Divorcebusting.com Forums Open Forums We're separated--What Now? Worried I found DB too late

You also have to tailor the info to your own situation, DR isn't always a black-and-white foolproof plan! As said above, if something which appears contrary to DR principles seems to be working - do it.

For instance, my W moved out Dec 27. DR says don't initiate contact, no R talks. Well, that was working well up to about a week ago. Recently, initiating contact was the right thing to do. And during those times, we have had some awesome heart to heart talks about where "we" are going.

So, stay aware of the day-to-day changes, try to do something away from home, and once again, do a 180.

There are great 180 ideas in the 180 Forum, BTW.

Yes, I'm a west-coaster (live in California). I'm going to read the 180 forum to get some ideas. But first I'm off to the gym -- one of my new things. I've always been slim and petite, but in the past six months I've lost 15 pounds and it's mostly because I've been going to the gym regularly. Honestly, I didn't know I had 15 pounds to loose! So now I weigh ten pounds less than when we met and I'm an almost 40-year old mother of two. Take that hubby!

I forgot this last night...I guess it was too late!
(((((cw68)))))

Have fun? at the gym. You'll look good and feel better! You are in the right place to find the support to get through this!

Well, I hope that I didn't just do a wrong turn, but it seemed like the right turn to me. We spent the whole day together yesterday, doing house stuff, playing with the kids, looking for new flooring, had dinner and the like. Had a very small R talk, but nothing really personal. (We're looking at getting new appliances and got into the 'what would we do if we stay together vs. what we would get to sell the house' debate, though neither one of us stated any positions or feelings.) He commented on me losing weight and hitting the gym a lot, though it wasn't in a "you look great" way or anything. We enjoyed each other and he even reached out and hugged my once while I was walking by. But right when the kids were in bed, he raced downstairs saying that he had work to do.

I've come to a lot of realizations over the past few weeks, the biggest one being that my reaction to his surprise only made things worse. So, I sent him this email. He called me crying this morning, thanking me for the email. He had to run to a meeting and sent me a quick response, which it below my email. We're meeting in just a few minutes (with the kids) for lunch and to buy some hardwood floors.


My email:

Hi --

I just wanted to share some of my thoughts with you. We didn’t really have any time away from the kids today and I wasn’t able to tell you this in person, so I’m resorting to email. FWIW, I’m trying to avoid communicating through email, but really need to send you this.

I’m sorry. I know I said this to you last weekend, but I wanted to elaborate. Unfortunately it took you leaving us to make me realize all the damage I’ve been causing and all the pain I inflicted over the past months (years?). I was just so surprised, so hurt and so crushed from that day in July that I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t hold my thoughts in my head. I should have realized the reality of the situation much earlier and realized that telling you what you *should* do wasn’t my place. You didn’t need me to tell you these things. I’m sorry that I didn’t see how troubled we were until you exploded. I was too wrapped up in my own displacement, unhappiness and depression after moving here that all I could see was me desperately trying to climbing out of my hole. In my own mind I was progressing, but didn’t realize the barriers I had created and embraced. What I didn’t realize is that a lot of that was caused by us and not by the move. Between moving and you distancing yourself from our relationship, I truly got lost and distanced myself. Though I’ve said this before, I want you to realize that I understand and know that it took two to get us where we got last year. My reaction has only made things worse.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t wish you had taken a different approach than you did. It’s not that I’m picking on you, I wish my approach was different too and would pay anything to rewind the clock, even just a few months. Along these lines, I want you to know that I’m letting go of my resentment, my anger over how you dealt with our problems. Holding on to this hurt, this feeling of being wronged takes too much energy and negativity. I forgive you. Honestly, I’m still sad, especially when I see how this has profoundly changed my family and my interactions with my family. But I have to make peace with where we are.

I still hope for us to be able to find our way back to each other, I can’t pretend otherwise. There is a lot to build upon, even with all the bad moves we’ve both made. We still love each other, we’ve made a great family together, we still are husband/wife and we do get along — even in the face of all that’s happened to us. Hopefully things will only get better from here and we’ll be able to plug away and make the future we both want. We’ll see.

It’s funny, I’ve been telling myself that “I’m only doing things that I’m proud of” and didn’t realize the errors of my ways until recently, things I conveniently omitted. That phrase has taken on a whole new spin to me, a spin that I’m fully embracing. I’m striving to be a much better person. There are so many aspect of myself I want to improve. Many of these things I kind of knew about before, but pushed back because I didn’t have the energy to change them. After losing all my energy, I’ve found the strength needed to really move forward, at least back to where I used to be.

I love you. You are a good man, a man I’d be proud to spend my life with, a man I admire and am glad is the father of my children.

Love,
C

---

His reply:

Working on a response, have to go to a meeting...

Thanks for this and I am really glad to hear that you are getting strength and feeling like life will go forward, it has to, no matter how difficult things get sometimes.

O.

OK, got his response. Sorry if all this is too much for here, I'm new here, but I'm really looking for good advice on how to apply the DB principles here. I've read most of DB and all of DR, started re-reading DR last night.

Here's his response:

Thank you for this. I am really happy to hear that you have found some strength and are feeling like you can move forward.

I am so sorry that I disrespected you and our relationship and engaged in behaviors that were both hurtful and damaging to you and to us. I wish I had possessed the courage/fortitude to be more honest with you earlier on and to let you know the pain and loneliness that I was feeling and to find some type of constructive way (no matter how painful) to deal with all of this. I knew I was sabotaging our relationship and I truly hated that I was allowing myself to do so, however, I just did not have the strength or tools to deal with my own feelings and confront you/us in a manner that was constructive. Frankly I wanted to escape and that desire manifested itself in my behaviors. You deserved better. I also do realize that when confronted with my wrongdoings, I was standoffish and in denial of the pain I had caused and the poor judgment I had exhibited. I conducted myself
poorly when it came to us. You deserved better, I was/am capable of better, again, for what it is worth, I am sorry.

At the end of the day, I don’t blame/begrudge you for how you reacted. I’d forgive you, but I don’t feel you committed any wrongs in this regard. I didn’t agree with some of your perspectives and/or assessments, but I empathized, as strange as that sounds. By the way, I told this to anybody that I talked to about us, that things were difficult and that you were angry, but that I understood where you were coming from and when I looked rationally at what you were confronted with, I knew that your reactions were just the result of basic human instinct and your legitimate need to try to protect yourself and hold together the crumbling foundation of our lives and family as we knew them.

I’m crying once again as I type this, this is difficult for me, I have failed and caused hurt and put us on a path I never thought I’d have to walk. I guess my desire to please and to always say the right thing has at at this point become my great undoing, how ironic that by trying to be the stepford husband (or maybe just Stonewall Jackson) and sweep things under the table, I ultimately caused more pain, grief, damage than I ever could have imagined.

Anyway, we have to move forward now, somehow, someway. I am not sure I can come back to this marriage, though being apart has helped me distill my thoughts, realize the difficulty of being with the kids without you (it is very quiet in the house) and to confront the enormity of a separation and/or divorce.

I do love you and of course the kids and I admire what you’ve done as a parent with them, you’re a great mother, that is not an
achievement that many can claim and they are two wonderful kids. I have never regretted them no matter how difficult things have been with us.

Hmmmm, lots of words in there! I think the most important ones were that he is not sure. So, you are not too late! So, now that that is done, I would stay away from any more letters or discussions on the topic for a good long time!

For now, you should concentrate on you. I know there are conflicting interests, but I think some GAL activities would be really good. You need to rebuild your own identity. My personal opinion is that many of us here have marriage trouble because we lose our identities in becoming a couple. Instead of two people supporting easch other we become two weaker people "needing" each other to function. I think that the biggest benefit of GAL is to break that dependency. Then you can be confident and attractive as you, and you will appear as a woman that your H would want as a wife. I don't know that I've ever seen it put that way, but that's the way it feels to me. I think both of your letters show symptoms of that, too.

Yeah, lots of words, but it was easier to cut and paste than to describe the whole sitch! It really is a good show of where we are.

I agree, no more talk of us. We did talk a bit on the phone too, and I showed no begging, no telling him what he should do, or anything of the sort. I thanked him for his email and was really glad that he opened up.

Now I think it's time for the long waiting process to really begin. Just be.

Not just waiting....just focusing your efforts on you, and not your H!

cw68,
Wow. I have been riveted by your posts because your sitch sounds SO much like mine. My H and I still live together and share a bed. H dropped the IDLYA bomb in October yet seems to have no real thoughts of moving out. I go from DBing to crying and trying to convince him that we have so much.

How did you explain the separation to your kids--esp when you all still have dinner together. H& I are not "out" to our kids, as it were. We still eat dinner together as a family almost every night, do things together. H has stopped wanting to go out with me alone, and we are less affectionate--and our older D has taken notice of that.

Anyway, hard as this all is (really, really hard), it is so good to keep meeting people here who are going through the same thing. Hang in there.

You are in the situation we were in for six months, though my husband did mention "should I need a separation" numerous times. During this, we didn't tell our children and we just plowed on.

When my husband said he had to have a separation, I made him tell the kids. I told him that we were parents together, 100% behind our kids, but I didn't want them to think I was at all OK with splitting up the family. Telling the kids was difficult, but we've done a really good job so far at putting the kids in our best interest. In this situation (sharing the house), I'm the one getting the shaft but my kids' comfort is bigger than my own right now.

He just told them that he was really unhappy, that adult relationships are complicated and that he had to get a little space. That he loves them more than anything, but needed to do this.

As for GAL, dry_heat, that's something that I always thought was a major positive of our relationship. Turns out that we were TOO independent of each other. Our mutual friends kind of dropped away after we moved two years ago. We used to get a weekly babysitter, but couldn't afford it once we got this house, so we tended to go out without each other more often than together. I stay at home with the kids and for my personal definition I'm active in city politics. City meetings happen in the evening. My school volunteering and my non-profit work happens while the kids are at school and are so separate from my husband. Our problem wasn't that we didn't define ourselves but rather that we didn't define us as a couple. We were more parents and individuals.

Though my husband is young for a MLC, I think he's got a bit of that going on too. He's quite successful, has a nice family, enough "stuff" without being really material and achieved most of the things he wanted. Then I think he looked around and said to himself, "This is it? This is what I'm going to deal with until retirement/kids are old?" Most of his old hobbies, his passion for volunteering and politics just vanished. A lot of his friends moved back to the Midwest and he didn't pursue friendships, having just a few friends from work. (And our dental hygienist, his EA.)

He took up marathon running and has run three in recent years. This would get him out of the house and away from me for hours and hours. I don't run. The only other thing he'd do was go to the gym. I'm more of an outdoors person than a gym-rat and the hiking, camping and the like that we used to do just stopped. Honestly, I stopped suggesting we go kayaking, hiking, etc. because he'd never want to do it. The only things he wanted to do was yard work (landscaping, major stuff) or go to the gym. He lost his mojo. Now I understand. He disagrees with the MLC stuff, saying he's too young, but he's an "old" 33. Has been his whole life.