He loved you and it was genuine. It was your real life.
Don’t let the fact that it ended in betrayal make you harden your heart to those years of your life. You had good times, but you also had bad times. And it all adds up to experience.
If your husband leaving can contribute to you struggling to become a more positive person, to strengthen your appreciation of your life just as it is, so you can love life, no matter what is happening, then you can chalk it up to experience.
Don’t think of it like an investment you make in the bank that you can lose when the market tanks. That’s the wrong metaphor. Think of it rather like an investment you made in yourself and in your own life that no one can ever take away from you and learn to love life again.
