He Knows

In the course of negotiating a settlement with my ex, I finally found out that he knows that I am seeing DB, and that he knows who he is.  Truly, I wasn't really trying that hard to hide the fact that I'm seeing someone now, 2 years post separation.  I just didn't want him to know about the affair.  More than any legal or financial consequences, my biggest worry was that he would think that was why I left him, and it wasn't.  I shouldn't have had the affair, but I would have left anyway, and for good reasons.  Equally importantly, I didn't want it to interfere with co-parenting.  We have a good relationship as parents.  We can both go to our children's events and sit together without gritting our teeth.  We communicate about issues relating to the kids, large and small, long-term and short-term.  We've built up a lot of goodwill, and that can only help the children.

But, I'm pretty sure he does, on some level, know my relationship with DB started before the separation.  At least in hindsight, he has to know.  The signs were all there - the jumpiness, the increased texting and IM-ing, the distraction, the irritability ... I was like a textbook case, and the timing fits.  In fact, my ex said that he could certainly speculate about the timing of the relationship and whether it related to our problems, but he didn't care about that anymore.  I don't think that's true - he has to care.  It's more likely that he doesn't really want to know, that he doesn't think the information would be helpful.  And it wouldn't.

In the end, it was a productive conversation.  My ex wasn't angry; he just wanted me to know he knew.  I'm relieved that I don't feel compelled to hide a big piece of my life anymore.  I see his acknowledgment that I'm now in a relationship as a sign that my ex is starting to move on, and that is healthy for him.  If he is a happier person, my children will have a happier father, and I want that for them, and for him.

Now, underneath it all, he still wants me back.  I know this because he said so.  But, in the same sentence, he said that he would no longer obstruct the divorce settlement because he had realized it was what I needed.  Sort of an "if you love something, set it free" approach.  He has finally accepted that he can't force me back into his paradigm.

I truly don't hate my ex.  We were not well suited to each other, or rather, we were too suited to each other in the exact wrong ways.  [Cue in Prince's "When Doves Cry"]  He married someone like his mother, who would cushion him from taking responsibility for himself or others.  He emulated his father, a brilliant but absent minded and socially and emotionally inept professor who has no way of conceptualizing people on their own terms.  I married someone like my father, who always gets his way.  I emulated my mother, a chronically depressed martyr.  It's a typical codependent cycle.  Eventually, though, it seemed like I had learned whatever lesson I was supposed to have learned from that experience, and the situation wasn't going to change, so it was time to move on.

Now, what have I learned?  That's a question for another post.