From over here (and I think I speak for everyone, except possibly cobra and fearless who always seem to have a counter-opinion) that you did EVERYTHING possible to be/do whatever seemed necessary to save the marriage up to and occasionally including doing emotional harm to yourself.
I agree that my marriage almost certainly woulda/shoulda ended no matter what. Here's what I'm saying. Fusion issues are control/power/security issues. When you are "working" on your relationship with the goal of saving/maintaining/fixing your relationship you are like a bad scientist who is over-controlling an experiment towards a result towards which the scientist has a bias. The moment I was able to think "I wonder if my marriage will survive?" without fear, I became a good scientist, more differentiated, more guided by curiosity and less controlling. The mistake that I made (even though I do believe that the results would have been the same) was that I almost immediately flipped my thinking towards a bias towards divorce and over-controlled the experiment in the other direction.
I think Cobra's stance is that when you reach that point in a relationship you should consciously "re-fuse" a bit and reclaim a bit of your pro-marriage bias about the results of the experiment but remain self-aware that you were able to be more differentiated. I disagree for the same reason I would disagree with a scientist who informed me he was running an experiment under that protocol. I think the best thing to do would be to just try to stay in that differentiated, un-biased, curious state of wonder as long as possible and then try to get there again once you inevitably slip as often and for as long as possible as you can. If a person could do that in regard to everything they would have, literally, the most wonderful life possible.
"Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" - Mary Oliver
