I thought of something else that makes me angry. We are admonished in DBing to look coldly at ourselves and our role in the D. What was Walkaway asking for / needing / looking for that we didn't provide? "Do you hear what Walkaway is saying? Are you speaking Walkaway's love language?"
But there's relatively little said about looking at the underlying dynamic there; why did LBS begin (for example) to shut down? What was Walkaway failing to provide?
This struck me today while thinking about @Kettricken's posts (and no, we're not 5 but there are some words that we can finesse in the interest of public discussion). WAW didn't even get me a card on our anniversary, which was 3 months before D-Day, or for any number of my recent birthdays or even Valentine's Days - while I never forgot. Now that sounds trivial, and perhaps it is, but the fact is she was withdrawing her affection over time and simply sat around (apparently) waiting for me to figure it out. Now perhaps I ought to have been able to do so, but how do you do that - just let someone soldier along in blissful ignorance while simultaneously getting angrier and angrier that the person doesn't get it? If it mattered, if you wanted it, wouldn't you say something? The most I got from WAW was "things need to change or something's going away" - and to this day she insists it should have been "obvious" that she meant "divorce." In hindsight, maybe, but she said it in this casual way (sorting laundry) - how was I supposed to know "this was it"? No, she just let me meander down the primrose path while she pulled all affection (and sex) from me. And the one time she decided to m/l before the Bomb (and the first time in 4 months at that), she stopped me in mid-foreplay and said "ugh, this is boring."
So WTF? When do I get to assess what I wasn't getting out of the M and when do I get to give that equal due, equal respect, to what I take to be my own shortcomings in the R?
