This is feeling a bit like 'The Perils of Pauline' (I guess I'm really dating myself here) -- but what else can I say. I hate to admit this to you, all of you who wished me well and expected the best, as I did, from the Retrouvaille weekend. But the awful truth is -- I am a Retrouvaille drop-out.
Sigh... I did the cardinal sin, I went on a rampage through the past, through the EMA sell-out. That happened late on the Friday night after our first formal Retrouvaille session -- which went fine, BTW, both of us really liked their program and both of us worked hard on it and got some benefit from it -- we left early Saturday morning at my insistence. I wanted to get away from H, couldn't bear to be in the same room with him.
I could go through a long song-and-dance and tell you all of the things which set me up for this particular emotional melt-down, but I'll spare you. The fact is that I've had emotional melt-downs related to the EMA on kind of a regular basis -- in spite of my best intentions and my devotion to reconciliation with H, and in spite of how I know the damage it does. So finally, the Retrouvaille melt-down -- like how could anything be more stupid or badly timed, right? Or more indicative to me that there is a real, real problem here that can't be 'emotionally-controlled' away.
I finally decided that it wasn't 'stupid', it was my body, or maybe some lower core brain center taking over from intellect. So 2 days later I wrote H a 'good-bye' email. And it really felt right. I didn't suffer from any regrets during the 36-hour period over which I wrote and meditated on it or after I sent it. I summed up the crux of the problem as I saw it -- H didn't want marriage, I couldn't forgive the EMA. We were at an impasse after 6 months of active reconciliation. We were back to square one, back to the beginning. I'd done my best with the situation and it didn't work, so good-bye. H sends 'good-bye' right back. It's over. And I'm still feeling OK about it.
So yesterday, feeling truly unattached to an ongoing relationship with H, I started having a more questions about 'the Big Picture'. About what really happened in the marriage going back a decade or more. I felt that H had been evasive, or maybe it was just that I didn't really trust him to tell me the whole truth during the time we were reconciling, and now that we weren't he could answer without worry of what my reaction might be. Basically, I wanted the story and that was all I wanted from him.
I contacted him at work, asked for some conversation and he said he would phone me back at the end of the afternoon. Which he did, he spoke before I could get a word in, he had made some notes on how he saw our situation and he had a proposal for me -- that we take a full month off seeing one another with the standard agreement still in place related to OP and fending off interested OP (the Shirley Glass protocol), and that during this time we do our own Retrouvaille-type questions in our notebooks and meet for exchange of notebooks & dialogue at the end of that time.
It was a long and heartfelt conversation, a few tears were shed on both sides. At one point he told me that he felt 'like scum for not making the break, for keeping this going and not letting you get on with your life'. And all I could think was that it was very likely he had said this same line to OW. Such drama! Only now it's appleroad who is standing in for OW-the-Drama-Queen. Well, keep wishing me luck.
