Stop.. just stop.. being her emotional confidant. That's what married couples are.
True enough, though it seems to me that when you share the responsibility for the happiness and well-being of 2 children, one has a certain investment in the emotional well-being of the parenting partner. That is to say, if s/he's not well, then the kids by definition are suffering. So one has an interest -- not a responsibility -- in helping to preserve that other half of the parenting team, no?
She has to stand on her own two feet, walk the walk and truly deeply choose which path she takes....she is becoming a more evolved mom, she will find another man.
Of this there is no doubt.
You're here to be you, the best you ever.. with or without her.
Of this, too, there is no doubt. And as for me, I have no doubt whatsoever about my future romantic life which, I expect, will be launched much, much sooner rather than later, and yay for my team!
@aliveandkicking:
You have missed, almost entirely, the point. When I referred to the lawyer guy, I was using him merely as a metaphor -- I don't really give a dam about his situation one way or the other.
But the larger point remains, and gets to the challenge I issued in my last thread -- namely, since we male LBS are constantly being told we weren't "man enough" in the marriage, doesn't it stand to reason that the female LBS simply wasn't "woman enough"? Now not too many people picked that up and ran with it, for obvious reasons.
But the point remains. This mode of working -- this DBology -- is predicated almost entirely on the supposition that YOU, the LBS, f*cked up. That you're "no good" as you are. So you work and you work to identify all the ways you f*cked up and fixed them.
But what if, from the WAS's true POV, none of those things mattered a bit? Doesn't that risk taking on far more responsibility than is perhaps warranted?
What if WAS walked just because WAS sucks as a person -- what if the pain of this situation is that LBS is discovering just how rotten a piece of work WAS really is as a human?
That's possible, isn't it? Not in every case, perhaps; maybe not in most cases? But isn't it possible that WAS walks for no reason other than WAS him/herself?
Dangerous thought, though, because it would mean at the end of the day there's almost nothing, absotively-posilutely nothing, LBS can do to "save the marriage." Because in that scenario the D ain't about LBS -- it's about WAS and WAS's personal suckitude, in which case the LBS should hallelujah and thank WAS for the gift of self-awareness.
It's not that the self-evaluation LBS does isn't useful or beneficial -- we see lots of examples of that hereabouts like @Gypsy, for example. But it's that it runs the risk of being done from too negative a frame -- and any life coach will tell you that if you do something out of a negative place those changes won't really "stick." For one, it's a recipe for further co-dependency.
And, for an even bigger kick in the head, those changes could theoretically run the risk of being counterproductive.
After all, I'm making all these changes to address the shortcomings in my now-dead marriage. What if That Which WAW Disliked proves to be the same set of characteristics that the Next Mrs. SP would otherwise like? What if I'm changing all the "good" things in me for the Other Next Woman simply in the name of fixing them because, in her "truth," they were "bad" for the Last Now Dead And Gone Woman?
Unless we assume there is some kind of Modal Relationship such that my bad characteristics in Relationship 1 would also be bad characteristics in Relationship 2, as WAW put it when first seeing and dismissing my changes, "Don't be the man I wanted you to be now -- my taste in men isn't like a normal woman's."
(And just for the record, @alive, not everything I say here is meant to be taken literally -- this is a good place for playing with ideas because there are a lot of interesting and smart people here, like my esteemed colleague @Gypsy above.)
