[emphasis added]You do and you have brought all the good things in me out into the world. You're a beautiful woman, gorgeous, and the most intelligent person I've ever met and will ever meet. All I can do is cherish the years we've spent together and the times you've been there for me. I'll always love you, I'll always respect you, but I painstakingly have to say I have to walk my path alone. I don't know where I'm going, I just know I have to keep taking steps one after the other in order to find my peace, to find myself, to find my answer. In the end I don't know what I want out of life. I'm a simple man and only ask for the simplest of things in life, I guess. I feel I've let you down and have injured you immensely, but in the end I believe we are destined for different things and must take different paths in order to find ourselves. I feel I've hurt your family immensely but would like to say I couldn't have asked for a more understanding, more loving family. I'll probably never acheive anything that compares to you or your family. I am grateful for the time I've had with them. I'll always love tham and fear that they won't quite understand in the end and nor will you. You're destined for great things and without me I believe you will acheive everything you desired growing up and in college. You'll make someone the happiest person in the world one day.
I've changed so much over the years, we've changed so much. I look in the mirror and no longer recognize myself half the time. I feel empty. We have enough history to fill a book, a history that I'll always look back on with love. _____, I just feel that maybe we're better as best friends than husband and wife. We come from two different worlds and even though opposites do attract in the end we are what we are; apples and oranges. Certain things in our marriage bothered me. As meaningless as this is about to sound it has always bothered me. I've always felt that I took a secondary role in our relationship. I never felt like a man, like the head of the household. I always felt that I married another alpha male and always took the secondary role because in the end I love you and wanted to try to make it work. I've always wanted kids, but I never could communicate with you because in the end I don't know how to communicate. I've always had a dream to be my age right now with two kids. I know you want a child, but I can't wait until I'm old and grey with only one child, but even then I feel you would be perfectly happy without one. I've always wanted a house in the country with a family who has barbecues on the back porch with a bonfire and at least two bulldogs running around in the yard. I'm a simple man and I honestly need to feel like one. Also I felt rushed with all the major choices in our marriage. I didn't feel ready at the time to get married because at that time I didn't really know myself. I was hurt when you gave me no options in the music being played at our wedding and it made you upset when I had the disc jockey play two songs of my choice. It was my wedding too and it always bothered me. I also just did not feel ready to buy a house but I relented because I knew it mattered to you. I didn't feel ready to buy that eclipse but I knew in the end you would need a new vehicle and I knew you would never try to learn to drive the focus because not only was it a hassle, but it made you look like a cheap housewife driving an economic car. the things you said about religion a few days ago amzed me. For years I thought I was married to Hades himself (joke). I felt like over the past four years I was losing my religion. i never had anyone to help me learn my faith or support me in my faith, no one to guide me or persuade me to attend Mass. I felt like it was to the point where I doubted my beliefs and doubted myself. I just can't raise a family like that. I know all the animals we ever had I never consulted with you and for that i'm truly sorry. Lola brings great joy into our lives and I miss her immensely. I know you never liked Lucy and I understand why. I felt like I always take care of our animals. I feel if we ever have children I'm going to take a motherly role because I feel you're not wired that way and you'll take a fatherly role. You come from a background of scholarly halls and i come from blue collar salt of the earth. I need things in my life that you can't provide me. Just like there are things I can't provide for you. You are the most intelligent person I know, the most driven person I've ever known. You'll go far without me and you'll fidn true love in the end. It's not fair for you to have to settle in the end. I will always love you no matter what. Don't feel hurt when you try to communicate with me at times and I don't respond. I'm just trying to mlet go and move on. Maybe one day our paths may cross but I have to say goodbye and start a new path into the unknown."
Okay, my situation doesn't involve an OP so maybe I just don't understand what that is like. I just want to say that after reading his letter, I have a very hard time understanding how it could be dismissed as "fog". His letter sounds very clear and from the heart to me. I hear a man who loves you and admires you a great deal, but who doesn't feel like he is "good enough" for you. I hear a man who feels like his preferences were ignored in what should have been joint decisions.
You said he is "rewriting history". Does that mean that the facts are not as he states them? You may have a very different perspective on these events and on the relationship as a whole, but these are his feelings anyway. I suppose it could be that he is seeing things differently because of OW, but isn't it also possible that he did have these feelings all along, and it was because he didn't feel like he was "good enough" and didn't feel like the alph-male, or maybe at times feel like he didn't even have a voice, that made him particularly suseptible to another woman?
It just occurs to me that maybe the reason he is gone is because these issues were not taken seriously during your marriage and I don't know how dismissing his feelings and point of view again now, and not even responding, is going to help. In fact, dismissing it as "fog" and assuming that you do know what he really wants would be more of the same of what he is complaining about.
I'm not defending his actions, I just wanted to give you an alternate pov to consider.
