He Got Away With It! Knowing When to Let Go

Here’s something that I often hear from wives who have been left: “How is this fair? He gets to go off and live a great life with his girlfriend and I’m left picking up the pieces. I’m alone with all the responsibility for the house and kids and I have to fight him for any bit of help I need.”

“HOW IS THAT FAIR!?!”

In a desperate attempt for the runaway husband to have to suffer consequences for the emotional damage he’s done to his ex and kids, some wives proclaim that wife abandonment should constitute a crime - an actual legal crime - that can be prosecuted in a court of law.

Wives want justice! When someone harms another, we expect that justice will be served and the offending party will have to pay. That just makes sense! 

So when women tell me that they want justice and that’s all they can think about day and night, I tell them this story, that I heard somewhere years ago, in order to encourage them to let go.

The story goes like this. A guy, we’ll call him Mike, was driving his rental car out of his friend’s driveway in L.A. when out of the blue, a Mercedes comes speeding down the street and t-bones him right on the driver’s side, causing his car to spin around twice during which time, he thought he was going to die. His car eventually came to a stop and there was a moment of silence after which he heard the other vehicle go skidding down the road away from the accident.

Twenty minutes later, after the police had assessed what happened, an officer stuck a form in Mike’s face and told him to sign it. He was completely shook up and asked what it was and the cop said, “It’s just to verify that you weren’t hurt” so he signed.

Mike went to the E.R. just to make sure he hadn’t sustained internal injuries and was surprised to learn that the other driver had already been there before him. The doctor, who had also treated the other driver, said that after hitting Mike’s car, the Mercedes guy sped around a corner and hit a tree. The E.R. doctor confirmed that the other driver was drunk and was taken to jail.

A couple weeks later, when he was back home in New York, Mike heard from the rental car company saying that he had been found at fault and had to pay $12,000 to the other driver to repair his Mercedes. Confident that it was a little mix up, Mike contacted the L.A. police to correct the error. Turns out that the officer on the scene that night had gotten mixed up in his identification of the two cars and, on the form that Mike signed that night, had mistakenly written that it was he who had hit the Mercedes.

Mike then spent the next year trying to get justice. The L.A. police wouldn’t even listen to him and he couldn’t find a lawyer to take the case. He became obsessed; it was all he could think and talk about. He didn’t care about the money - he just wanted the truth. He’d exhausted his friends and finally, his girlfriend said she couldn’t take it anymore and was breaking up with him.

It took that for Mike to wake up and realize that his futile attempt to get justice was ruining his life. He gave up the case and paid the guy $12,000.

By pure coincidence, I just watched a stand-up routine on Netflix called “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” by the comedian Mike Birbiglia in which he hilariously recounted this story, which had happened to him. Somehow somewhere, I had heard about it and have used it many times to illustrate a point.

Why do I tell women this story? Because too often, abandoned wives get stuck trying to get emotional justice which never comes. They want their ex to acknowledge what he did. They want their former in-laws to know the truth of what happened. They want to clear their name in the community because people make judgments or their ex circulates a false narrative about the break-up. They desperately want the true story to be told about what he did because he so often unjustly blames her.

My message here is not about whether you should fight for financial justice in the divorce agreement. That's a separate topic and I always believe you need to protect yourself financially.  Here I'm talking about the fact that striving to get your ex to acknowledge, apologize, show remorse or set the record straight with the kids takes a lot of emotional energy and keeps women obsessing. I tell the Mike story because sometimes, you just need to pay the metaphorical $12,000 and move on in the service of mental health and emotional peace.

Justice is a luxury that most abandoned wives don’t get to enjoy. But rather than letting it consume you, you need to recognize when it's time to accept that you won't get closure from him and give up trying.

So, in the end, does it feel like your ex committed a crime and got away with it? Maybe. But, that’s not your problem any more. You’ve paid the emotional price - now let it go.

Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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Are You Looking for Closure?

Today is the first day of the Sedona Retreat 2019. Eleven women from every corner of the U.S. as well as central Canada have gathered here in breathtaking Sedona to work on healing and moving on from wife abandonment. We had our first workshop today and one topic that came up often was the wish for closure. Several women talked about the tremendous frustration they feel due to the fact that their husbands just vanished without any proper conversation or explanation. It left them hanging - longing for closure.

What is closure? After a long term relationship, closure means a husband showing respect and sensitivity to the fact that the wife did not want the marriage to end and is deeply grieved by his decision. He would do that by providing time and effort to help his wife integrate what has happened - to talk it through, try to help her understand his change of feelings, care about how she is going to adjust to her new reality.

But many men who decide to leave either have stopped caring or are deeply uncomfortable with their wife's distress and choose to distance themselves from it as quickly as humanly possible, leaving the wife without any expressions of heartfelt concern.

That leaves the wife needing to find a way to give up the wish for a sense of closure that she will never experience. It's a decision she must make, for her own mental health, to accept that she will not receive that expression of concern. She has to decide to let it go and move on nevertheless. Hoping and longing take a lot of energy. To truly care for herself, she needs to accept that for some things in life, closure is an unavailable luxury.

Along the line of letting go, I wanted to share with you a poem by Safire Rose that I like a lot.

She Let Go

She let go.
She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.
She let go of the fear.
She let go of the judgments.
She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.
She let go of the committee of indecision within her.
She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.
Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.
She didn’t ask anyone for advice.
She didn’t read a book on how to let go.
She didn’t search the scriptures.
She just let go.
She let go of all of the memories that held her back.
She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.
She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.
She didn’t promise to let go.
She didn’t journal about it.
She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.
She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.
She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.
She just let go.
She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.
She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.
She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.
She didn’t call the prayer line.
She didn’t utter one word.
She just let go.
No one was around when it happened.
There was no applause or congratulations.
No one thanked her or praised her.
No one noticed a thing.
Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.
There was no effort.
There was no struggle.
It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad.
It was what it was, and it is just that.
In the space of letting go, she let it all be.
A small smile came over her face.
A light breeze blew through her.
And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…

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Let me know your thoughts about closure below. Are you still holding out hope? Did you get the closure you want? Tell us more!

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Are you a woman whose husband suddenly left? Click here for more resources to start your healing process.

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