Up, down, turn around

[toughlover]

Thanks guys.

LN, it so good to hear from you. I confess I had forgotten about everyone here as I had to get off the boards cause I was drowning in this stuff.

I am so glad to hear things are going well for you. I thought and prayed for you often back then.

Bottom line: I just want out. Even if we could have a great marriage after many more months of doing whatever, I don't even want to pay that price. If I had unlimited funds I'd be moved out already. As it is we have a pretty good plan in place to get to that point which I estimate will take 6 to 9 months...what's mainly involved is her finding a full-time job. She actually already works full-time hours in a part-time job, so it's something she needed to do anyway...or quit working altogether, which clearly is no longer an option.

I don't remember all that I posted back then, but I didn't set out too many hoops for her to jump through, and the ones I did were guidelines I had to follow as well, and were arrived at with the help of our marriage counselor. They were mainly: no emotional or physical relationships with members of the opposite sex, including her OM, make major decision together with mutual enthusiastic agreement, and, of course, work on the relationship together.

Which if you think about it, is really what marriage is about anyway. We both agreed to that, and we both did an imperfect job in carrying that out because we're human.

Interestingly, cutting off contact with the OM was relatively easy for her, compared to the other guidelines.

This is not about power or control. For good or bad, it's just about me being very, very tired of the rollercoaster, and being tired of being the only giver here. So I'm getting off of the rollercoaster. We had a lot of potential, I think. But as with most of what had transpired in our marriage from day one, we've never been able to work together, never been on the same page. We couldn't/didn't do that even before we had all this crap to deal with.