TL;DR - Divorced my wife after cheating on her emotionally for years, she had cancer during some of it, met her new bf and feel like crap now.

This is a long story, and beyond nuanced, so please bear with me as I go through it. Male, single dad, divorced and incredibly depressed and lost. I initiated the divorce for a number of reasons, but not the least of which was that we were constantly fighting, and I was cheating (emotionally).

I was married for 7 years, and my ex and I have been together for almost 2 decades. We grew up together in nearby schools, went to college together, and moved to our current city together. We were in love, but all the while I was chatting online with other women.

She knew about this during college, and told me it needed to stop, and it did for a period. I have since learned through therapy that this (along with cannabis and alcohol) have been long-seated coping mechanisms I learned to avoid dealing with incredibly complex, overwhelming emotions (fear, anger, sadness, grief, loss, frustration, hopelessness, and suicidal ideations) from an early age. While cannabis use was fine within the context of my marriage, infidelity was obviously not.

I have been in various types of therapy for this over the last 10 years to try and understand this need for distraction, and I'm exploring a new style of therapy that has helped me to uncover some very painful things that I haven't been dealing with in order to shape and hopefully help me along my path to finding myself and becoming a better man.

However, right now (a month and a half after we finalized our divorce), I'm flailing... I have been crying several times a day this entire week, and I know that is part of the process. I hurt a lot and I'm trying not to beat myself up over it... but it breaks me every time i think about how much pain I've caused my ex-wife... whom i still deeply love, and who currently does not share that love.

I know right, of course she doesnt love you right now, you sought external solace from other women during your marriage, and when things got BEYOND hard you gave up on love... I was scared, and i didnt feel like i was supported to pursue treatment and really start to unpack my trauma... of course now I'm doing it without ANY of her support.

What comes next will be hard to hear.

I told my wife about my infidelity about 4 years after we were married, a month after the birth of our son. She was still recovering from a cesarian, and i dropped that bomb in her lap. She stayed with me, despite wanting to leave... and for the next year I was honest with her when I sought it out, while going through therapy, but i didnt have a good understanding of why i was doing it. I think now, hindsight being 20:20 that I was overwhelmed by being a new dad.

Over the next year I occasionally ended up back online and chatting, but now everytime I did I stopped myself and immediately told her. In April 2019, she was diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, and we immediately started treatment. I stopped any online chatting and focused on her and our son, but I didnt take care of myself... I wasn't seeing a therapist, I had no real support network outside my family and close friends, or rather i didint have a support system that understood what it was to be a cancer caregiver, and go through watching the person you love the most wither away into a skeleton. I have severe, immobilizing PTSD when i remember her waking up from her tumor removal surgery, her skin grey and the thinnest i have ever seen her in my life (I'm crying while writing this ...) and to add to that... My aunt died of the same type of cancer in the same hospital 20 years earlier.

During her treatment, she regularly told me that I was not emotionally available or supportive of her... and I know that my trauma (sucide of a close friend, death of an ex gf, death of my aunt, death of my grandfather all occuring in about a 12 month period during my senior and junior years of HS) prevented me from being able to be AS emotionally available as she likely needed, but I know i did the best that I could at that time. She also had a 3 week period at the end of radiation, where she became convinced that the stress I caused in our marriage caused her cancer, and she reminded me that at least once a day for 3 weeks before she finally apologized. That destroyed me, because (as I'm learning now) i internalize the pain i've caused other people and shut down.

We divorced, it was amicable but bitter - she didnt want me to sell the house, wanted to keep living there with our son and pay rent/get a roommate, which our lawyers and the mediator all recommended against - but she has told me she'll never forgive me for taking away her garden.

We separated in March, and she started dating, finding a guy (whom is her new BF) in April. While i initially had a period of seeking out new partners, ive since realized that it was a distraction from dealing with how much I'm hurting... and stopped.

I still have open communication with her, which is necessary for logistics with our kiddo, but i have also been overstepping (inappropriate because shes in a new relationship) by emotionally cannonballing her. I told her all about what I've been uncovering with my new therapist, how I'm committed to healing and doing the work, going through the long process of forgiving myself and finding myself and my path again and hopefully finding happiness at the end.

It kind of boiled up this week because I met her new BF (she's introduced him to our son... after dating for 3 months, despite my opinion that it was a bad idea). I've been in a tailspin all week, crying constantly... Im jealous, but only because I no longer have the chance to make her happy and somehow redeem myself for the past... which Is an impossibility anyways - It happened, and I cant fix it.

I'm just trying to heal, be better for myself, my son and any future partner that I find... and this is such a derailment.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk