It’s time to start a healthier new life chapter

DEAR MISS LONELYHEARTS: I want my wife back! I ran into her at a wedding recently, and she was as brilliant and charming as ever. She has also lost the extra weight she put on while married to me. I loved her cooking and baking!

She now looks like she did when I first met her and was actually quite pleasant with me — but she’s always been quite the charmer. But at the end of the night when I tried to kiss her, she withdrew and said quietly, “I’m sorry. Not in this lifetime! That chapter is over for us.” I was hurt and felt embarrassed.

I realize I lost her because of all my bad habits, not just drinking. Now she’s letting me know she wouldn’t come back to me even if I cleaned them all up. I know she used to love me a lot because she’d say it all the time. That’s part of why I married her! True love never dies, I hear. Was she lying?

— Suspicious, St. James

Dear Suspicious: She wasn’t lying. She was giving you her true temperature reading at the time. For reasons you know well, your ex realizes it’s best for the two of you to move on with your lives — separately.

Even if the person who ruined things in a relationship with their behaviour makes big changes, it’s often too late to rekindle the chemistry. You might be friends in the future, but it’s likely the romance has departed permanently for this woman after what she went through with you.

The good news? You know exactly what you want in a partner now. Plus, you have improved your own behaviour, so you could go looking for someone with a similar personality to your ex, and possibly start over with her — and be more successful this time.

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts: I’m a woman who’s in love with a wonderful woman. However, she wants me to move away with her. Her family does not approve of her coming out as a lesbian, so she wants to ditch this city and go somewhere she doesn’t have to deal with family disapproval.

My relatives are fine with my sexuality, and they are very good to her. They’d happily embrace her as their daughter-in-law if we wanted to marry.

My big question is this: Why would we move somewhere both of us have no warm family connections, when she is welcome to step into mine and be loved and accepted?

— Want To Stay, Wolseley

Dear Want To Stay: Perhaps your lady love is looking for you to both be on the same footing — starting over in a new place with a bigger lesbian community. More importantly for her, she wants to get away from the family disapproval she feels here.

It’d be wise for her to get into counselling here first and try to salvage her relationships with some or all of her family, instead of moving away together to start over, with no close relationships.

The loneliness factor could be very hard on your own relationship as a couple if you move, as there will just be the two of you in the beginning.

Rather than moving too soon, try to bring your partner more closely into your Manitoba family, and introduce her to absolutely everybody. If many people end up embracing her, she might not feel as strong a need to move anymore.

But if she still does, and you can work it out job-wise to move, it could answer a lot of her questions about whether a new community would be better for both of you — or not.

Please send your questions and comments to lovecoach@hotmail.com or Miss Lonelyhearts c/o the Winnipeg Free Press, 1355 Mountain Ave., Winnipeg, MB, R2X 3B6.

Maureen Scurfield
Advice columnist

Maureen Scurfield writes the Miss Lonelyhearts advice column.

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