It is wonderful to have an expert on Greek on the thread! I tried going to bed earlier last night, so i'm sorry I missed you when you wrote this.
This love stuff is so tricky. K, you make a good point about the difficulty of getting out of real love once you are in. That is a whole other side of the puzzle. It does seem that the trick is to just find that new person who titillates with love, lust, cupid's arrow, whatever it is. That certainly seems to work for the WASs.
For me it seems that would be a short-term fix. Most relationships, especially a first relationship post-divorce tend to have low survival rates. Then again - they are often described as some of the "best" relationships by divorcees.
I'm generally pretty good at detaching from my emotions... I was able to back off, go dim, and make a conscious decision to let W go her own way and follow her own journey within a month of the bomb. I'm making a conscious decision now to detach, go dim, and let reality work its way in.
She knows how I feel about her. I'm sure on some level she sees that as a safety net. I'm going to start removing that net... going to start moving on... going to start doing what I can to be happy for myself.
If she comes back, she'll come back to a changed person, someone who is positive, working hard, and trying hard. But she won't be coming back quickly - because I won't let her. If she asks to go to counseling, I'll tell her to wait a couple of weeks and make sure that is what she really wants. I'm not going to rush into anything.
This is the person I intended to spend the rest of my life with. I am still 'willing' to consider the possibility. But with OM, especially living next door - that is going to be a major investment on my part in order to forgive her if she ever comes clean. If she never comes clean, I'm just going to focus on moving on. I deserve better - and so do my children.
Love? I don't think you can just 'get out' of real love. I think you can hide it, I think you can push it down. But it is always there. I have an ex-W who was truly a horrible person, and who is literally in prison for the next 17 years. I still have 'some' feeling there, because she is the mother of my 2 boys.
Those feelings aren't at the point where I'd want to ever invest in even a friendship with her. But I don't believe that true love goes away. Real love endures. Real love is the reason a lot of us are here instead of saying "fine, get the heck out!" when our spouses are unfaithful.
But eventually that flame can subside... the embers eventually fade, and when not tended - it can be overcome by another flame.
If anything, a lot of us can learn something from what situation we've found ourselves. Love, no matter how true, requires maintenance.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."
