"I Told You So" Hurts Too time4me: We knew each other for 11 years, married for the last 2. He lead a pretty unstable life for quite a while, but really changed his life around a couple of years before we married. We worked really hard on making a good life for ourselves in that time, however, few were thrilled for me when we did get married. I truly loved him and I was prepared for a few bumps in the road given his past, but things just snowballed downhill a few months in. His business went bad, I lost my job and got pretty depressed, we had financial troubles, and on and on. With all that pressure, he started to fall back into old patterns, betrayed my trust and we are now divorcing.
As if this is not hard enough, I now have to deal with "I told you so" from every direction. I am humiliated enough that my marriage failed, but to realize that no one believed in it from the start really hurts. Some seem excited that now think they can finally tell me what they really thought of him. No matter what has happened now, he was the man that I loved and wanted to spend my life with when I got married and it hurts just as much to hear that torn apart as ever. It makes me feel very lonely as if I was in the wrong for loving him at all. Now I feel like I have to walk a very fine line with most of my family and friends - I need support, but I am cautious in keeping it a little distant so as not to be hurt more by their responses. This is my experience and pain, not their's to judge.
Re: Carrie: Dear time4me,
"I told you so"?? Maybe your friends just wish that you hadn't been hurt. What they don't see is that even though you are hurting your experiences are your own and that your marriage wasn't worthless! YOU are the one living your life, you know a lot more about yourself than they do and you made your own decisions. You had happiness and joy (I hope!) with your friend/husband, not just the pain that you are in now.
Having a relationship end in pain doesn't negate the entire relationship!
Yes, the truth is that you were/are hurt - but you are going to use your experience and pain to LEARN something more about yourself. THAT is a divine response to the inevitable pain of human existence. I believe that you will learn a LOT more about yourself through the pain that you are experiencing now than you would have by steering clear of a "risky" situation based on your friends' "advice".
I fully support what you are doing! Tell your friends and family that you appreciate their wish that you hadn't been through this pain - but you want them to join you in the next steps of your life... You are honoring the good things that you had in your relationship but not allowing your friends to taint your mind with the thought that your marriage was worthless. You are growing rather than letting your pain defeat you. That is true strength of character!
Hang in there!
-Carrie
Re: "I Told You So" Hurts Too time4me: Thanks for your support Carrie.
I am trying very hard to grow from all of this experience and hopefully will come out wiser for the journey. This has also made me look at some of my relationships with particular friends/family and see who is really there to support me and who is there to pay more attention to getting their point across. I realized that I may also have to end or put on hold at least one of these "friendships" if it causes me more pain than relief in the long term.
Now that I have a little distance from my relationship with my s2bex, I have been able to release a lot of the stress that had been building up with all of the problems we had and start to see what caused them. Luckily, my professional life is also back on track so that I can focus on dealing with healing my heart. Even with all the hurt, I am still feel that taking the risk on that relationship was right at the time and I don't want this to stop me from taking a risk again, but this time from a better perspective of myself and what I am looking for in a relationship.
Re: "I Told You So" Hurts Too sueb: Mean people suck and that includes family and friends sometimes. I think people are just stupid sometimes and unfeeeling. If someone says something that hurts you like I told you so... tell them where to go! You are going through hell right now and what you need is support. Stand up tall for yourself and NEVER EVER EVER let someone hurt you like that. You need to be with people who supprot you no matter what happened whose fault it was etc etc.
Susan
