Good day Jethro, I hope you don't mind that I waited til lunchtime to reply, but I figured today I was going to need a little additional time.
Quoting jethro: When exactly did you ask for her forgiveness, and when exactly did you forgive her?
I feel closer to being able to forgive, but I KNOW I'd have an extremely hard time saying it to her. And, I also understand that I played a part in our drifting apart. I guess I'm trying to find out about the chicken and the egg here...In your sitch, did forgiveness happen before healing or after...or simultaneously?
I can't say that I had a defining moment in which I could say, "Now I forgive you.", but with each passing day, I gained a little more acceptance to be able to forgive. I'm sorry if I seem vague here, but I'm having some difficulty finding the words to express some of this right now. I might have to find some time this week to start a new thread to sort some of this out myself.
Don't think the chicken/egg thing applies here as in one follows the other ... rather that forgiveness is one ingredient of healing process as a whole ... when it comes in is not so important as knowing you are working on it. It does come slowly and last night, You took a step closer.
Quoting jethro: When did you discover what your part of the deterioration was? You see, for me it's difficult to pinpoint. I can't put my finger on any one thing, ... I simply WAS NOT nurturing our R like I should have and my attention was elsewhere. This is what I can come up with for my 50%. If you asked her side of the story, she would agree that we drifted a little, but that isn't the core issue. She would say that she never really thought she loved me, that we've always been good friends and not much more, and that we M too young, etc. Her reasons for doing what she did was because she felt trapped at home with kids all day and didn't feel close to me like she thought a W should. Her wall went up, then she became a WAW and had her A.
So, my quandry here is that I don't think we'd agree on what went wrong in our M. She has a much more universal approach that we should never have M while I really see a steady deterioration over the last four years. She really and truly believes this and has for many years now. This is my primary concern: that she won't get over the fact that she will never love me like she should.
Jethro, her feeling must have been there and strong enough to have married you. People have a tendancy to review the past with the filter of how they feel in the present. So you didn't keep the soil fertile, so to speak, and her feeling withered on the vine. BY nurturing the R, then her feelings would blossom and she would be wearing rose colored glass when looking back through out the years. This is still possible in the future. Hopefully in a few short years from now, this dark time will be overlooked in the nostagia of the good times to remember. Its certainly something to look foward to...
