posted by NymphaeAvernales
1 yr. ago
The comment I'm about to copy/paste came from a post in..I think it was AITA, maybe R_A….of a guy who wanted to abandon his fiancee just a few months after she was injured,and he wasn't even acting as caretaker or anything at the time. I was shocked at the number of people basically telling him he wasn't obligated to give one single fuck about the woman he supposedly loved, but this commenter really let the guy have it.
*I see a lot of patients whose partners do this to them. Many of them have other health challenges including TBIs and other neurological problems on top of what I’m seeing them regarding. In fact, I’m often seeing them because of depression or attempted suicide due to abandonment.
It is overwhelmingly men who abandon their severely ill partners. If I see men in these situations, their wives and fiancées usually stick with them and take on their care, and usually we have to step in a little to gently remind them to get the care and rest they need too where possible. When a woman is in this situation, more than half the cases I see feature the man emotionally checking out, doing everything he can to half-ass her care, blaming her, becoming emotionally neglectful and abusive, and then leaving.
So be assured that you’re normal. The overwhelming majority of other men in your situation would also abandon the woman they claimed to love and want to share a life with pretty much as soon as they’re not getting anything out of it. You won’t be alone, and you will find a huge number of people to make sympathetic noises and assure you that you did the right thing for poor you.
And you know what - yeah, this is an overwhelmingly hard situation. It’s one of the worst things a person can face. It’s terrifying. It changes everything. You will have a more fun life and be less stressed and be better cared for yourself and be happier in your other relationships etc if you leave.
But you need to be clear that the emotional trauma of abandonment kills. At least she’s physically cared for so it won’t have that effect, but taking away one of the tiny pieces of emotional joy she has left? Leaving her trapped in her wounded body, grieving for you, helpless to do anything to change it, with this whole new kind of pain and bitterness to cloud up her thoughts?
You will set back her recovery. Truly you might kill her. At the very least you will profoundly compound her trauma. She might never recover from this accident; she will also never recover from you. You will become an active contributor to how terrible the worst thing to ever happen to her was, and if she doesn’t survive it will partly be your fault.
Her parents may well react to you with disgust, as will others. People on here are suggesting you speak to them first. You probably still should, but don’t go in there expecting that conversation to involve them giving one single fuck about how sad you are that she’s no longer of use to you so poor you has to move on. Don’t try to convince them your abandonment of her is okay; it’s not. Just tell them plainly that you’re going to leave her and ask them to be aware that she will be in unbearable distress and will need even greater care once you’ve done this. Don’t try to soften it; you can’t. Don’t try to phrase it nicely; it will just add self-serving dishonesty to the list of your features. Don’t try to pretend you’re not being a bad person by doing this. You will be.
You will move on with your therapist, and you will be fine. People who do appalling things justify them to themselves with alarming alacrity; it’s just a mental and emotional self defence mechanism. You’ll be fine and picking up the next poor woman with a sob story about how you “lost” your last partner in no time.
But if you have a conscience, this will be on it for the rest of your life. And if you have any sense, you won’t ask anyone else to marry you again. You don’t want a marriage; you don’t actually want a partner; you claim to love someone, and however much you were capable of love, that’s still apparently not enough to make you treat them with decency and compassion when it might cost you something.
Them’s the breaks. You can do something incredibly hard and painful that will hurt you, or you can let down and abandon someone you claim to love in a completely monstrous fashion. There’s no way to do this and not be a terrible human being, and you’re just going to have to live with that* (context link)
