Therapy convinced me to leave my loving husband and find someone ‘better’. I soon realized the frightening truth about dating in my 50s

Another man who holds a fish in his profile photo … this one is clear Still married … Friends with benefits? What am I, 25?

When Suzie de Jonge ended her 15-year-old marriage to husband Stuart, she learned in the hard way that dating in your 50s is not for fear.

Only two years earlier her marriage had been solid. She loved Stuart, had a beautiful daughter and they lived together in a charming house.

But it all unraveled after the death of her father and her subsequent ‘mid-life crisis’.

Trying to juggle her things, motherhood and a social life became too much, and the menopause left her with insomnia, hair loss and hot flashes. In her despair she saw a doctor and then tried the therapy.

During therapy, Suzie felt an in -depth and indescribable shift from the inside – as if she stepped over a threshold, left one chapter of her life and entered another.

In her heart she knew that she was moving forward to something new, and Stuart was no longer the partner who was planning to walk that path with her. Or she thought so.

It hadn’t always been that way.

Suzie, when a 39-year-old single mother who raised her daughter, had met Stuart for the first time on a blind date arranged by a good friend.

At that time she had not been to a date for years, but her girlfriend sold her on Stuart, whom she described as real and ‘down to earth’.

Yet Suzie had her reservations and he only agreed to condition that her boyfriend and her partner came to them at the time. So it became a double date.

“Stuart was different from someone I had met or dated before,” she remembers.

‘I had a low self -image and that was about dating the wrong people. He was grounded, friendly, had a dry sense of humor and we clamped a lot. I felt safe with him.

“We had similar education, were hard workers and had the same morality.”

In 2005, after three years of dating, Suzie and Stuart married. They bought a house, adopted a dog and were ready to spend their lives together.

But four years later things started to unravel after Suzie’s father suddenly died.

‘I had never lost anyone with whom I was so close. I was dealing with the grief and noticed that I was ahead of fear, but thought everyone was like that, “she says.

One morning while driving to work, she realized that she got the steering wheel so tightly that her knuckles had turned white.

She felt fear and in turn you are ashamed of how she felt. It became so intense that she hardly left her house.

She went to a doctor who told her that it was not normal to feel so tense 24/7.

Stuart only wanted the best for his wife, but because he was a ‘Blokey -Kerel’, he was not good at talking about feelings. While Suzie started working on herself in therapy, she became more and more far from her husband.

“I started to change as a person and unraveling why I am the way I am and my lack of self -esteem, but Stu didn’t change,” she says.

“He didn’t have to change – I understand that now – but at that moment I felt that the gap between us was getting bigger and bigger.”

In the course of time, she became more aware of fundamental differences in their personalities and believed that Stuart’s actions and worldview had a negative impact on her mental health.

‘Stuart and I are like Yin and Yang. I am a very positive, spontaneous person, while he tends to be a little more negative and get used to me, “says Suzie.

‘The energy of it felt really tough [at the time] And it was hard for me to be that when I saw the world through different eyes.

“I tried to talk to him about it, but he didn’t understand what is fine, but at that moment I couldn’t handle it.”

One night she let it all out. Due to the floods of tears, she released her feelings of insulation and resentment. That evening they slept in different beds. They didn’t speak the next morning.

Marriage fell apart.

‘We sold the house and both rented elsewhere. All my life I had never lived alone, which was scary, but I just needed space, “says Suzie.

Dating in your 1950s

Suzie spent 18 months alone before she started thinking about dating again.

Even then the prospect was frightening. But in the end she picked the courage to download the bumble dating app and make a profile.

“Placing yourself in a position where you walk into a room to meet a total stranger is a very vulnerable thing to do,” she says.

Suzie felt completely without contact. She did not understand that half of the Lingo people used apps and had not been on a first date for years.

She wiped through the competitions and was stunned by the number of men who kept fishing in their photos. Others used images of themselves that wore sunglasses or hats so that they could not see what they looked like. Some had selfies with their children. There were photos that were clearly taken decades ago.

She was ‘catfished’, ‘breadcrumbed’ and ‘ghosted’ – terms that she had never heard of. Within a few months she realized herself How shallip the dating pool is when you are in the 1950s.

On a particularly deadly date, a man demolished the back door of the restaurant and left her the bill. She felt humiliated.

Suzie often discovered that her dates wanted to talk to her about their exes and how ‘terrible’ they were.

“Has learned that there are always two sides on a story, my Spidey sines confirmed that these were not the people for me,” she adds.

The last drop was a man with a cloudy past.

“He was happy to brag about what a successful businessman he was and has really built up to sound like MR Wonderful,” Suzie recalls.

“He said we had to meet each other, but for someone inexplicable, my intuition said I had to google him. I found out that he had recently been in prison because he had attacked his then heavy partner and cheated on his staff of their Superannuation.

‘That was enough for me to go:’ I don’t think this internet is dating for me – I’d rather stay single. ” ‘

It turned out that the grass might not be greener.

What I found in the bedside table …

Three years after leaving Stuart, Suzie was still single. Neither of them was in the vicinity of submitting a divorce, so they were still technically married.

Life was busy with her work and social life, and she moved to a new home.

In the middle of packing her clothes, shoes and furniture, she opened her drawer of the bedside table and found a collection of cards that Stuart had given her over the years.

“I didn’t even realize that I had saved them all. Birthday cards, Valentine’s Day cards, anniversary cards. I opened them all and read them and was shocked to see what he had written, “says Suzie.

“Each of them explained his love for me and how he looked forward to spending the rest of our lives together. I felt an overwhelming stitch of loss and pain in my heart.

“How blind was I? Why couldn’t I see and feel that love, accept it and let it inside? Now I know why – because I didn’t feel I deserved it. And so, just like any other relationship I had been to, I sabotaged it. ‘

Suzie decided to write down what she felt and shared it with her therapist.

“Why don’t you share that with Stu?” She introduced them.

When she did that, it was the start of the again denying their love. After three years apart, Suzie set aside their differences and decided to work things out with Stuart.

“Our reunion was quiet – not a big fanfare, only a gradual coming together,” she says.

“I felt nervous, I might fill things again, but I was gradually able to relax and now we are here.”

During their time apart, the couple had learned a lot about himself. They realized that strong communication was missing from their marriage, which is why Suzie felt so far from Stuart after she went to therapy.

They promised each other to work on that.

Suzie now acknowledges that she put unfair expectations on Stuart when she mourned her father and struggled with her mental health.

“I didn’t have the right to expect him to change who he was just because I went to therapy. But that is who I was at the time, “she admits.

‘Now we are closer than ever and they cannot imagine they say goodbye again. He’s stuck with me. ‘

Suzie has released her second book ‘Reflections of a menopausal, insomnia, crazy dog ​​lady ‘, A Unapological Nubitics reads about how she turned her life around.