Do we have a future?

[PlaceboMonk]

Thank you in advance for reading this. I know it's long. Explaining four years of a complicated relationship is a daunting task. Honestly, thinking about how much time this will take to explain is overwhelming. I suppose I should start at the beginning.

In my fourth year of college I decided to take an internship with a company about 5 hours away from my home town. A few months later, the strain between myself and my girlfriend at the time became too much to bear, and I broke it off. To this day, I regret that decision more deeply than anything else I have done. I feel like this persistent pain is and has been an influencing factor in my love life.

After a short-lived romp with a local in this new town, I began dating my current SO. I’ve decided that the main reason for my persistence with her was because she seemed unattainable. It wasn’t that she was some rare beauty that made me think I could never get with her, it was that I felt like she should have been an easy catch and she wasn’t. She wasn’t very loving, caring, or giving. I think I couldn’t accept that she wasn’t very interested in me, and so it became a challenge. I was determined to win, and so I pursued her.

At the time, I was in no position to offer anyone what they deserved in a relationship. I was very egocentric and thought that I was so much better than the backwards, unintelligible locals that populated this place. I was such a fool. I figured I’d get what I want, live freely, and sew my wild oats as it were. Less than a month into being with my SO, I cheated on her with a married woman. This was my first time cheating on anyone and it has become my second most regretted decision of my life. The affair ended within a weeks time, but we swore to forever keep the secret to protect both of our interests.

The woman’s husband was suspicious and we were accused of the deed. We lied over and over again. The lies went on for a year until I couldn’t stand the weight of it anymore. I confessed, but by this time I had told so many lies and made such a heavy commitment to being the ideal partner that the revelation was a devastating blow. I don’t know how she was able to stay in the relationship, but she did. The betrayal did color our relationship from then on, as you can imagine. I was ever more determined to demonstrate my commitment, while she seemed to place less and less value on my efforts.

This is where my current agony truly began. Everything negative that I experienced between us from that point on, I would temper it with the knowledge that I had betrayed her, and that I deserve any discomfort I might feel. Anything she did or didn’t do was my fault for destroying her trust in me. Where before she was somewhat loving, from that point on she has given very little and been less and less appreciative of what I did for her.

This went on for over a year. I graduated college and returned to this town to continue working for the employer that hired me as an intern and moved in to her apartment while we looked for a house. We chose a house that was in an area between where we work and where her daughter from a previous relationship goes to school and spends half of her time with her father. This is about 45 minutes in either direction. 45 minutes to and from work every day, 45 minutes in the other direction nearly as often.

Things between us became increasingly strained, fights got worse, until it all came to a head and we were both at our wits end. I left home after a particularly bad fight, completely exasperated and desperate for relief from all the strain, intending to visit my parents and collect myself. That’s when it happened; she told me she was pregnant. This changed everything for me. I knew I could not abandon things now. I would not let my child grow up without me. Call it instinct or a learned behavior, but I simply could not fathom leaving my child.

This did not help our relationship, though. Everything we felt was still there, only now it wasn’t about us anymore, it was about our child. We fought through the difficulty and stayed together.

Our problems would still bubble to the surface regularly. I became increasingly likely to voice my displeasure at some of her tendencies as the guilt of my earlier betrayal waned. She will go to extreme lengths to do anything for her daughter, but did very little to improve our relationship. I bought a newer, reliable vehicle to keep our daughter safe, and because my SO drops off and picks her up most of the time, she exclusively drives this vehicle while I still drive my beater from college. My SO has gone from paying virtually nothing to paying for almost everything related to our daughter. This had to be the case because my finances are already strained as I pay for the house, the vehicle, and all utilities and maintenance.

After one particularly bad fight where I told her I was upset over the fact that 9 out of 10 days when she came home, she did nothing but play on her phone and watch TV. She rebutted that although I paid for our lifestyle, did nearly all the day to day chores, and am an excellent father, that I wasn’t affectionate enough toward her. She left to stay with a friend. The following day I went there, picked her up, and took her out to eat to talk about things over dinner. I tried to reassure her that I would do everything I could to accommodate her needs to keep our family together. A few days later she told me that after I left that night she cheated on me. She left our 9 month old daughter with her friend and went to another man’s house and cheated on me.

I can see how I’ve written this may make the reader have a lopsided opinion of things, so I want to pause here and try to be as fair as possible. She felt like I was not truly invested in the relationship. Although I did many things for us, she felt as though I was merely meeting the requirements of a family man, and not treating her like I loved her. She did not like that I rarely attended her daughter’s softball events, and it was a factor in making her feel like I was not invested in her and her daughter. It’s true that I did not often attend the games. I was feeling like “I’m doing all these things and she’s not doing anything in return. Why should I go the extra mile to give what little free time I may have to being on the road and at softball games, when she does virtually nothing for me?” I think that both of us felt like our cups were empty, and we had nothing to pour out for the other.

She seems truly remorseful and disgusted with her actions, but here’s the kicker. This guy, like her, is an assistant coach to her other daughter’s softball team. This puts me in an incredibly difficult position, because I have only two real choices. I can attempt to attend the softball events, or not. So far I have not gone. I feel like if I were to attend, there would be no way to stop myself from confronting this guy, which would invariably result in a much worse situation for all of us. Instead, I spend most days at home with our daughter while she is gone to the softball events.

Currently, until their season is over, I spend the majority of my days alone. When she is home, she’s only somewhat affectionate, and does very little to contribute to the household. She’s been diligent about calling frequently to tell me where she’s at and what she’s doing when she’s gone, but she’s gone most days. I would like to be able to honestly say that the only reason I don’t put her out is because I want to keep the family together, be close to our daughter, but I’ve wanted to end things since before she got pregnant, and have never been able to pull the trigger. When it comes down to it, I back off and make excuses to myself as to why I won’t end it. I love her, and I have put so much into this that it’s terribly hard for me to give up. I hate quitting, I hate failing. Above all, I don’t want to fail my daughter and want to spend as much time with her as I possibly can.

I’m trying so hard to make things work, but I remain perpetually unhappy and full of anxiety. My own interests have gone out of the window as I’ve been doing all I can to work 12 hours a day (actually 9, but when waking up on time and commute is considered, I am ‘working’ from 5AM to 5PM), come home and do all the chores, cook dinner, and spend time with her and our daughter. I am lucky to get a few hours a week to do anything for myself.

We have had many ‘talks’ about these feelings that I have. One of my demands for things to work was that she put her daughter on another softball team. This way I could attend and spend time with the whole family. She reluctantly agreed to consider it, saying that she feels like I’m telling her to either hurt her daughter’s feelings by changing teams or else I would end it. In my life, I’ve played several sports on several teams. It never crushed me or affected me in any way that I can remember to do so. But she seems to feel that her daughter has made such good friends on this team that it would be unfair to remove her because of something that she did. “You’re making me choose between my daughter’s happiness and our relationship and that’s wrong.”

Now, I live every day with these terrible feelings. I yearn for affection, worry about everything, and have to wonder if I’ll have a family tomorrow or not. Honestly, it’s crippling me. I feel like I’m losing my mental and physical health. Half of me hates her for what she did and for her continued inability to be a loving partner. The other half loves her, wants to feel loved by her, and thinks that if I try harder and give her what she needs that she will come around and reciprocate. I live every day in a hell of my own making, hoping for a sip of water which may or may not come. It often doesn’t.

I’m embarrassed to talk about this with the people I’m close to. I’ve only told my family in my home town. Mostly they think I should end it. I worry that this is biased and I am hoping that some fresh perspectives can help me make a decision.

Thank you again for taking the time to read this.

[Hooo!]

Stop accusing
Focus on talking constructive with person
Stop negative shit
Find ways together
Make her understand that if things do not change you do not want to stay in the relationship but that you want to work on it because you love her

And essentially
Cut the crap
Come to the point
Stop walls of excuses and explanations
Sometimes it’s useful
But most times it puts people of