If there is change was it my fault?
I can relate to this question. I have often wondered if ex could have a successful relationship with somebody else. So far, he has failed miserably. We had an "open" relationship at the end and he couldn't find anybody that would stick around for very long. He would talk up somebody online and maybe meet up with them one time. After that, the other person would disappear and never talk to him again. I would belly ache to some of my friends and they would remind me how messed up he is and they would also remind me that anybody that would have him is probably not somebody that is very healthy. Even if he did find somebody, that person would have to be as dysfunctional as him.
I do not believe someone else could have worked harder with someone so untrustworthy to gain their trust(In other words I was as delusional as they steered me to be at the end).
I think a lot of us on these boards could say similar things. I stayed longer than any sane person would have or should have. I worked my butt off to save a relationship that wasn't really a relationship at all. It was me doing most of the work while flailing about wondering what the heck I was doing wrong. I spent a lot of time reading articles about how to improve a relationship. I spent a lot of time asking other people for ideas and things to do to get ex's attention and get him to plug into the relationship. When none of those things worked, I worked that much harder with the notion that it wasn't working because I must be doing it wrong.
Yes, probably there is someone more right out there for both of us, it's just I've never known someone so messed up from within a relationship that it would seem immediate marriage has to bring that out out. 6month sea deployment then 6 together seems like an interesting dynamic for someone with attachment and abandonment issues.
That should be a very interesting dynamic. At one point in our marriage, ex got a job out of state. I wanted to stay in our house with the kids and let him go ahead of us so he could get us set up in the new state and I could tie up loose ends and prepare the house to be sold. He would NOT hear of it. He dug his heals in so bad that I gave in and lived with him at his parent's house with our three young kids. That was a disaster. He was so afraid of being away from us. I thought it was weird because I grew up in a home where there were times when my dad would work out of town or be away at different times. Nobody freaked out. Everybody knew that dad would be back. There was no weird fears. The fear and desperation that he had over the idea of us staying behind was so not normal.