This past woman is your Anima. Your fantasy. She is the picture of perfection.  She is your perfect vision. Your wife will not win to compete with such perfection. You can never attain her. She is perfection while you have flaws just like any other human.

You project her, this Anima to this woman of your past.  And of course what you perceive is such perfection that compared to your wife, your wife is last place.  But your projection is fantasy, not real.  Your projection to this fantasy life remake, life rewind, life do-over, a life of what-if is totally in a league of its own compared to the real life, compared to your real live that you lived, compared to the life you had with your wife.

Life is hard, it sucks, and in that hardship, we gain wisdom, and humility, learn to appreciate that good and joyful moments despite the tragedies that come along with it.  If life is all perfect, then it only has one taste.  And you will not know the bitter taste of the bad times and the sweetness of the good time.

This Anima, this perfection is your own illusions.  This is you avoiding to confront your own human failings, your own flaws.  To you, you see your flaws are something that make you unworthy of love as a person.  Despite all the achievements you pile on top of that flaw, deep inside you–you despise yourself because of such flaws.

When you are wisened to begin liking and loving yourself, just as you are, then the flaws are part of you and still make you worthy of love.  It is then ok to have the Anima, that perfection to strive for, but attaining Anima does not define you. 

What defines you is how you live your life daily as yourself, flaws and all, how you celebrate this life in every step of the way.

You lived your life, and moved on the past 42 years without this woman of your past.  You achieved things in life, and pursued this for yourself, for the good of what you believed.  Your Anima existed, without this woman of the past 42 years. You did without her all along.  You got here with your wife along the way. 

How then can you honestly say that today, this woman of the past was the reason how your life turned out?  Your life now is whatever it is because of the very decisions you made in your life.  Those were your choices, and thus you created your own responsibilities.  All decisions and responsibilities are your own, and each have consequences.  You deal with those because they are within you.  Even if you run away hoping for a clean slate, you are still you and they remain within you.

Believe me, I’ve had such Anima and perceived and believed it true.  It seems like a script that MLC’ers get and follow.  I was lucky that I was not put in that position to make the possibility be more probable.  I was lucky that some wise men shared their experiences with me and said they regret and wish they did not do what ever destructive path they chose. 

I hope to return the favor and tell you, do nothing and confront yourself and answer, “what do I want in my life?”

Play it out in your head–not just the good parts….

You hook up with this woman of your past, and then what? Have sex to your contentment, really, and then what after that?  How do you picture yourself waking up, who’s doing the breakfast, who’s doing the cleaning from the bedsheet stains?  You need to showers, who’s cleaning the toilet eventually?

Oh, it’s the weekend, so head out and eat out, maybe a champagne brunch. Oh heck, just fly to Vegas for a week, live the high roller life–it’s only a week.  Drop some major cash, perhaps fill up the plastic, live life–life is short.

Come next weekend, or maybe just extend your fun trip for another week.  After all, the sex was good, different styles and she does wild things in her age–without any trace of inhibition.

But eventually, same old p*ssy is pretty much the same even if you’re just page 10 in the Kama Sutra.  You start noticing her quirks, sometimes irritating.  She has hang ups and baggage, too; not the same as your (ex)wife, but it is there.  She smells different, a different kind of stink that was exciting before, but not so hot anymore. 

You start seeing her as normal in her own way, and very much unlike your wife.  You soon get bored with her, or she bored with you.  Her interest goes in other directions not similar as yours.  You start comparing her with your (ex)wife and seeds of doubt you might possibly f*cked a perfectly imperfect marriage that you traded for this.

You read more stuff, seeking for answers.  You run into some post about the “in love” brain chemical that says that early “in love” brain chemical is addicting, but eventually wanes and loses its addictive properties.  And then you realize that you had such an “in love” brain chemical with your (ex)wife in the early years and that soon waned.  And that it is pretty much the same thing with this woman of the past that you traded for your (ex)wife.

You realize that you are the same person with the same crap to deal with inside.  Your hope for the magic that life turns things around and makes life better with little effort on your part to happen, does utterly fail. 

You realize that you’ve been procrastinating all your life to put your own effort in doing the things you want.  You realize that you’re just fooling yourself all along, and it hurts to face yourself, that you lied to yourself, that you deprived yourself living in integrity.

You realize too that your own pursuit to ego / perfection / the one brought you through the path of destruction, hurting the people you once proclaimed in your adult life to care, love and protect.

You grasp the concept that your life has worth, and everything in your life that you love is worthy.  But you realize that you were hurting so bad inside, that you’ve become self destructive, that you allow this fantasy and the “temporary remedy from the pain” to disregard the “logic and reality.”

But by then, you’ve walked and taken the path of destruction.  Hindsight and all.  Do you really want that kind of life of regret?

My suggestion is to confront this fantasy–be open and honest with your wife.  Bare your humanity, flaws, doubts, needs, sadness.  Even when you think such truth or perception will hurt her, if you really think it is honest, then she is one of the persons that deserves such honesty.

Posted on the Midlife Club Forum by “JM_May”