His Wife Abandoned Him but Now Wants Him Back. Should He Do It?

This is not our typical thing at Culturcidal, but every once in a while, there’s just a post on Reddit that’s too much fun not to share. This is one such post and after you read it, you’ll understand why.

My wife abandoned me but now wants me back

Last year my wife of 13yrs abruptly moved out of our apartment, she packed up everything she owned told me to expect a divorce and moved into her best friends house 3 hours away. she left me with the rent and bills to pay on my own with 10 months remaining on a lease and also left behind 2 of 3 cats. she eventually presented me with divorce papers i reluctantly signed and was unwavering in her decision. i cried and begged but she wouldn't budge. i was depressed, went through therapy took spravato treatments and developed body tremors from the severe anxiety. after some digging i learned she flew to NY to meet some guy she met on discord but to this denies it ever happened. after 10 months of misery i met a new girl, lots in common and she's smoking hot.. like omg she's so hot and she actually likes me.. I was so happy and out of my deep depression... just as things look up my ex wife shows back up at my apartment and tells me she made a mistake and wants me back. sobbing and panicking she tried to convince me she never really wanted a divorce but just space.. and she was only telling me she would never come back to distance me and she never meant it but always intended to come back home... i'm torn, for so long i wanted her back, i would have done anything for this chance months ago.. but i have fallen in love with someone else after accepting my fate.. should i accept that she has made a mistake and taker her back? or continue to try a new relationship with my new found love that may or may not continue to a possible future. should i go for the sure thing with my ex or risk being alone again if things width the new girl don't work out??? please help

Of course, we can’t possibly get a solid handle on the dynamics of a 13-year-long marriage from a one-sided 334-word post. As you get older, one of the things you learn is that there are ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS two sides to the story. Granted, sometimes that other side is “Yeah, that dude is just an ahole,” or “She’s a horrible human being,” but usually there’s a lot more to it than that.

For example, in cheating stories like this one, the first thing I always wonder is, “Were they sleeping together?” Believe it or not, a surprising number of married couples aren’t. Statistics vary on this subject, but…

While many people do seem to have satisfying sex lives, a very high number of couples did not have sex in the past year. According to a study conducted by Georgia University, almost a fifth of married couples didn’t have sex in the 12 months preceding the said study. Roughly 27% of women and 15% of men did not have sex in the last 12 months, according to an article published in VeryWellMind.

Having your partner refuse to sleep with you doesn’t justify cheating, but on the flip side, if you refuse to sleep with your partner and they cheat, you are far from blameless. That being said, we don’t know if they were having sex. We don’t know what their relationship looked like. Maybe she’s an awful human being or maybe he’s such a terrible husband, we’d be going, “I can’t endorse cheating, but I understand why she did it.”

So, after getting that out of the way, let’s take everything at face value because that’s all the information we have about what happened.

According to the author, his wife of 13 years “abruptly” left him with zero concern about how he would pay bills, apparently because she wanted to start a relationship with some guy she met on a Discord server. She asked for a divorce. He cried and begged her not to do it and she ignored him.

The divorce went through, and he was devastated. He then spent 10 months pulling himself together and found a “smoking hot” new girlfriend that he’s in love with. At that point, his now “ex” wife showed up, said she never really wanted a divorce, only “space,” and begged him to take her back.

First of all, marriage is a sacred and important thing. It’s not something to take lightly. If you get married, you should put a lot of time and effort into trying to save that marriage if it’s in trouble. That goes double if you have kids. However, they don’t appear to have kids and they’re also not married anymore because she insisted on a divorce even though he “cried and begged” for her to reconsider.

What that means is that at this point, he has a choice between two women.

The first is a “hot” woman who “likes him.” He says he loves this woman and that she makes him happy. That sounds pretty good, but he is indeed correct that he could end up “alone again” if things don’t work out with her. Of course, if things don’t work out, which is entirely possible, the fact he was able to land one woman like that suggests he may be able to land another woman like that. We can’t know that for sure with the information we have, but it seems like a good guess.

On the other hand, he has his ex-wife. Rather oddly, he calls her a “sure thing,” but given the situation, she seems like anything but. After all, if what he says is true, she discarded her 13-year-long relationship with him like a used candy wrapper for some guy she met on a Discord server and when he tried to save the relationship, she treated him like something she scraped off of her shoe.

While we can’t know exactly what happened from there, the best guess would be that things didn’t work out with the guy she met on the Discord server, she saw her ex looking happy with a really hot girl, she felt a twinge of jealousy, and she realized she may have acted too hastily. Of course, even that may be too charitable. She may just want to prove to herself that she can get him back or alternately, she could just see him as a placeholder to be with until she finds her next guy.

In any case, whatever her real motives may be, the fact that she was willing to check out of their marriage over his objections without making any effort to fix things or showing any concern for his welfare says an awful lot. So does the fact that she’s trying to gaslight him about what happened. I mean, seriously?

just as things look up my ex-wife shows back up at my apartment and tells me she made a mistake and wants me back. sobbing and panicking she tried to convince me she never really wanted a divorce but just space.. and she was only telling me she would never come back to distance me and she never meant it but always intended to come back home.

Ultimately, people do what they want to do, but if this were me and I had given 13 years of my life to someone only to be treated like that, I’d feel like it was time to move in a different direction. It sounds like his ex-wife tried to make him into “Plan B” after an affair didn’t work out and every man deserves better than that out of a marriage.

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