Thankyou for your helpful response. You are of course 100 percent right and I know that I already am aware of what I need to do (leave him!) but I am just looking for the strength to do it.
By reading your post and others and recognising abusive cycles of behaviour I feel that 2010 has to be the year that I reach my wake up call and make the cut. I hope that all other women out there that are going through what I am find the strength to put themselves first again. Thankyou.

You are just an OPTION for him… Who would want to be with someone that’s destructive and abusive? Get it in your mind that you are never going to be HAPPY with him. He feeds you just enough to make you stick around. That’s what they do. Seems like you are at square one and you haven’t really had your wake up moment to leave and never look back. If unhappiness is what you’re in for then stay…. Don’t ask questions cause you already know what’s in it for you. But if you are serious about receiving the right kind of love and being in a relationship with a man thats capable of loving and committing then you need to make an EXIT…. Good luck

And, yes, it does take a lot of energy/thought to ignore someone. I will focus on us, our good news, and the people around us–including him, and only very briefly, and in the manner you advised, if he will cross our path that night! Very likely, he will, and for 2 reasons: (1) his wife won’t be there, as she just had a baby herself; and (2) the conversation-starter–my big belly–is an avenue for him to try to start to acquaint himself with me again. I am ready, though.

It is JUST A DAY!…..Out of 365!

If someone is who they are…. do you think this 1 day will make them any different in character…good or bad? Will it change anything about the existing situation, good or bad? Of course it won’t.

Here is where we tend to indulge in ‘fantasy’… and that becomes ‘our’ problem and is not really about the other.

Agreed, particularly if we don’t have a special someone in our lives at this time, Valentines Day highlights that because it is supposed to represent showing someone you love that you love them. If you feel you have no-one, you can allow yourself to feel somewhat excluded.

Like everything else, it is actually a choice. It is just that we don’t always realise it. Alot of the time we think we are a victim of circumstances. A victim of external forces beyond our control. If only we realised just how powerful we are…..

If you are in a healthy place, whether in or out of a relationship, you are going to feel completely differently about Valentines day. Firstly, you know that ‘real love and affection’ does not hang on just that one day…a meal, a rose and a cuddly teddy bear! It is so much more than that. Secondly, you will see it clearly for the commercial marketing that it has become…. and you won’t even want to buy into it. Like RES said, you will be expecting love and romance in its different forms (maybe no teddy bear! ) 365 days a year!

Thirdly, take away sleeping time, it is all of a few hours long! Why chose to mope about someone who didn’t represent ‘love’ anyway? Better to go out/stay in and have a great time with those who actually do care about and love you…whether it be your kids, family, friends or savouring the delicious moment by yourself…. hassle free!

Maybe Valentine’s Day should be reviewed and made into a day when you love and romance yourself! instead of winding oneself up in expecting it from another. Now wouldn’t that have a completely different emphasis and feeling on that day……

Change the emphasis and you change ‘the feeling’. That is when you realise…… it is actually a choice.

FYI #1: The friend who invited me is one of the women who projects her own obsession with him onto others (yes, including me), even though he is on record (in photos even!) as the one who is obsessed…with checking me out behind his wife’s back. Of course, I don’t care; this is all his problem. (See below.)

FYI #2: After all of the disrespect while seeing him, I resolved on NC and made a promise to myself (which I have since kept) to never speak to him, or even acknowledge him, again. I actually can’t stand the sight of him. It’s a cross between hate and disgust with the physical feeling of having eaten a bad taco. (Why is this?) I learned, over time, that he took back the woman he had previously abandoned AND told her about how intimate he was with me, that she TOLD mutual friends that we were intimate (though it was only “second base”), and that he once bragged about the women he dated (including me).

I ignore and avoid him. But what should I do and say if I am forced to acknowledge/speak to him? I really don’t want to talk to him AT ALL. He may want to congratulate me on obvious good news that we have: I am (finally!!) pregnant.

Oh NML… the red flags were there but I sooooo wanted things to work out. Man I wish this post had been up back then… because I turned a blind eye wanting so badly for him to really mean he wanted to be with me. I can say this though, it brings me comfort to see you write this as I realize it makes him what he is… and it almost makes me laugh that you called that entirely accurately as if my relationship with this man was so textbook. It helps me keep moving and teaches me to trust my gut next time.

I will say one thing… I hate that book “He’s just not that in to you” I feel it trivializes some of the issues we face (for example abuse) but one part I do love is where he says “if someone comes back saying they miss you, remember they had to leave you in the first place to be missing you.” How much value did you have to this person in the first place if he left?

Ladies, I am sure many of you like me have spent hours reading what NML writes, understanding what she is saying, but then saying “but why can’t he just like me…” trust me it has truly taken me a while, of seeing my ex again and again, watching him date other people, and seeing NML quote things he actually said to say “no this person really is who he is and it has nothing to do with him ‘just not being that in to you”. It has nothing to do with YOU at all!

Dazed