This is a subject that I see come up time and again on my mom's forums. A woman's DH talks to someone that they don't approve of-- be it an ex girlfriend, a female coworker, and the list goes on and on-- and upon finding out, it blows up into this HUGE fight. One of the ladies recently started a huge row and told her husband off simply because he was talking to an old high school girlfriend over Facebook and said girlfriend sent him a couple of old football articles.
Not only did she tell her husband off, she clearly thought that she would get backing for her rude and inconsiderate behavior. It seems to me that she was just as upset when other moms were telling her that she should have handled it in a different way than she was finding out about her husband talking to an old flame.
The part that I find sad about all this is that there's a simple lack of trust...almost everywhere, it seems. If this were an unusual occurrance, I wouldn't think about it too much at all. The fact of the matter is that, nowadays, women simply don't trust their men.
It's really a two way street when it comes to trust in relationships. If you show trust, your partner will be trustworthy in return. If you do not show trust, then your partner may end up feeling that there's no more need for him to be trustworthy...simply because no matter what he does, you won't trust him anyway. The degree of frustration over his ability to actually Do Anything Right will leave him disenchanted at best, and at worst drive him away.
When I read these sorts of things, it makes me ever so glad that I don't have to worry about things like this. While I do admit to jealousy on the occasion, I fully realize that this jealousy is all in my head and it isn't doing me any good. I truly have no need to be jealous of K's ex, because of one simple fact that he told me:
If he wanted her, he would still be with her. He chose ME. He's with ME. He's in MY bed every night.
I still talk to my ex, on the rare occasion. When I do, I try to keep it as short as possible, because it's a part of my life that I simply would like to get past. But he remains on my Facebook profile as a friend-- for a variety of reasons, among them so that I can get ahold of him easier when the time comes for me to file papers-- and, shock and amazement! K doesn't ever get distrustful of me. He has absolutely no jealousy or resentment of what came before. I know this for a fact because, if he did, he would talk to me and tell me!
I'm secure enough in my relationship to know that much. Without genuine communication, nothing's left but that a sense of mistrust and apprehension, which are left to grow and fester until it drives a wedge into the relationship. It doesn't matter if these negative emotions are real or imagined: by nursing them and not letting them out, you make them as real as if they actually were.
Why should K be mistrustful of my previous relationships, really? We both know that my marriage to my ex was...shall we say, less than satisfactory? I wasn't happy at all, through the entire duration of the marriage to my ex, and now that I'm well away from him and with K, I am. I, in turn, know that K's former relationship was just as bad for him, and that being with me is what makes him happy. I still can't fathom that fact sometimes, but yet...there it is. And really? If that's enough for K, it's enough for me, too.
Being confident and secure like this-- having real, genuine trust in one's partner and knowing it's returned in kind-- is one of the most amazing and fulfilling parts of being in a relationship. True trust is an apparently rare gift today, because so often women are so caught up in their own insecurities that they fail to see everywhere that their relationship's gone right. They forget about the fact that The Ex is the ex...for a reason.
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