Do you remember the "Jack Handy Deep Thoughts" blackout sketches they used to do on "Saturday Night Live"? One of them went, "It's easy to sit there and say you'd like to have more money. And I guess that's what I like about it. It's easy. Just sitting there, rocking back and forth, wanting that money."
Wanting your W to work on the marriage. That's the easy part. We all do that.
What work are you going to do, now, given the Brutal Reality of your situation? Because the Working and the Wanting are not mutually exclusive. You can Work and Want at the same time; you can work on X and want ~X. It's the DB Way.
But there is no Moses to lead you to the Promised Land.
Sometimes the only way across the Red Sea is over it, on top of it, or under it, depending I suppose on whether there's wings, crossed swords or dolphins on your chest.
You've got to be your own leader now and find a way across the sea. But (and to mix maritime metaphors a bit) you're rather more by way of being Magellan than Moses.
Because it's just not clear what lies on that far shore.
Perhaps OM3 is a response to your successful DBing, eh? Perhaps W feels she is being pushed by your DBing efforts and by way of resisting she is expanding the domain of her distractions.
The WAS is like quicksilver in that regard -- push it here, it sploobs its way there. In which case one might think you should just carry on with what you're doing.
On the other hand, MWD does advise that if what you're doing isn't working that you relook and rethink. Perhaps you're not getting the result you seek. ReThink.
But my most jumbled thought is this: How bad would it be to live, but live darkly, in Limboland? To, in essence, ignore W's very presence in the home, to refuse to leave your children, to make every moment in your presence a reminder to W of your categorical rejection -- rejection not of her, but of her course of action?
You don't want to divorce. We get that. I think, by and large, we all share that want.
So don't divorce.
But that choice -- and that IS a choice, my brother -- imposes costs. Only you can answer the $10,000 question lurking there -- are you willing to continue paying those costs, recognizing that at the end of the day there's not a blessed thing you can do about OM's 1 through n?
That's the gouge, my friend. And as you sea-faring types say, live by the gouge, die by the gouge.
