We See What We Want In the People We Love
We see what we want in the people we love. Does that mean that when we finally see what we don’t want to see we have fallen out of love?
I must not be quite there yet, because I am still having a hard time facing the reality of what my ex-to-be has done. It just seems so unreal to know that we were leading different lives when all along I thought we were sharing a life.
I wish I didn’t have to think about this divorce again. Sometimes I feel great but sometimes I’m still so heartbroken that I can’t see anything in front of me but the shadow of what’s behind.
I want to change my life, but I don’t know what kind of life I want or how I can pay for it.
The only thing I know for sure is that I don’t want to live in debt and I don’t want to spend the rest of my days worrying about money. I don’t want to end up with no retirement and a bunch of assets that aren’t really assets at all.
I have started a change of direction. I have the same goal: get out of debt and stay out of debt. But now I can get there my way, on my own timetable without consideration of someone else’s spending habits.
I haven’t been fooling myself. I am a better money manager and saver than my ex-to-be. I’ve managed to save for legal bills instead of rely on debt to pay them. I’ve been saving for my irregular expenses. I budget. I keep my money under my control even when it means passing up things I would like to have. But the truth is, I’ve lived a very austere life the last 10 years, feeling guilty for every penny I spend because I wasn’t working as many hours as my husband, because I worked only part-time, because I wanted to stay home even more and thought somehow that by not spending he would see that it was possible. He didn’t, and now I know that he never would have. He didn’t value any of the financial contributions I made to our family, because they were never enough.
I didn’t see any of this, because I imagined him to be so much more than he turned out to be. I made up elaborate reasons why he behaved the way he did, made the choices he made, had the reactions he had. None of them were real.
Because we really do see what we want to see in the people we love.
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