What I admire is that you seem to be doing your level best to NOT become or sound like a typical walkaway spouse yourself. I can hear many of those thoughts in your frustration - "I have changed and you have not, we are just not compatible anymore - you cannot love me the way that I NOW know I deserve to be loved."

These are some of the same phrases that were thrown to many of us as reasons why our spouses walked out of their family's lives.

I know that you do not want to become that.

I also know that you are NOT being superficial about this.

Going through a marital crisis where our spouse chooses to abandon us for a better life is incredibly traumatic. It shakes us down to our core, for most of place incredible value and importance in the promises made when we marry. Put that together with YEARS often spent together, the children we conceive and raise together, and the many, many memories of life together and we are hard pressed to just rise from the bed each day.

Eventually we find a measure of strength inside. For those of us with children, I think it usually starts there. As parents, the only active parents in our children's lives at that point, we KNOW we MUST survive in order to provide, care, and nurture them. Whatever it is, something eventually pushes us out of our pain and paralysis and moves us forward with finding recovery.

As time goes by, we become stronger. We find a core group of people who are honest and supportive. We care for ourselves and manage to take good, long looks inside ourselves and try to see honestly what we find there. We grow. For us the crisis becomes an opportunity to reassess and redirect our lives. Our perspectives change as a matter of course. Our priorities change as well.

It amazes me sometimes that any of these long term marital crises EVER are healed. I see my ex-wife (in the rare times that we have contact) in much the same state she was in when she walked out the door. It seems to me that very often the walkaway spouse makes little progress in growing as a person, perhaps because they allow themselves only to look outward for change.

What then is the left behind spouse to do when faced with a situation like Kalni faces now?

For is this not an excellent example of a relationship where one partner has, in a sense, outgrown the other? It looks that way to me.

Kalni has changed. Her perspectives have changed, her priorities have been rearranged. What she values is different in some ways from what she valued before. What she NEEDS is certainly different that what she was willing to accept before.

And yet her husband seems to be pretty much the same man he was when he left. This is NOT to say that he was or is a bad man. Just to say that he is STILL the man he was before, the man who was part of a marriage that was NOT working well.

The worst part is that I do not believe that he realizes this.


Kalni, you are in a tough spot, though I know that is no news to you. I feel for your situation. You know my story. You know that I DID move on, that I found another person who was capable of loving me for who I had become, and who was willing to accept the love that I offered. You know that I am happy and blessed to have this chance to try again.


Honestly, if my ex-wife had approached me early in our situation and asked to try again, I would probably have done flips to make it happen. But I think of now, two years since our divorce, and there is no flipping way that I would ever welcome her back (were I still single I mean). I am in a much better place personally. I have wrestled with many of my demons and found some victory, and that victory has changed MY perspectives and priorities as well.


Your heart wants to allow your husband this chance, or at least I get that tone from your writing. But this does not deserve to be an automatic thing, and your husband rightfully should come to that realization quickly.


If he already knows your NEW expectations for married life together, then he is failing by not addressing those things. If he is totally aware of the many ways that you are now different and have different needs, then his inaction screams out that he is unwilling or at least unprepared to match your changes.


I would be inclined to take this trip, were I in your shoes. I would go because I would want a chance to see this man and how he behaves with me when work is not pulling at his sleeves. It is perhaps the one thing that you have not seen since he expressed a desire to return.


In the end, you must be honest with yourself. I know that you do NOT want to be doing THIS again in the near future. As I told Debra when we married, "This is IT for me. There will never be another marriage if we fail. I cannot and will not go through this again."


Blessings,

Bill

"Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon."