The Pros and Cons of Settling Down With Someone You Don’t Trust

It’s obvious to avoid people who have betrayed you and sucked away the love you once felt, but sometimes there are reasons to pause before walking back into the arms of someone who clearly isn’t your true love. Today’s letter comes from a woman who calls herself Trish. She writes: Hi Anna — I’m turning to you for guidance about whether I should try to reconcile with my son’s father. We share more than a decade of history, so I’ll do my best to condense it. Okay, I’ve got my coloured pencil ready to circle parts I want to revisit, but here’s the story of what’s been happening between me and my ex. A bit about my background: my mother died in 2009. She was an alcoholic who also misused pills, though she wasn’t violent. She divorced my dad when I was sixteen and never remarried. My dad has married two other times since then; he runs a business, so although he was around, work often pulled him away. I spent most of my childhood with my mom, and when the marriage dissolved and addiction took hold, my sisters and I sometimes found ourselves acting as her caretakers. There were terrifying moments when she passed out with a lit cigarette in her hand or left food cooking on the stove; once she passed out at the wheel and crashed into a telephone pole, landing in the ICU. About a year before she died, I met the father of my son. That began roughly sixteen years ago. Our relationship started as friends-with-benefits; he didn’t even call me his girlfriend until a couple of years in. I lacked a strong sense of self-worth back then, though I didn’t see it clearly. He was present during the period around my mom’s death, offering emotional support and reliability when I needed it, and I fell in love and became determined to secure a commitment from him. After two years we finally had a label — boyfriend and girlfriend — but I started sensing he might be unfaithful for several reasons: magazines belonging to another woman hidden under his bed, furtive phone behavior, phones always on silent, taking calls where I couldn’t hear. My gut told me he was cheating, yet he was the avoidant type who would stonewall and shut down whenever I questioned him. He gaslit me, and I gaslit myself, convincing myself I was just being insecure. Over time I grew passive because I wanted to keep the peace and hated his shutdowns, but my suspicions festered and I began sneaking around to uncover what I couldn’t get from him. We had our son ten years ago; earlier that year we’d moved in together when we found out I was pregnant. Two years after that I discovered proof he was having an affair with a married coworker — emails, photos, videos of them in the act. It was utterly devastating: my idea of marriage and a stable family was shattered. To make a long story somewhat shorter, I moved out and ended the relationship, then moved back several months later after we tried therapy and he started attending church with me. I wanted to believe we could fix things. We were never married — I wanted marriage, but he remained indecisive. Two years later nothing had improved, so I left again. I didn’t have hard proof this time, but his habit of shutting down continued when I raised his sneaky behaviours, like taking phone calls in the basement at four a.m. I had become someone I didn’t recognize — insecure, anxious — and I hated that person. I even found myself trying to eavesdrop through a floor vent; that’s when I knew I had to go. I moved out in 2018 after seeing him texting his ex and after noticing how I’d changed. Since then I haven’t looked back. In total I moved out twice — the moves were about eight years ago and six years ago — and over the years he’s tried several times to get me to come back. We’ve both been in and out of therapy. He had a rough childhood too, marked by abandonment and rejection from his parents, and eventually he began to seek help for those wounds. I truly loved him and still love him in a different way now — more like family love than romantic love. I’ve listened to many of your podcasts and similar shows over the past couple of years to help me move forward. Last year he married a younger woman he met at work and divorced her eight months later. That marriage reopened a fresh wound: after a decade together and a child, I wasn’t seen as marriage material, yet he married someone else without hesitation. That stung and deepened my doubts about my own worth. While he was with that woman he told me he still loved me and wanted our family back; it felt like a repeating pattern — reaching out to an ex while still with someone else. I know I have my own pattern, too: being drawn to unavailable men. For the past two years I’ve been single and celibate after realizing I’d become fearfully avoidant, mainly attracted to long-distance relationships that had no future. Over two years of celibacy I’ve found emotional and financial stability; my home is calm, though I’m lonely. I’ll be 44 in a few months and I’m losing hope that I’ll meet a healthy, available partner. Sometimes I wonder if I should take him back for our son’s sake: he’s available now and insists he wants to try again. I no longer feel romantic attraction toward him after everything that happened, and I carry real PTSD about him, so even imagining getting back together makes me feel a bit depressed. He accuses me of being the avoidant one and calls me unrealistic for wanting a relationship that isn’t tainted by a toxic past. Is that what mature love looks like? Am I holding out for something that doesn’t exist? I don’t want to settle, but I also don’t want to die alone like my mother did after her divorce. I’m filled with fears and running low on hope. I want hope that isn’t limerent — I don’t want to delude myself or be deceived by someone else — but I still question whether I’ve become avoidant. Right now I feel numb and confused about my next step. I hope you can help. That’s from Trish. Okay, Trish — I hear you. You didn’t say much about your child, but I’m guessing he’s ten now, and all of this is wrapped up in deciding whether the parents should try to reunite. I’m curious: would your son genuinely benefit from having his father more fully present? Does he currently have a relationship with him? I hope so. It’s not necessary for a marriage to be restored in order for a child to have both parents in their life. To recap some of what you told me: you had a difficult childhood with a mother who battled alcoholism and pills, a divorce at 16, no remarriage from your mom, and a father who remarried twice and was often preoccupied with work. You spent much of your time with your mother and ended up stepping into a caregiving role. That kind of early responsibility primes many of us to become what I sometimes call people-pleasers who adapt ourselves to unacceptable situations — we learn to fit ourselves to unhealthy dynamics because, as children, we had to accommodate the chaos. That habit isn’t something you want to carry into adulthood, yet it’s common for survivors of parental addiction to gravitate toward partners who are incapable of reliable love and fidelity. If you’d grown up without traumatic experiences, those betrayals might have precipitated a quicker end to the relationship; with trauma, the pattern can drag on for years. You do have a child from this relationship, which complicates matters and makes everything about what’s best for your son. If you didn’t have a child, my clear recommendation would be to cut ties with this man: there’s a lot of entanglement and he’s shown himself to be unreliable. Even now, when he comes wanting to reconcile, he does so after leaving someone else — that’s a pattern. It may take years, if it happens at all, for him to change that habitual behaviour. He’s not a safe bet just because he’s trying right now. If he had been the one true love of your life — the only person with whom you felt entirely right — then joint therapy and a committed effort might have been an option. But you say the feeling is gone, and you’re peaceful on your own. I’m a big supporter of staying together for children when it’s healthy to do so, but not if it costs one parent their spirit. From what you’ve described, being with him would likely hollow you out, and that deadness would be visible to your son and stressful for him. Your reaction to his stonewalling and deceit — falling out of love with him — is a rational response to being lied to and shut out. People who shut down emotionally are extremely difficult partners. It’s good you both tried therapy and that he sought help and even attended church with you; those efforts matter. Still, therapy, faith, or effort can’t recreate a feeling that’s been destroyed. You’re not avoidant for wanting something sane and non-toxic; you’re making a reasonable choice. If anything, trauma can make someone hold on longer than they otherwise would, out of loyalty to the pattern they grew up with. One major reason people stay together is for the child — raising a child alone is hard and lonely. When possible, a cooperative relationship between divorced parents, a functioning two-household family, is one of the best gifts you can give a child. That doesn’t require remarriage; it’s about both parents providing loving homes and working together practically: coordinating who drives to sports, who pays for clothes, how holidays and vacations are shared. If your son’s father treats him well and can play a consistent, loving role in his life, maintaining a civil, cooperative friendship with him is in your child’s interest. Yes, friendship between exes can complicate future romantic relationships, but the child-centered reason for keeping the other parent involved is strong. A word of caution about new partners: statistically, a stepparent can often be the person more likely, relative to others in a child’s life, to cause harm — not that abuse is the norm, but it’s a risk to be mindful of. If you bring someone new into your son’s life, take your time. Don’t rush introductions; vet people carefully and set high standards. Make it clear that anyone you consider dating seriously should be willing to commit to being a positive step-parent and to foster a respectful, cooperative relationship with your child’s father if your family arrangement requires it. A practical rule I recommend is to wait at least a year of steady dating before your children meet a new partner. Early on after divorce I made mistakes introducing kids to people who weren’t ready for that role; later, with my current husband, we waited a year and only then introduced him to the children when we were sure our relationship was serious and stable. That precaution really protects kids from the emotional whiplash of a parade of brief relationships. You also mentioned your own father’s remarriages and the upheaval you experienced — being moved away from a beloved parent — and that underlines how important it is to think long term about what’s best for your child’s emotional continuity. When exes cooperate, the practical details of parenting split across two households — holidays, weekends, school events — get handled more smoothly. Wobbly boundaries and confusion about whether you’re a couple again create drama, especially in adolescence, which you want to avoid if possible. Ultimately, you get to decide what’s right for you. If therapy or time leads you down a different path, that’s your choice. Wanting a relationship that isn’t scarred by a toxic history is not unrealistic. Mature love exists: some couples rebuild and grow stronger after hard times, while others never recover. Starting fresh with someone new can be a real blessing, too — though it lacks the history that initially makes an old partner feel like home. Being in your early forties is not late; there’s plenty of life and opportunity ahead to build a meaningful partnership, even if it doesn’t happen until later. If you want to examine which of your own patterns might be holding you back — for example, returning to partners who have treated you poorly — that sort of behaviour is often self-defeating. I’ve put together a checklist of seventeen or eighteen common self-defeating behaviours people who grew up with abuse or neglect tend to adopt. You can review that list, identify which habits of yours are most important to change, and make one of them your practical project in the coming weeks: pick a behaviour to work on and take concrete steps to shift it. If you’d like that checklist, it’s available as a free download — you can get it by clicking on the link right here. Take care, and see you very soon.