And here's the rub.. because my impression goes against popular opinion.
Let her go.
Only she can decide to come back.
I am in total agreement. And a lot of people on Team Person in the Alt (AKA, the Real World) actually want that quote cut off at the period following "go" -- they don't want her to decide to come back because her attitude has been so single-mindedly on herself.
I'm not rendering that judgment, because I'm recusing myself from Judgmentaldom. I do understand that they're saying, "You're too good for her."
Welllllll, I don't buy into this "good" for a person thing, but I appreciate their basic point: You're acting more nobly than she is, says they, so why should she reap the benefit?
That's actually not a bad question in a sense. I was having this convo with a tennis partner t'other day -- "Would you really take her back?" asks he, rather incredulously.
And you know what, Gypsy? Between you and me and the Internet -- I'm not sure the answer is "yes." For the kids' sake? Absolutely. But for mine? I really just don't know anymore.
For one -- and this is something I see over at the Piecing threads, and is something @Puppy Dog Tails talks about a lot vis-a-vis affairs -- there's the "what's to keep you from doing it again" angle.
For another -- and I've referred to it above -- there's the whole Self-Awareness issue: What if, in fact, WAW is not (and perhaps never was) "the one"? What if there's a kind of inevitability being played out here?
Big questions, to be sure, and certainly not ones I'm going to front-load any answers to, but they strike me as emblematic of "progress" in a way -- one goes from "What do I do now?" to "What do I do next?" as the days wear into weeks wear into months and the DB'ing proceeds accordingly.
Quote:
Returning the ring with sentimental value.. "Let me go." "I'm leaving." or "Look at what a brave little toaster I am, do something".
I'm going to give her props on this one. That was, I think, actually just a nice thing to do. I mean, it was my father's fraternity pin (him, like Mistah Kurtz, dead), and is one of the very few artifacts I had / have of him. That act was for me, I suspect, and not for her.
Quote:
Let her experience the consequences of her decision.
So important. Sooooo important! This was one of the earliest lessons I had from @Greek, in fact, and was really key in moving me from Stage 1 to Stage WherevereitisIamnow. When we say "it's all about WAS," we have to really mean "all." WAS has to be allowed to own it, good and bad. As I've said before (again courtesy of @Greek and @DanceQueen and you), LBS tends to underestimate (or not even consider) the fact that WAS is going through his/her own process, and that it might not -- though in a perverse way LBS wants it to -- be all good, sunshine, and roses. Just look at WAW -- I can see on her Totally Not Poker-Face Face just how pained she is.
One of the frustrations, I think, that @BTB, @Gardener, @pollyanna, and @aliveandkicking have in their sitch's is that their WAS's don't "seem" to be experiencing any negatives in that "all" that is "all about them." (Though @alive recently opened up a can of Mojo on her H who suddenly seems not to be so cool after all.... And bully for her!)
Quote:
It doesn't mean you don't love her, that you're walking away from the marriage... it's respecting her wishes, that go counter to your goal.
It's so funny that you wrote this, because I had JUST said the same thing to one of our colleagues -- who shall remain nameless -- in the Alt. He said that, by detaching he felt like he was becoming the Walkaway and abandoning his kids (to WAW's whims), to which I replied:
Quote:
in more than one sense the LBS does become a Walkaway. Even if the LBS is "true" to the vows and fighting for the marriage and etc. and et al., the LBS is still Walking Away -- at a minimum, walking away from a situation, from her/his own past self, and so on.
I went through the abandoning the kids thing, too. "If I walk, then I'm no better than her!" But I reframed that. She's walking away -- I'm walking towards. And ultimately I decided I was saving them by saving myself.
Great thoughts and comments, Gypsy. As you can see, you've been influential.
