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Nicely and perfectly said Mark Evolving

I do believe there is a difference between a walkaway spouse and a driven away spouse. It is a different kind of pain that is inflicted by the initial walking away but also staying put than the "pain" caused by the tedium of adult life with children.

I would bet that most WASs feel they were driven away.

Again I don't want to put too fine a point on this discussion, which is the first I've seen on the boards to really engage the basic paradox of Left-Behinddom: When you start coping, disengaging, you are literally in motion. You are, to borrow a term, Walking-Away.

Now this doesn't mean you're Walking-Away from the marriage, at least not entirely. But you're certainly Walking-Away from the context of the pre-D-Bomb status-quo. Ideally -- that is, in the DB Paradigm Ideal -- you are simultaneously Walking-Away and Walking-Towards: away from the past and towards a future with the erstwhile WAS.

Overstating the case? Riddle me this: What, after all, is a 180 if not a Walking-Away? Abandon All Old Selves, Ye Who Enter Here reads the inscription on the archway.

So the whole thing is a Walking-. The challenge, Left-Behind, is to define the referent object of the Walking-. What are you Walking-Away from? Those bad old habits, maladaptive behaviors, petty irritants that drove her/him away, no doubt.

But.... Now comes the hard question, hard on the self, the soul, the strength to regard one's own reflection honestly.

What are you Walking-Towards?

Oh, sure, take the easy way out. Invoke the Mantra, the default position, the Divorce-Busting null hypothesis: "Towards a renewed and deepened relationship with my Beloved."

Sure about that?

Witnesseth @robx, @O'dog, @CityGirl, @Iwantittowork.

Witnesseth Smiley's Person Himself.

Because there comes a time -- at least as a first approximation -- where That Which Is Walked-Towards changes. Morphs. Evolves. Even disappears. "S/he's not coming back," they say in hushed tones, and you know they're right. There's no more Walking-Towards.

What creates the change? A "tipping point" as discussed earlier, where the cost-benefit calculus shifts not only against WAS, but against Reconciliation as a whole. A point as individualistic as each DB'er, as common as the experience as a whole -- the point at which you say, channeling @robx, "Why bother?"

And Diminishing Marginal Returns set in; where each additional unit of DB Power invested by LBS produces a decreasing amount of return. What does it say in Da Book? If what you're doing isn't working (i.e., isn't bringing WAS back into the fold) then try something different.

Sure. But no one has an infinite set of possible strategies; no one can change and keep changing and keep changing and retain any sense of Who I Am, let alone Who I Was.

How much energy do you have, LBS? How much more time are you going to invest? "Whatever it takes" (Coach Ditka, 8/89). "I'll fight for my marriage for as long as it takes."

Really? Sure about that? You'll be fighting in 2010? 2011? 2020? 2050?

No. No, you know better than that. You know there's an end-point and that it sits just south of the bottom side of a judge's gavel.

You say you're going to "fight forever" because you know, in fact, you won't have to. The decision will be made for you.

But it's not a foregone conclusion, at least not always (or at least not sometimes). So you walk down to the quay, and you stand before the mast, and welcome aboard, you, you're on the Good Ship Left-Behind.

And you work. Oh, how you work! GAL! 180! Get a Motto! Change! Style! Hair! Acknowledge! Validate! Change your Motto! GAL Some More! More 180s! Doing Donuts in a winter's parking lot! But what heading, Mate? That'a'way just isn't going to cut it. The ship spins around the compass rose, you are adrift on the tide.

So you must fix a point. Haul out your sextant, shoot the stars, and move. You've got to do something, lest you rip out your keel in the shoal waters of Limboland.

But beware -- Here There Be Dragons.

You thought you knew where you were going, but now, mid-current, with a freshening wind and running seas, the White Ship takes you to where you weren't.

You're Henry Hudson, searching for the Northwest Passage, cast off by a mutinous crew, lost to time in a boat.

Who mutinies? You do.

Your passions. Your fears. Your patience. Your memory. Your emotions. Your hopes. Your dreams. Your will.

Alas, poor Yogi; I knew him, Horatio -- a fellow of infinite wit. What did he say? In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.

You were Walking-Away from a failed past and Walking-Towards a hopeful future when, as if through a glass and darkly, you find that you've become Earl Holliman, wandering in the Twilight Zone.

And the picture changes. And Here, too, There Be Dragons.

I walked My Way. And, as a result, I Walked-Away.

I know that about myself. And other things, too.

I know that divorce is just divorce. Not the end of the worlds -- mine, hers, or Themselves'.

Now, now, put that umbrage back in your Gladstone bag -- you'll want to save some for the journey. "But wouldn't it be better if...?" Of course it would.

But by the same token it would be "better" if I had a zillion dollars and the Lost Tribe of Mu named me their new King.

"I wish s/he'd come back to me -- I'd make it right." How many friggin' times have I said that this year?

If wishes were horses, even beggars would ride. So many of us here hope that we can "save our marriage."

Wonderful as it can be to hope, it nevertheless remains the case that hope is not a plan. So I made a plan. It was a conscious decision. I would Walk-Towards. Towards the future. A future. Without her.

I can do that because of other things I know.

I know that, in fact, I don't need her. And that alone is liberation. I mean, give the devil her due. Maybe I was clingy and needy and un-self-focused or, at a minimum, was a person who could easily be so perceived. So now I'm free of that. Bic lighters up. "Freebird!"

You see -- as my recent posts up-thread have shown -- she too has a Walk, and there's very little evidence that she's embarked upon it.

If it should prove to be the case that her Walk and my Walk cross paths in the future... well, then, I suppose we'll have to grapple with that, evaluate it, consider the implications.

But in its time, and that time is not now. Now is my time.

Still, if only it were so simple.

I've learned, too, of the Dark Side, the black humors. Rage. Snakes on the brain. And sometimes they feel good up there.

I know that whatever "love" I feel for her seems increasingly to be an academic exercise, a theoretical proposition, a habitual response -- I say I feel love for her but that is because I'm not ready to give up the idea that I feel love for her. It still speaks to that residual identity, Who is Smiley's Person? Why, he's that cove who loves Mrs. Smiley's Person.

But that chap staring back at me from the mirror? Yes, that one. I suspect he knows better.

Alas fog-bound me, aboard the White Ship. EA, PA Ahoy.

And I like it.

Because I look at WAW and what I see is not the person I married. The person I loved. I see another person -- one who, admittedly, looks and sounds a lot like Herself, one equally maladroit at all things child, household, and owner's-manual-accompanied, but one who Is Not Her. What's missing is her soul.

Oh, sure -- Love Is A Choice. Just switch it on, SP.

Sure; sure. But is that a Single Throw or a Double Throw switch? It makes a difference, you know.

And choice? Choice implies alternatives. At a minimum, a pair-wise set of alternatives.

Which means, drum roll please, that I -- you, we, all of us -- can also choose not to love.

And doesn't that suck? But think about it. If "Love is a choice" is a fair proposition, then choosing ~Love is in-bounds. It, too, is fair. Because if I have a choice, a real choice, a true choice -- dare I say it? I dare! -- if I have Free Will, then my choice is True and Just and Fair simply by virtue of being The Choice.

So if I choose not to love, then that is every bit as honorable as to choose to love. Because if it is indeed my choice, a free choice and a fair one, then each outcome in the set is equally viable. Equally valid.

The alternative -- well, you can choose TO love but not NOT TO love -- isn't a choice at all. Which puts the nail in the coffin of "love is a choice."

Each of us has a path. You walk it. It is, as the Dead have it, for your steps alone.

Where your journey takes you, wellllll -- cope with it now; it's not likely to be the destination for which you embarked.

Yes, that sucks. It will suck should you realize, as SP Himself has, that there are Things That Are True though you so desperately wish they weren't.

But, as Philip K. Dick put it, reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

The fairy tale is gone. The courtroom remains. And though I close my eyes and dream of times gone by, Reality (the old bitch) doesn't go away.

And with her rides her sister, Self-Awareness. And Self-Awareness is a bitch. Beware The Divorce Remedy, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, Codependent No More, Hold Onto Your N.U.T.S., and their legion of various and sundry kith and kin. There, too, there be Dragons.

Because with the right eyes you might well find that, like Walt Whitman, you're large -- you contain multitudes. And many of those Yous inside you may not feel the warmth generated by a spent kitchen match towards WAS.

I don't need her. I may not -- probably do not -- even want her anymore. She committed a kind of murder, or perhaps ritual seppuku, in order to drop the Bomb. She killed off that inside of her that made her "mine."

So choose? Flip the switch? Methinks not. And in so thinking, I choose.

For the switch to close the circuit would require that I make a leap of faith of Superjesuitical proportions and that she demonstrate everything she has never demonstrated thus far. Anything less puts all I have achieved, all the progress I've made, all the equilibrium I've regained at risk.

And that I am not willing to do.

It's true -- Miss Someone didn't help at all. That debate should largely be put to rest us. Flirt, smile, show you're desirable. But go into the -A Zone at your own risk. There there most definitely be dragons.

So it's true -- at the end of the saga of Smiley's Person there is neither whimper nor bang. Just the pre-dawn echo of gates being pulled shut, doors being locked, curtains being drawn.

The Person himself becomes just another lame-ass Walkaway, mouthing the cliches and the platitudes. Cliches that are cliches, and platitudes that are platitudes, I was shocked to discover (and equally shocked to find myself sympathizing with WAW), because in general they also happen to be true.

And that, too, is okay. Not "okay" perhaps in the theological way, the philosophical way, the "what's wrong with America today is" way. But in the It's My Path way.

I'm not worried about it. I'm not defining it. I'm for the day. Let the White Ship carry me where it will; I bought the ticket, I'll take the ride.

Yes, it sucks. Sucks to read, too, I suppose. Sorry 'bout that.

It sucked -- as you all know yourselves -- to discover myself beneath a falling D-Bomb.

It sucked to be cursed, slapped, spit upon, damned, and disrespected.

It sucked to have to say to myself, "SP, old bean, she ain't coming back. She's told you to move on. So move. Look over there -- it's Robert Mitchum and there's only two kinds of men on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die."

I Walked-Away and started Walking-Towards and yes, yes, yes it sucked.

But I have Embraced the Suck. I am Walking-Towards.

The road is long. The turns are many, their numbers unknown. The way is unclear. The course is not plotted. The navigator has jumped ship.

And I can live with that.

First rule of navigating is know where you are. Use multiple sources to verify. Sounds like you know where your skin is.

Cheers

SP, That last post summed up a lot of feelings. A lot right on the same way I am feeling.

Well said.

It does suck at multiple levels. I wished I could formulate a response that would equal what you've written, but it doesn't need one.

Walking towards something. The unknown. But, did we think we knew where we were in our comfortable relationships? That was an oasis as well, and now we reached the shimmering water, and it's just sand from a mirage...

We'll dip our hands in the sand for a bit, and curse. Let it run through our fingers, and feel the grains as they fall through. Oh so dry. The throat is constricting from lack of sustenance..

We can lay down now, but we won't. We'll stand back up in the baking sun, and look there! There's water on the horizon, and it's the same path, one step in front of the other....

I do.

FWIW, I wasn't. I was walking toward an unknown chapter in my future. It could have been a chapter of independence as a single mother with a new job living near my H for the sake of the kidlet. I had an apartment here all lined up and a lease ready to sign. Or it could be what I have now, a new chapter in reconciliation with my husband.

With apologies for spamming your thread...

I'm with you 100%. When she reared SIS's ugly head, I'd have been done, too.

When it rains Suckitude, it pours.

The Boy Himself got into Massive Trouble at school yesterday. There's been Typical Trouble of late -- (hmmm, what variables matter? what has, what you might call, "changed"?) -- but this was huge. This wasn't, in other words, an acting-out by the soon-to-be-Child-of-Divorce. This was some Next Level Sh*t.

Now for years WAW Herself and I have avoided confronting certain things, engaging in a thorough-going process of rationalization, with respect to The Boy. But things have come (or been brought to) a head, and now they can't be avoided.

WAW's solution, of course, was to email me: "I'll support whatever you decide." And then go to Upstate City for the weekend, while I sat in the principal's office for 45 minutes, hearing the Unhearable.

Oh and then to make a not-so-thinly-disguised inquiry about alternatives to the most likely course-of-action, said COA carrying with it the almost certain promise of her having to pay even more support to Smiley's Person Himself. In other words, she cut right to what's important -- the money.

Nice.

But as I drove home -- The Boy silent in the backseat, knowing himself to be Doomed to a lifetime in his bedroom with no teevee or gameboy until he's 100 years old and even after I die I'm going to have myself reanimated to come back as Zombie Dad just so I can keep punishing him (ahh, the rational discourses we have when we're upset with our children!) -- it occurred to me that I didn't care. I didn't care that there wasn't a Team working the issue. That I had no back-up, no support, no one but myself (and Miss Someone, obliquely -- but there is a TMI limit with such Someones after all) to lean on.

And I'm perfectly content with the idea of Handling It (cf, @Coach). I can do it.

So there it is. I don't need her. And maybe that will be a good starting point for figuring each other out again. Maybe not. Either is okay by me.

Damnation. Worst day of my (recent) life -- at least the worst day this week -- and my first response, my first intuition wasn't "turn to She Who Loves You -- oh, yeah, you can't, waaaahhhhh doesn't divorce suck and oh me oh my."

My first response was: "Hooah! This sucks! So Embrace The Suck. Another opportunity to excel."

Suck, consider yourself Embraced.