Pardon me for weighing in from out of nowhere. I feel presumptuous addressing one of the "gods" of DBing, but I'll just go ahead. I feel enormous respect for you, given the grace, patience, and stamina you've displayed and the wisdom of your words to others. You're certainly first rate in my book. My personal situation is not too different from yours (and not really interesting enough to recite), though my wife never left the house. What jolted me out of lurkerdom was the part about your wife and D9. I have two daughters, 4 and 9, of whom the older one also has a hard time dealing with her mother. It seems to me that your wife feels like she has you in her hip pocket, so she can continue to mentally check-out from her marriage and freely indulge her OM fantasies. Among my in-laws, I've seen these situations stretch out for year after year. Maybe you'd gain some traction in your situation if you were less accommodating. If your wife got a sense that the door was closing, she would have to make a real decision. Of course you would have to live with the outcome. Personally, I finally got tired of waiting for her to snap out of it, open up to me, recommit, what have you. I used to always be listening, validating, peacemaking. The result was that she felt safe dumping all her stuff on me, and there was just no end to it. It probably helped the process of detachment to reach the point that a divorce sounded just fine to me. I don't try to get her to open up; I just insist on being treated with respect, and I try not to reinforce negative behavior. When things run smooth, I'm about as pleasant and accommodating as I always was. If she wants to go on about some failure of mine, I listen for a while, apologize (once) if I haven't already, then ask her what she'd like me to do about it now. If she comes up with something reasonable, I do it and then consider the subject closed. If I get divorce or separation talk from her, I tell her to either knock it off or let me know when she's leaving. If she brings up OM junk, I tell her I don't want to hear about it. If she throws a tantrum, she gets no comforting or peacemaking from me any more; I just leave her alone, and demand an apology before letting things back to normal. Her everyday behavior is about 100% better, which puts it almost at the tolerable level. I don't have any great hopes that we'll stay married for the long term, but I don't worry about it much. Well, that was a little more about me than I'd intended, but I'm sure you get my point. You have my best wishes.
