Cheating & Betrayal·
SICK OF HIMSELF
A man abandons his wife of two decades for a younger lover, ignores stern warnings, and nine months later confronts a hollow romance and a brutal self-reckoning.
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He left his wife of 20 years for a 30-year-old girlfriend, and then spent the next nine months watching his ex-wife's warning come true in real time.
The poster says he and his wife are still legally married, both 45, and had been together for two decades. For years, he calls her "the love of my life." Then he met someone new: younger, exciting, and, in his words, the kind of relationship that made him feel alive again.
When his wife found out, she did not hide her disgust.
"Leaving your wife of 20 something for a 20 something? How original," she told him, brushing off his attempt to explain that it was not about age. Then came the sharper edge of it. "Let me guess, because she cares about her looks. Because she is so positive and adventurous."
She did not stop there. She warned him that when the glow wore off, he should not come back to her. "When reality hits, don't come running back," she said, and then laid out exactly what she thought would happen: "When she stops blowing you in the 'most wild places' because she knows that she doesn't have to now, when she realizes that she wants more and asks for more, when your answer and actions aren't good enough for her, when she stays in bed, scrolling her phone all weekend, because now she has you she doesn't need to pretend to be oh so adventurous anymore. Remember that you haven't traded up."
She pointed to their own marriage, too. "The love and respect we had and look how it ended," she said. Then she threw the whole thing back at him: "How do you think this one that started by hurting the people closest to you will end?"
Nine months later, the poster says the answer is staring him in the face.
The girlfriend moved in three months ago. Since then, he says, he has grown miserable. The fighting never seems to stop. She nags. She scrolls on her phone. The energy and adventure he thought he had found are gone. He says he feels no real affection for her at all, not even like. Around other people, he acts as though everything is fine, but privately he says he thinks about his wife every day.
At some point, he told the girlfriend the blunt truth: "I will never love her like I do my ex."
And now, after all of it, he says the part he cannot shake is the one he can barely say out loud.
"I am sick of myself."