“Why was I so devastated when she left?”

I talk to a lot of men about wives who walked out on them and these men all have one thing in common.

Standing around a dying bonfire at 2am in the bush, drinking with a bunch of mainly men, celebrating the birthday of one of them. His wife had walked out with five children last year. It was 2am, we were drinking, so it was easy to start a conversation about marriage.

Each man I spoke to had been abandoned by a wife with children. It didn’t matter how long ago it was, the eyes told the story when the event was recalled: when they speak about it, you can see a special hurt around their eyes. It is the look of a small child who has been betrayed and abandoned. It is a deep, deep wound that time may heal, but, like an operation scar, can twinge and ache when the chilly winds blow.

I know the feeling. I was one of them. But I survived and I won her back. And even today, I ask myself the question: “Why was I so devastated when she left?” I felt completely secure and capable of making it without her before she announced she was leaving me. In fact, at times I had wished she wasn’t there, especially during the long silences we endured, the silences we filled with our own negative thoughts about each other and ourselves.

Well, my wish came true. Out of the blue. I had no warning. She betrayed me, stabbed me in the back, stole my security, my inner secrets, my intimacy. She took her secret knowledge of me to another man, who was my rival. She had my power and she gave it to another. He gained my power, gained possession of what was mine, my possession. My precious. Gone. My power. Gone.

Lying on my back in the hypnotherapist’s room I had a great realisation: I hadn’t lost a wife. I’d lost a mother. I had become so emotionally and practically dependent on her, she stopped being a wonderful person and became a support system for my infantile inability to cope with the details of life. She became my mother. I made her my mother.

And when a mother leaves a little boy behind, that little boy never forgets it. The little boy in me remembers the moment my wife/mother rejected me as her little boy. It shows around the eyes whenever the memory takes you back there to that room, that smell, that night, that dark cloud that descended, that cold feeling in the guts...

Here is the clue. A woman doesn’t marry a son. She marries a man. A grown up man who stands proud and alone with confidence and independence. An adult man who can make her feel protected and loved and valued and safe, like a little girl. (Ironic, isn’t it?)

Love is possible only between two emotionally-mature adults. Anything else is a form of dependency. No one wants a person clinging to them, depending on them, dragging them down.

So gentlemen, your mother may have waited on you hand and foot, treated you like a little god. But she’s not the person in your bed. Grow up. The woman who loves you wants to be loved by the man in you, not the little boy.

To give love you must first be capable of standing on your own two feet and being comfortable with who you are… all alone. Happy to be with yourself.

To find love, first be loveable, said Ovid. And I say, stay loveable.