I didn't get the memo...

I don't think love dies so much as it evolves. People change. Relationships too.

Some people are monogamous for life. They don't change partners when one loses a spouse. My step-sister is an example of someone who chose not to remarry or have another partner when her husband died in a small plane crash 30+ years ago.

She is beautiful. Could have been a model if she'd wanted to. She was a wife and mother instead. When her husband was killed, she devoted her life to raising her children, and focusing on her career. She's had suitors, and turned them all down.

She didn't want anyone replacing the love of her life. So for her love didn't end, it is on hold. She believes in eternal love. Not the Mormon kind; the eternal flame. She's been given one or more signs that her husband is waiting for her on the other side. I believe that he is too.

As people age their interests aren't just focused on relationships. Some do, but not all. They find other interests to keep them occupied, engaged. Their children, community, volunteering, etc. It isn't all about romance. Romance fades even in relationships. What lasts that endures is built on trust, respect, commitment and common core values - and mutual love or at least like for each other when marriages last.

Another step-sister of mine won't remarry after her first ended in divorce because of her attachment disorder. She is a beautiful woman in her own right. She used to get mistaken for a famous movie actress in Los Angeles when she lived there and people would ask for her autograph. That's how much she looked like the movie star. She would laugh as she told them she wasn't the other person. She's still a beautiful woman even today as a retiree. Just didn't feel comfortable in relationships, so has remained single for her lifetime and is comfortable with her decision.

Different strokes for different folks.

There isn't an end to love in relationships. It's that people evolve and interests change. Love isn't the end all be all. There is much more to life than fairy tale romance, which only exists in fairy tales.

AMYJO:


thanks,

lots of wisdom there, 'too many of us' were sold the fairy-tale version....

Tell me about it. Especially as a Mormon.

It caused me lots of hubris in my relationships though. I was over-confident that everything was going to work according to my patriarchal blessing. Only it didn't.

Big seismic shift in my epicenter right there leading to the shelf cracking.

My true loves were not LDS, despite what my patriarchal blessing told me about dating. My soul mate died when I was quite young, unexpectedly. I dreamed of him the day before we met in real life. I dreamed about him dying in the months leading up to his death. And after he died but before my step-sister told me about it (the same one who lost her husband in the plane crash,) I dreamed he and I were married in heaven.

Life doesn't get any stranger than that.

My theme song during that time of my life was from Abba's "Winner takes it all:"

"The gods may throw a dice
Their minds as cold as ice
And someone way down here
Loses someone dear ... "

That I was given signs we'll be together again in another life was meant to be reassuring I suppose. It has taken me a lifetime to adjust to whatever that is supposed to mean. I'm still adjusting to that "new normal." And the next lifetime? Who knows what that will bring? Cause there are no guarantees with this merry-go-round. None whatsoever.

But that being said, guess what I'm trying to say is there is no end to love. It is on a continuum of space and time like our lives. It will exist like we do and is eternal from past to present, and to future. Love never dies.

I do care about "ex." BUT whoever got married to him that day in the temple is gone. I don't even admit to myself I was ever married to him. I tend to compartmentalize. I've had to to survive.

I never quit loving my boyfriend. I met him in 1978. He was a HUGE SURPRISE to me as I had avoided nonmormons. I had worked with him for about 8 months when I finally agreed to go out with him. That was it. I was in love. I didn't think he'd ever become available again, but he did. When I saw him again for the first time after 27 years, I felt I'd come home.

Love isn't easy I don't believe. We have our ups and downs. Both of us have a lot of baggage--especially me. It takes a lot of work, but we are committed to the relationship and we work through things.

My ex--I don't know how he ever loved me. I believe he loved me, but not like 2 straights love each other. People seem to forget that not only was he with the wrong "gender," so was I. I know the difference.

There are 2 other men I loved in my 20s and I will always love them in some fashion.

cl2 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> There are 2 other men I loved in my 20s and I will
> always love them in some fashion.


I feel the same way about the women I've loved, I don't think relationships 'die', I think they're murdered thru bad, ugly choices & actions....

and Worse, even Mormons don't seem to think that repentance, forgiveness apply to them.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/02/2019 09:27PM by GNPE.

didn't seem to think asking for forgiveness applied to him, but now I've seen a few times his regret for what he did. He doesn't cry often, but he has when he has told me how sorry he is. He needs to tell the kids in the same fashion as he did me. I was going to say especially our son, but our daughter likes to pretend she is over it, but her actions say otherwise. They test him to see if he'll abandon them again.

BUT him finally MEANING it made a huge difference in our relationship now.

The other 2 men in my past--long story about one. He is also a nonmormon I worked with. The other guy is who I started to date in the middle of my insane experiences with my gay boyfriend. I was a mess. He was so kind. He was an ex-druggie who had just gone back to church. I lived with his sister. I ended up marrying my ex because I basically didn't know how to handle the situation and I felt I needed to take care of him--my ex. I'm still taking care of him even if we aren't a couple. In reality, I SHOULD HAVE married the other guy. I know he would have asked me to marry him if I had said something.

Whether or not there is a fairytale relationship, love is the life blood of our relationships and our relationships define to a large degree who we are as individuals. When we harm people who trust us not to hurt them, we hurt ourselves.

Apologies can go a long way toward healing people's lives from relationship traumas. I have heard more than once that church leaders often say to an offender that their attempts to make an apology would do more harm than good. Most of the time, that is not true.

I had a relationship end terribly almost thirty years ago. The lies and exploitation were unbelievable so much that I didn't know what had happened until the very end of a long setup against me. I always told her the truth and had really loved her. The relationship ended in tragedy.

Years later, I had a dream one night that it had all been my fault. In the dream, I was so relieved because I could just apologize to her and to everyone else and take responsibility for everything that I had done wrong. That would help greatly with my suffering over the vicious ending that has persisted since. As some dreams go, logic in the dream wasn't so logical. I woke-up with a momentary sense of relief, until I was fully awake and started thinking about the list of things that I should apologize for and could think of nothing valid to apologize for. She had pursued me for months and gotten me to fall in love with her (I was young and naive then). She then lived a double life, gotten pregnant by someone else, did everything in her power to hide what she had done, and told lies about me to a lot of my (so-called) friends and neighbors to make her lies seem plausible. I was humiliated in front of everyone who I had introduced her to and many of them stopped trusting me because they didn't know who to believe and I didn't know that I had been positioned by her to appear to be a jealous and obsessed ex-lover. Several people were treating me strangely and I didn't know why.

A Superior court judge tossed out her request for a restraining order and he said that she should know that her actions might provoke me. I am pretty sure she was having sex with several of my neighbors and all of the two of the men and the one woman (all church members) who called the police on me in a malicious prosecution against me after I told their respective bishops about all of the sex, and church courts were held for all of them. She later married one of those guys and must have married the wrong one because my paternity suit (I filed it against her and her new husband) uncovered that neither he nor I was the child's father after the blood-paternity tests came back. After I knew the I wasn't the kid's father, I was done and haven't had any contact with any of them since then.

After thirty years, one would have thought that I would have gotten over it. I want no part of her life now and hope I never see her again until after she takes full ownership of her actions and apologizes to me (like that'll actually happen). And then after the apology and answering some of my questions, she still needs to stay the hell out of my life after that. Several former friends and church leaders need to apologize to me also for believing what she told them and taking part in injustices against me, figuring that dirty deeds are okay if you're doing them to someone who you were told is doing bad things also (but I wasn't). It's a burden loving someone who is either crazy or a sociopath because no matter what they've done to you. If you really loved them you can't just take that love and desire for them to be happy, back. You just suffer with it, whether you are capable of forgiving them or not.

I don't see her having a happy life no matter what though. It's not that I don't want her to be happy. It's that I can't see how it's remotely possible. I saw them (her and my ex-friend who married her) in a public park three years ago (not planned). The next day, I looked-up in public records to try to make some sense of what I saw there that day. They had divorced fifteen years earlier. She was visiting with what looked like they might be her teenage kids, some of who also had their own babies in strollers and they looked pretty young to have their own kids. He stayed about fifty feet away the whole time, watching everything carefully at a distance, but far enough away to give them privacy and like he wasn't allowed to get closer (possible court ordered supervision?). Then they all walked toward their car at the same pace but he didn't get close to them until they all got in to the same car and left together. He had a distressed look on his face the whole time. Their divorce case history in public records was long and consisted of continuous back and forth petitions by both sides to modify the child support. She was currently married to yet someone else. It looks like he got what was coming to him. His family's fortune and every dime he made probably went in to court fights and child support. I thought to look at his predicament and laugh as I passed, but that probably would have led to a fist fight. I told myself 'if they'll do it with you, they'll do it to you'. So I just looked away as I passed and kept my distance. I was carrying supplies some distance to load a vehicle and passed them three times before they left. Instead of cleaning-up the mess early and putting her on the right track earlier in life, the church leaders bought her lies and fed the even greater monster that she became. I was glad I had filed that paternity suit twenty-six years earlier. Whatever they had going-on there, I had no interest in their family. If I wasn't still unresolved about what they had done to me, I might have felt some empathy for them. I felt bad for those kids.

I hold Mormon church leaders responsible for much of the tragedy. They didn't have to buy-in to the lies. They could have played by the rules instead of trying to equalize things by breaking the rules (and the law). Everyone lost.

... This reminds me of blind people who've never seen an elephant trying to describe one, based on the particular part of the elephant they are touching or have touched.


Here's a way earlier attempt at this on RfM:

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,1358973


and again, no consensus, because there are so many parts to the elephant.

Commonality/camaraderie with many of the comments/observations.
Seems nothing told to us during our developmental years, is as it actually is - because those who told us, didn't know either.
So that growth is in finding the discrepancies between what we thought and what actually is, and somehow making peace with it.

It is sometimes harder to lose a dream or vision of how we thought it was, than to lose a life.

But it passes.

Each relationship is different, and in my own relationships (the one constant being my self, but at different stages in my life) love has endured a lifetime, or it has ended altogether.

What was the end of love in my marriages?

Marriage # 1. When my husband started beating me. He seemed remorseful, but his hatred of women and his innate cruelty never mellowed. I read everything I could find on the subject of spousal abuse, and learned that most wife-beaters never stop being abusive, and that there is NOTHING a spouse can do to make him stop. In the tiny minority of husbands who seek professional help, and stop assaulting their wife, the basic hatred of women and the basic arrogant entitlement regarding a wife as a "possession" is still there. It's all in the D & C 132, which he quoted to me, often, while he was hitting me. It is impossible to love someone that horrible. I made sure I didn't get pregnant. I hated him and feared him, and I ran away, filed for divorce, and never saw the creep again. The hatred went away, but there was always the fear. He beat his next two temple wives, and also his children. His abused son was recently divorced, because he beat his wife and molested is two adopted daughters. I'm grateful to have escaped that cycle of abuse.

Marriage #2 to another TBM. We started as friends, at BYU, and dated for 5 years, and it was off and on, because he didn't want to commit, and he wanted to date other girls. He went into the military, and I had my nightmare first marriage. When he found out I was divorced, he said he still loved me and wanted to marry me. I was moved by that--we really were in love! We had both been through a lot, and I thought he had "grown up." We had children, a nice house, and a good life, but my husband hadn't "grown up" at all. He was a classic Narcissist. I struggled to keep him interested in the children, went out with him to parties and date nights and weekend trips, made him dinner every night, gave him love and attention--everything I could do--but he always seemed pre-occupied with himself. I accepted his obsession with golf, because he needed a lot of freedom and self-time. (It turned out, that he wasn't golfing.) He never went to the children's school activities, performances or sports games. I was a "golf widow", with an otherwise happy life. I appreciated our life. My children were and are wonderful human beings. I would have stayed with him forever. Love is accepting someone with all their faults, and giving love without getting any love in return, so I thought.

My 15 years of constant, patient love and devotion ended in about one minute--when he told me that he didn't want a family anymore. He told me that he never did love me our our children, and didn't care what happened to us! He wasn't going to support us, or even see us, ever again. Poof. End of love in one minute. Nothing could ever make that right, or apologize for that, or evoke forgiveness for that. I would have forgiven infidelity or a normal divorce--but abandoning his own children was the worst! I tried to get him to contact the kids, for emotional support, but he gave them nothing, not even a birthday card, or inquiry into how they were doing, for 6 years. The kids saw him at his mother's funeral, and found out that he had cheated on me for our entire marriage--so the whole thing was a sham. He's married now, and has a pack of 5 snarling, biting adopted dogs, and whenever the kids contact him, he rejects them and insults them. Finally, this last year, they have given up trying to have a relationship with their father. My children are nicer than I am. "Forgiveness", by the Mormon definition, is not in my vocabulary.

My first True Love was the boy next door, who was 6 years older. I was only 18, and not ready to get married. He was and is an amazing human being, and there will never be anyone like him! He has always been an atheist. My TBM parents sent me off to BYU, and he married someone else, when he was 25. We still are in contact with each other. We knew our marriages weren't great. After my second divorce, he said that he didn't know why he married his wife, instead of waiting for me, and that he regretted marrying her, and that he wanted to have a relationship with me. I didn't want to break up his family (I loved his children), so I didn't respond to that. Good decision, because our friendship is still going strong, today. That love did not end.

My Mormon high school crush was one-sided, or so I thought, until he got serious about me in grad school. (I had not met my first husband yet, and my second husband was dating other girls.) We were madly in love--romance, passion. Country adventures, hiking and skiing. City dances and concerts, and romantic dinners. Love letters and poems. He was The One, until he decided that he didn't want children. Well, I was raised a Mormon, and was a nanny and teacher, and I loved children. To have a child was my one dream in life, so I had to continue on my life's journey without him. I was on the rebound from that heartbreak, when I met and was conned by the wife-beater, who pretended to be the ideal Mormon RM, and wanted a nice Mormon family. Beware of rebound relationships! We're older now, and I'm glad I didn't marry my high school crush, but the sound of his voice, the look in his eyes, still makes my heart jump. He has such charisma. Crushes don't go away, either. Often, it's hard to tell the difference between a crush and real love, just from your emotions. I love him as a friend, too.

So much of relationships is decision-making and good choices. Follow your deep-down gut feelings plus your own mind, and give it TIME.

The Love that really matters is the love you have in your own heart. That is the love that gets your attention, that you build upon, that lasts over time, that you can depend on. I always had that internal love towards others, my parents and friends, towards life, nature, and animals, while my other "loves" came and went.

My children are the greatest love I have ever known! And grandchildren! They have actually given me love, in return! I am truly happy. I've been single for 30 years, and have all the love I could ever dream of in my life!

What a rough story. I'm so glad it ended well and that your kids and grandkids are both doing well and making you happy.

That is good news.

I was in a loveless marriage. I think I knew that from the start, but we were young mormons and in lust for awhile. I envy people who truly feel love in marriage, even when (especially when) the lust decreases or even goes by the wayside. There's a difference. I could live with love but no lust. But not the other way around. So love (i.e., in relationships) has a lot more to do with respect, honesty, feeling happiness, and just plain caring what happens to another person.

+1