I care for her well-being. I mean, I spent 15 years with someone, and I feel like I’m following a guidebook on divorce.
My marriage ended in a mutual tone. She obviously didn’t love me in the same ways she used to, same for me as I used to for her, but she’s still a person, and we still spent 15 years together. Formative parts of our teenage lives were experienced together. It’s not even as-if there’s a void, it’s a gaping hole through to the other side.
I don’t know if she’s dead. I don’t know if she’s ok. I don’t know anything, and I’m afraid to ask. I cut off all contact, as was pretty much universally suggested and even I had a lot of ideas that I’d never really come away from it entirely unless I literally separated my life from her. It’s a divorce. It’s what you do, isn’t it?
I just want her to know it wasn’t so much by choice as it was a commonplace necessity, but… why would she care? I also get the sense that the second my name is seen on any note, it would just the thrown away, and am I even right to send one, and for what long-term purpose?
It’s just a waste of time, isn’t it? We should just move on, but… can I? 15 years. I’m 35 now. I should be spending my last five decent dating years finding someone new, but I’m stuck on her being ok. I don’t even have to be the one to find out, just someone tell me she’s ok.
She probably just hates me and never wants to hear from me anyway, and what good would it do? I’d know how she is, I guess, but she’d have another thread into my life and things could end up more complicated overall.
Every time this comes up in my head, I decide against it, but it keeps coming up, almost daily, like a self-induced torture. “Just don’t think about it!” Easy talk…
Once you’re done healing you can seriously ask yourself if you want her as a friend. But where you are now isn’t there. You divorced for a reason and that reason is so you could both try your hands at finding a relationship that worked better. Right now you aren’t ready for that as to be expected. It sounds like you’ve never been an adult without her. Of course that’s hard, and of course you feel so badly damaged and emptied. But if she’s filling that hole, you aren’t letting it heal.
Seriously imagine trying to date and fall in love with a woman who left her ex husband, but felt so empty that she had to bring him back into her life.
Go learn to live on your own as an adult. Make new friends. Get comfortable. Heal. Then when you feel like you’re genuinely in a place you don’t need her or another partner, then you can do two things: start looking for someone new and reach out to an old friend you happen to have been married to once.