Was I always just his back-up option?

DEAR BEL,

I REALISE worse things are going on in the world, but my feelings have been well and truly hurt. My husband and I have been together nearly 30 years, married for 25. It was passionate initially, but has now settled into companionship.

I’ve always felt he didn’t truly love me. It’s a second marriage for us both; we had children by our first spouses and then together. When we met we were months into marital splits, our partners having left us for others. He seemed more upset than I did. Neither marriage had been good.

Very quickly I became pregnant. He was shocked, but seemed pleased, as was I. A mutual friend took me aside and said I should be wary as my then boyfriend was someone likely to take up with someone else before really getting over the ex. He said he didn’t want me to get hurt, but feared I’d be dumped.

I told my boyfriend about this conversation and he was furious, saying this guy had always disliked him and his family. He assured me there was no truth in the suggestion. So we married.

But a few months ago in a casual conversation, not even an argument, he admitted that had his ex-wife asked him to go back to her, he would have done, even though I’d have been left abandoned and pregnant.

He said you don’t get over a ten-year marriage in a few months and he’d have gone back to her to prioritise his older children — as what you don’t have, you don’t miss. Meaning our unborn child!

When I said this hurt and I wish he’d never told me, he said it hardly mattered as it didn’t happen anyway — because his ex didn’t ask him back.

Now I just feel I was the back-up plan, second best and our entire relationship and the longevity of it has been based on a lie.

He remains quite happily unconcerned at how it’s made me feel, but it gnaws away at me and I can’t see a way forward. MOLLY

THERE is nothing at all trivial about the hurt human beings have always been ready to inflict on one another. Sometimes it’s deliberate and cold, sometimes truly cruel. Other times the hurt is carelessly dished out, as if it didn’t really matter.

That’s what your husband has done, and I am not surprised you feel you can’t get over it. In fact, I feel indignant on your behalf because it all seems so unnecessary. What on earth possessed the man to be so brutally honest? First, perhaps you should consider the exact content of that casual conversation. Then think hard about something — anything — which might have prompted this strange confession.

Do things truly ever come out of the blue? Somehow I don’t think so — and nor did Freud.

I’m asking whether something triggered his brooding about the past. has he had any problems with health (physical or mental) recently? Is he worried about something? has something happened within his first family to upset his equilibrium? I imagine he is in regular touch with those adult children, so wonder if somebody said something to make him reflect on what his life would have been like had that first marriage not broken up, instigated by his first wife.

Many men are poor at communicating their thoughts and feelings, which is why I ask these questions.

This whole episode may not be so much about you and your relationship, but more about him at this point in his life. I know it won’t seem that way to you, but it’s worth a few thoughts. That is one ‘way forward’.

The second is to realise that you ‘rescued’ him from loneliness and loss all those years ago, but the woman who caused that hurt has remained frozen in time ever since: his lost love.

You don’t want to hear that, but it expresses a truth about humans — that an emotion can remain ‘stuck’, and repeat itself like a broken record.

Maybe a part of him hankers after that long-gone state of victimhood, when all his emotions were highly tuned and ‘real’ — in contrast to the ordinary, companionable, rather humdrum present.

Getting older can be quite depressing; some people react by sending their daydreams spiralling backwards towards a reality that’s preferred to the present.

You say he’s ‘unconcerned’, yet men can be obtuse. If I were you, I’d talk to him again, not as somebody hurt and upset (i.e. a victim) but as a wife who wants to know if he has been unhappy for the past 30 years (i.e. someone in control) or, if not, what’s wrong now? Don’t be fobbed off.

I simply don’t believe he never loved you, or that he saw you as ‘second-best’. He’s just all over the place, and the way forward is to find out what’s going on.