Rosie Green loved her Alpha Male, but suddenly he turned grumpy, then hostile, and finally moved out. Greene humbled herself to hold him and endured the misery of the Forsaken – until she reinvented herself.
Rosie Green is a well-known author in Great Britain, she writes about beauty topics and about her marriage. Her column about married life with “her” alpha male was never without a joke, but as she says today, it was a bit smug. Because the beloved married life must have had cracks before she noticed it.
In early 2018, she noticed a change in her husband. He became irritable, grumpy, and dissatisfied. Also a topic for her column: Husband X has reached the “male menopause”, she wrote calmly and didn’t think much about it. By the summer, she realized that something was going on between X and a colleague.
More than just menopause
Green was devastated and honest enough to share all of her humiliation and not share the modern myth that powerful women must always have power and keep their heads up. Whether in newspapers or on social media, the whole of Britain took part in their misery. Of her tears and episodes of separation. About what it’s like to free the house from “his” things, which reveal so much about the common history. Green spared nothing. When the man moved into the guest room, she climbed into bed with him. When he fled to the couch, she followed him there, she told The Times.
She stopped eating and lost 2 stones – nearly 30 pounds. But she did not give up on her marriage and continued to humble herself. She tried to be the perfect woman. “I would have liked to have been like Penélope Cruz in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with flaming eyes and full of anger, but instead I was like a housewife in American Beauty, desperately clinging.”
But nothing could cover the rift, and the harder she tried, the more hostile X became. “I googled stuff like ‘360 ways to keep your marriage alive'”.
“I lived in a world of pain. Doctor friends had given me a supply of sleeping pills and I took one, but my brain was wired so I only slept for about three hours. When I woke up, my face was smeared with tears. By then I had I’m trying not to tell anyone how bad it was because I was still like, ‘We can get through this.’
end at Christmas
Presumably on the advice of a lawyer, X did not admit to his affair, but he stayed away overnight more and more often. Supposedly he slept in his office and in reality he was visiting cheap hotels with his mistress. On December 22 of all days, X informed her that it was all over. But at Christmas they should play the whole family in front of his parents.
She couldn’t do that – the final break was here.
But with her heart in tatters, her career took off. Because Greene makes no secret of her misery. The columns that celebrated the Alpha Male have now become the wreckage of a broken heart. The story tells Green in How to Heal a Broken Heart: From Rock Bottom to Reinvention, a personal story but also a ship chart to navigate the sea of misery.
“I was afraid that these confessions of an abandoned woman would make me deeply unattractive; damaged goods. Just being returned is embarrassing. A friend whose husband died at the same time told me I was worse off than her for having the had taken a double hit of losing the man and the blow to my ego at the same time.
Make up your own story
Green develops coping strategies to avoid the endless “Why, why, why?” mill. to escape in my head. “Was I too mean to him? Wasn’t I mean enough? Ultimately, you’ll never find out exactly what happened.” A woman in her position can only try to protect her own feelings. Then she got a tip: she shouldn’t try to fathom his motives, she should find out her own story. And she’s still working on her own story.
“I still don’t know everything. All I can do is know my truth. Namely, this all came as an absolute shock to me that I didn’t see coming. I think X had retired for a while, but he didn’t have the tools to communicate that. What was really sad for me was that I didn’t have a chance because he had already made up his mind. His focus was elsewhere and he had moved on and moved away.”
Abandoned for good before she knew it
The tragedy: she loved X’s stoic nature, someone who doesn’t endlessly question a relationship, who doesn’t brood over his feelings. This was simple and clear at first, but it also seemed to mean that X was unable to deal with the situation when negative feelings of dissatisfaction set in. The marriage collapsed when these negative feelings took over and the positive ones were transferred to another woman.
Two things got Green out of the valley: Girlfriends break the circle of a broken heart. And young men. Young women moan about today’s dating customs, but not Green: “I thought at first nobody’s ever going to love me again, but then there were quite a few cute 25-year-old men out there who wanted me.”
A new friend helped too. Green doesn’t know if it’s for eternity, but at least it’s lasted five months.
The old marriage? “Some days I still feel like shit, but most of the time I don’t.”
Rosie Green, How to Heal a Broken Heart: From Rock Bottom to Reinvention
Source: TheTimes