Close encounters of the MLC kind

[hoosiermama]

I was reading this morning that people, often, after the revelation of an affair, do everything they can to save/fix the marriage. What they are really in search of is not a fix for the marriage, but, rather, something much deeper: themselves. They search for the self, perhaps that they lost a long time ago. Perhaps this self never really emerged yet. But the core essence of the self they are looking for is the self that will not allow their spouses to treat them so cruelly.

I can certainly understand this statement. I think I'm past the point of being willing to do anything to "get him back." I think I was past that point a week out from the bomb. I've been doing some heavy work (as you may have noticed from my loooooong and verbose posts) to figure out when and how I lost myself, because I was in a pretty good space before all this began. I think I'm getting close.

principally it doesn't allow us to reveal our selves to others. This kills intimacy, and it invites abuse and contempt from others.

Amen to that. It's not even a choice to be aloof, really, it's how we learned to survive. And it does invite contempt.

Thanks for the affirmation. Someday I hope to believe it.

Stalling--it just seems that 60 days is such a brief time for such a destructive thing. It just seems so incongruous to be able to end a 14-year marriage and rip apart a family just 6 months after H gets a wild hair and decides he's entitled to more out of life. That's basically it. It may not accomplish anything, and it's not really a strategy. If anything, it's a way of honoring the vows I took and not trivializing them by tossing them out the window in a 60-day process.