What to do when He/She Leaves?
Assuming you want her (him) back.
People frequently come to me with this problem. Actually, this is my most read article. To me that suggests that a whole pile of people only “really wake up” when their partner starts to pull away. And you are probably one of them, right now. I feel for you. You’ve probably done a whole bunch of things “wrong” and don’t know what for sure. I am sorry it took you so long to wake up. A lot of my work, shared here on this website, is for you. Take your time, breathe and read on. Take heart! Waking up is always a good idea – at least in the long run.
First job is to turn your partner around, or at least halt their moving away. Some years ago, in 1998 I believe, I came up with a short set of answers to this situation and have not felt the need to change them since. It works. Follow the four steps. Print this Article in PDF
1. GIVE UP ALL SIGNS OF PUSHING.
This is very important. Your partner is already moving away. Anything you do to push them will tend to make them move away faster and further. Stop anything that might be construed as pursuing or pressing them. If your instinct is to call them twice a day, start calling them once a week. If your instinct is to send them a gift, do it once a month. If you are trying to find out what they are doing by asking other people, don’t. Leave them alone – a lot, but not completely. (I do not recommend “no contact.” (See my article When to Fold ‘Em.) Let your partner contact you when they are ready. (See Reliable Membership Article.)
2. SURVIVE
Do not be surprised that you may feel awful, or sick, or depressed. This is normal when you feel left behind, abandoned. The feeling will go away – with a lot of time. We all can live alone. It’s not good for us, but we can. So, in the meantime, continue to live your life. Go to work. Eat well. Sleep well. Do more exercise. (It will help you sleep. It will help with any depression you may feel.) Be among friends. While you do this, you might consider staying away from friends of your partner’s gender. If you cannot sleep or seem very depressed, see your doctor. Some medication may be helpful for a while. If your partner speaks to you, don’t tell them how hard a time you are having. That will probably not get you the sympathy you want. Just say something like, “Well, it is tough.” And say no more.
3. WORK ON YOUR SELF, VISIBLY
See a counselor. Read books. Talk your problems over with friends, your pastor, your priest, your rabbi, etc. Learn what you can. Read my papers on Using Turtle Logic and The Two Walls. Chances are there is a lot for you to learn. Most often when a partner leaves, they have been planning it for a long time. Most often they have felt terribly lonely with you. You, on the other hand may have been taken by surprise. Ask yourself, what led you to be so unaware of your partner? What led you to be so unaware that they were in distress enough to consider leaving you? Try to not blame yourself too much. All relationship trouble takes two. And so, Get to Work. Work on yourself.
And do this work so that your partner knows. The chances are one of the reasons they are leaving you is because they believe you will never change. They have become hopeless about you ever changing for the better. By visibly working on yourself, they have to wonder what you are doing and who you are becoming. That is much better than their continuing to believe that you will never change.
When I say “visibly,” I mean that you take opportunities to let them know that you are doing something. If they call, say you only have a little time as you have to get to your counseling appointment. Say, “By the way, I’ve been reading a book on marriage. It’s interesting.” Remember to follow Rule #1, and not say much. Don’t try to “teach them.”
4. BE AVAILABLE MINIMALLY WHEN YOUR PARTNER ASKS FOR CONTACT
It is reasonable that your partner will try to contact you. They may ask for a chat. Ask, “How long?” Agree to give them half that time. They may ask for dinner together. Agree to give them a short one. They may ask for you to spend the night. Stay only through the evening. Get used to this. Think that you are trying to get a deer to come out of the forest and eat from your hand. You have to earn (or in this case, re-earn) their trust and never lose it again.
Good luck.
P.S. And when he/she stops the leaving and starts tentative connecting or checking you out, be ready. For more on this subject, particularly once you have managed to get your partner to slow down their leaving, you might want to read “Out of the Blue” means “Read the Tea Leaves”.
You will probably also want to check out my Map of Relationships to put a clear framework around what is going on and what your choices are. Being foolishly stubborn, i.e. doing what you have been doing, will probably lead back to the same “them-leaving” problem. Being stubborn about “learning-to-do-new-things” seems to be the only path.
Notes:
There are so many excellent comments submitted that I archived them in two PDF files. Aug2007–July2008 and July2008–April2010. These are good.
Click here for “all” my articles on Clingers. Avoiders.
Remember, this is just one (Reliable Membership) of the several major problems in relationships. When you solve this one, when your partner turns around and decides to consider staying with you, there are the other problems in front of you. Take a look at How to Use this Website, or Using my logic on relationships, or Where to Start. The most comprehensive place to start is always my Map of Relationships.
Good luck.
Download an audio file of me sharing 26 minutes of further discussion for $5.00.
By © Al Turtle 2002
Hi all,
I am in a tough situation, my wife has asked me for a divorce recently, I'll be honest that I'm surprised she didn't much earlier on.
When I met my wife she was a good Muslim girl, very happy. Her family were extremely strict with religion, I had to pretend to be Muslim in front of her family for our entire marriage, only 4 years long. Our relationship was rocky from the start, trust was broken almost immediately, I was at the time we met flirting with old friend over the Internet, they of course live over seas. She caught me out with this and was upset with me, I deleted this friend immediately with out any warning or hesitation, I realised it was a problem. I met some one else online as well who I started chatting with and one day agreed to meet up for sex, little did I know that this person had informed my then girlfriend at the time. So of course I was caught out again. Thankfully. After a discussion she chose to give me another chance. I later learned that she had been flirting with men on the Internet too, when I approached her about it she turned nasty laughed at me and said it was nothing, I insisted that it hurt me, she threw her engagement ring on the floor and left. I chased after her and apologized and begged her to take me back. She finally did. I had even printed out the pages of her conversations with these guys and that had made her furious. She later on found me sending dirty text messages to some one else I had met on the net before meeting her, she was furious and chose to leave me again. Again I begged for her forgiveness and she gave me a chance again. I had once found out that she had gone to meet another man for lunch and hid it from me, when i asked her about it she again laughed at me and taunted me saying that he was her lover boy. I was so angry and hurt, she stormed off and again threw her engagement ring on the carpark floor and left. I chased her down and begged her to forgive me and take me back. She did. After we got married I caught her out on a few lesbian dating sights talking to woman, she didn't say she was married but did live with a house mate. She was handing out her number and email address to them. I was so hurt, I felt destroyed inside. I asked her about this and her first reaction was to laugh at me. This broke me even more. She got angry with me and abusive. Again threatened to leave me, I had to beg and plead with her not to leave me, she agreed to stay and not do it again. I had soapy emotions running through my head, so many thoughts that perhaps I was just her way of getting out from her families strict rule. Now she could come and go as she pleased. I was so distraught I would cry at work, come home and pretend to be strong. I started putting up gay adds on a personals sights and joined a gay men's forum. The stuff I said on these places were disgusting and I am now ashamed of it. I was talking to some of these men. I bought a new sim card and used an old phone so that they could call me. I never met any one. I would agree to but never went through with it. She eventually found the sim and after much screaming and fighting and me begging her not to look at those sites i eventually gave her the access codes. She spent the next few days going through all of them, saving everything on an external hard drive to keep as evidence. I never went to those sights again. I slept in my van for days before she agreed to talk. I begged her to forgive me, she took me back. We chose to move I. With my mother to save money to buy a house. She one day started accusing me of some thing. I remember being so furious cause I was innocent, she took our daughter that night and went to a hotel, moved in with her mother the next day. This was the day she decided that we were seperated. After a while we tried to start working on things again so hard, she chose not to speak to me much and admitted tht she was distanceing hersel from me and didn't want to involve me in her life. She would go out and not tell me where or who with. She was meeting woman off the Internet as friends and clubbing and drinking. She eventually moved into her own place and I soon moved in later. I tried to always take her out talk to her and involve her with things, she would just tell me that I was talking to her and I was only giving her dribs and drabs of my days, I would tell her everything though. She would not communicate anything back to me though. I joined an application o my iPhone and was talking to woman, no flirting really, maybe just a little stupid words her and there, I would talk about my marriage and problems, it was some one for me to talk to, I have not a single friend, seriously no one. I had moved her form over seas and wasn't even in contact with people there. I told her about the application and she got furious demanded to see the conversations do I showed her she flipped out. I moved into the spare room, she then used the app herself on the phone and was chatting to random guys, I was not allowed the right to see the messages of course, she would always tell me that I had no right. We moved to a house for the space for the little one. We were not on good terms and things were tough. She was leaving at night and going clubbing and getting home at 4:30am drunk, I have no idea where she was or with who and she told me I had no right to ask, I would go to the gym room to work out and she would send me a message that she was going out, when I stepped out of the room to ask her where she was already gone and came home early hours of the next morning. I asked the next day to see her phone and she screamed and refused and grew so abusive screaming at me to hit her, I got in my car and left, when I returned she was gone again moved in with her mother leaving me with a rent to pay that was more than half my pay chech every week. She now lives on her own and I live with my family, she often goes out clubbing and drinking, I found out that she was meeting guys and making out with them during this new seperatuon, I chose not to bring it up even though it hurt me but I knew that during our seperatuon I had met 3 woman, but she was meeting so many men, she says she didn't sleep with any but I was to scared to tell her that I believed she did. We trie a bit again but there was no willingness, it was all gone, just empty attempts, I reopened a dating site I was once on and started flirting with woman, on valentines day she came running into my office hoping to catch me out and she did, just what she wanted. Even though in the bottom of my heart I know she was also still seeing those guys and had that app on her phone. We were being friendly, she started letting me kiss her again, we were even intimate, she then went on a weekend away with her friend and I found out that she was meeting guys in clubs there and making out with them on the beach, she was so proud of it she sent a link to a friend to brag about what a hottie he is. Destroyed me. Crying from the moment I was awake to the moment I fell asleep. She eventually got me to sign the divorce papers telling me that it was the worst 4 years of her life that I had made her completely miserable. I still cry within the first minute of being awake. I just don't know what to do. I feel like throwing my self off a bridge. I made the one woman I love more than anything completely miserable, and all I do is tell her I love her, that no matter all the problems there were they wet the best days of my life.
Good going, Jane. Yup. The Slave sometimes angles for power. In the first paper I wasn't fully aware of that. By the second (5 years later) I was on it. Power of Passivity was a great set of discoveries. Scary stuff, too. Good luck.
Thanks Al
I do want to rebuild not necessarily with a view to getting back together but with a view to growth and communication and ultimately increased happiness for us both. I am really learning a lot from your articles more than the books on relationship rescues, dances of anger etc that I have been reading for years. I am sorry to learn our relationship is a total cliche. I am going to work on myself but I am interested in learning more about the Master/Slave model. I think I have often taken the Master role and my husband the Slave role but I think the Slave role has the power. By disengaging through silence then the slave manipulates and encourages the excalation of the dispute by pushing the master to either keep arguing alone (which I have done supplying his answers some times!) or by retreating into their own silence (only for the issue to be revisited at a later date). I think breaking this will be the hardest task.
Thanks again -Jane
Hm. Wow. Tough times. Glad you found a counselor to be on your side as you do what you will do next.
First thing is to be clear with yourself whether you want to “rebuild” your relationship with him (think from ground up) or whether you are ok with going your separate ways. I can't help you on that decision. And you can make that decision and change your mind later.
If you don't want him back, make sure you head for an attorney to help you with building appropriate boundaries with this partner of 35 years.
If you want him back, then I would shift to following the advice in my article on What to do when he/she leaves you. Then I would study the my Map of Relationship and using it begin to plan the new “you” that you are going to have to start on – working on yourself.
My husband of 35 years and I havent been happy for the last few years. I push for communication and he retreats. Its been like that for years. He told me he wasnt happy and was leaving and the next day he was gone. I was worried about him and was very sad but hoped a break would help us to reconnect. I started counselling, didnt try and contact him and tried to get perspective. Two weeks on I was less unhappy and starting to think maybe we could be friends. His mail is still coming home and I opened a letter thinking it was a bank statement but it was a confirmation of a new account for him and a woman. Obviously he moved on and planned for some time. He doesnt know I have found this out and I am devastated but trying not to react. What now?