Over the Shock and GALing 4

[Thinker]

Thinker,

What do YOU want? Do you want to be married? What kind of a wife do you want? What kind of a home life and family life do you want?

What is making you stay? At what cost?

Where are you, Thinker?

You, as a whole man with so much substance, have choices.

Lucky

Hi Lucky,

Such Questions deserve answers:

I am pretty clear in my mind that I do want to be married. At heart I am a monogamist looking for connection. I also want to be married to the mother of my children and have a stable home and family life. It's what I grew up with, and it's what I want for me as a father and for my kids.

I also really love my W, and in many ways she is what I would be looking for: fun, active, sociable, loving, dedicated to her kids, creative and intelligent, sexual.

She has some large inner demons that cause her problems, but so do most people. I can't do anything there but hope she works through them.

She also is unable (for the past 2+years, since well before the bomb) to open up the fun, sociable, loving, sexual sides to me. I see them, I know they are there, but they are inaccessible to me. She blames me - say's that I killed those sides of her. I have used the term "emotionally divorced" before and it applies.

So what is making me stay is the belief that some day she will work through her demons (and I'll kill mine) and we can take the wall down from between us and we'll have the R that I know we could have.

At what cost? Well, at the cost of time. My biggest fear is the thought of years in limbo followed only by disappointment and pain. I am not there yet, however. I've only been really actively working on my own demons and intelligently working on the R for a few months. I'll give it a lot more time before I make any decisions on my own.