Hey?!? Who Locked Up My Mojo?

[SmileysPerson]

@Gypsy: I sometimes find it hard to follow your posts because the referents in them are unclear to me, and I start to wonder whether they're clear to you.

For example,

Her weekend getaway is nothing mysterious or foreshadowing. It's a charity event planned before the bomb though the physical separation may cast it in a different light.

Yeah, not sure really what that has to do with anything.

With respect to "sauce" for game birds, four days after the Bomb WAW was en-route to Upstate City for a weekend in a boutique hotel and at the slammin'est of slammin' Upstate City restaurants with Signore Schmuckatelli, he of the limitless pockets and limitless free time. So this notion of @polly's that WAW will "resent" other-focused sexuality strikes me as being a miss and not a hit.

@Sara (I believe) then posted, asking why, if Signore is out of the picture, is WAW going to Upstate City next week (I having pointed out that, symbolically, she is leaving the area one way while I and the kids leave it another way). My reply was, Oh, that's got nothing to do with Schmuckatelli -- that's a charity event. So that's completely independent of the sauce discussion.

With respect to sauce, you wrote:

you can boink to your heart's content.. but understand why. You're lusty and a tasty morsel is dangling without salacious reach of your tongue.

Do I infer correctly that the sentence starting "You're lusty..." is the "why" to the preceding clause, "but understand why"?

Because if so -- yes, I never didn't understand that. Of course that's the reason why. Charter member of the Lucky Bastard Club, I'm getting mercy tumbles -- and booyah! to that.

How's the old psyche? How true to yourself are you being in counseling? Do you still go?

The old psyche's okay. About where it should be.

I'm starting to miss things in a healthy way. It struck me the other day, for example, how easy it is to take for granted those trivial, about-nothing conversations you have with your spouse. "Hey, what's that?" That kind of thing. Solitude in "the" house is so quiet it's loud -- know what I mean? But that kind of missing doesn't send me off into paroxysms of sobs and snot and head-beating. Just that comfortable kind of achiness you have when you remember things you used to like.

I still see the head-shrinker, though I've been getting bored lately, so we're shifting our focus to this idea of life-coachery for me. He asks, I answer, he keeps saying, "God, you sound healthy." Then he takes a bunch of notes, and we talk about Things Wrong With The World. I think he's getting bored, too.

what comes across to me is that your wife's physical departure, letting you assume she was renting a house has blow the lid off.

Here, too, we have the kind of miscommunication / misinterpretation that is endemic in these fora.

She never let me assume she was renting a house. In thread 4 or so I talk quite a bit about this. The rental idea crapped out very quickly when it transpired that, given our credit ratings, a mortgage was cheaper than rent. No, my point there was that this separation does not have the markers of "temporary" -- she's committed to a mortgage, not a 6-month lease. See the difference?

Sex is a good thing...Consider the total picture.

Oh, I am! Make no mistake about that -- Florence Nightingale #1 sent me a "total" picture, just to whet the old appetite. Booyah!

@aliveandkicking wrote in response to @Sara and @Kimmie Lee:

Obviously when you live with someone and are in a difficult relationship, you see your S through a different lens.

I think that's exactly right. Male and female alike, I suspect it's often the case that Total Desirability and Length of Marriage are inversely related.

Herself has said on a couple occasions, "I know you'll find someone else, you're great," most recently in The Note. And she's mentioned my obvious "opportunities" and "prospects" recently. And a couple woman friends she's told have had the initial, shocked, "you let THAT go?" response. But as she likes to say, I'm a nice guy, just not her guy. So it's not a matter of leaving something valuable in the trash -- it's not wanting that valuable anymore. A couple years ago, WAW basically called "halt" on gold jewelry and switched to silver and platinum. Nothing wrong with gold, had a bunch of it -- just didn't suit her any more. Boring. Last decade.

That's Smiley's Person in a nutshell, I guess -- good as gold.

@alive then wrote:

Do you see what I'm saying? Basically, finding someone to boost your ego and make you "feel good" about yourself means nil about the circumstances or culpability in the M. IMO.

Ummm, no -- I actually don't see what you're saying.

It's true that "someone to boost your ego" means nothing about what you did in the marriage. But I'm not clear why that matters. Can't you both acknowledge what you did in the M and get your ego boosted? Or are those mutually exclusive variables -- they cancel each other out? Or is your claim that a person in a D situation is "unauthorized" to feel good about him- or herself until such time as all debts (emotional, psychic) are paid?

@Orich wonders if

in some cases, it might help the WAS to separate completely. In other words, the WAS might be holding on just because they are afraid of hurting the LBS. Once they see that the LBS is doing ok, the WAS can leave without any guilt.

This one has me puzzled. For one, nothing I've seen

(... sorry, got distracted there -- Procol Harum, "Conquistador" -- always have to stop for that one ...)

For one, nothing I've seen in any of these threads, or read in the MWD books or any other books suggests that guilt-at-hurt is decisive for the WAS. After all, by definition the WAS has decided that her/his pain in the marriage is greater than any pain that might be caused by leaving the marriage, so the cost-benefit ratio always favors WAS.

For another, potential guilt-at-hurt is assuaged by the strategic deployment of the litany of bullsh*t phrases that are the heart of WASspeak: "I love you, but...," "it's not you, it's me," "kids are resilient," "heck, half of all marriages," "you'll be better off without me," "I know I'm losing a good thing, but...," "I'm trapped," "I can't breathe," blah blah blah-dee-frickin'-blah.

Moreover, if the guilt-at-hurt were substantial enough, the WAS would ultimately prove only to be an AWAS -- and that's seldom the case.

Now in a specific case or two, as you suggest, seeing the LBS survive might reinforce the decision, but I'm not convinced it would be decisive in the decision. And why not? Because (a) the WAS is all-about-WAS and (b) there has to be an implicit assumption that LBS will "get along somehow" in order to permit WAS to move along.

If your WAW hasn't pulled the trigger, I hardly think it's because you're not out doing the Wild Thang. It's probably got a lot more to do with your DB'ing and her own thought processes.

@BobbiJo wrote:

Love how she keeps reaching out to you (vaguely) with these e-mails!

Good! You keep loving it for both of us for a while longer, if you will. At present, I wax and wane between curiosity and irritation!