First timer Ugh!

[jmegator]

Like you both I still get on really well with my spouse, but she sees us as 'housemates' and doesn't seem to want to unpick that label and try to be anything else.

This is exactly the same as my sitch. My thinking is that if I can be happily married with passion I would much rather have that with my best friend rather than start all over with someone else. I get that H is worried because passion hasn't been really great between us for quite some time.

People ask him how he can throw away the last 10 years of his life by divorcing and his reply is that he is more worried about throwing away the next 3o years. He doesn't want to live in a passionless marriage. I understand that. I just don't think a friendship like ours is that common. Maybe he can have the passion with someone else (it always is exciting when it is new)I think though that he'll end up in this same position again in another couple of years but not with someone he has a great friendship with. What then? Serial monogamy? I think at some point if you really love who you are with, you have to be willing to put the work in to have what you want and we have definitely not done this.
He is very aggravated because he has been telling me that things haven't been good for him on and off for about a year. We talked and talked about it. Things we felt needed to change but neither of us took the initiative to make that happen. I think I was really in denial about how far this could go. I thought we were just having a low phase and I thought that was normal for any marriage and we'd get through it. Now that it is serious enough where someone is moving out he says I'm throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it. He's frustrated that I didn't try this hard earlier. He says now it may be too late. He knows that if we work at it, things could possibly change enough where we could both be happy but he just doesn't know if he even wants to do that anymore. He says he is tired of trying. That irritates me because we haven't really tried yet. All we have done is continue living each day ignoring the issues.