Okay, youse yo's, Smiley's Person is back on the coast after his -- extremely irritating, total waste of time, energy, and (most importantly in the D-process) money (gaack, I could strangle someone!) -- sojourn to Great Lakes City in the Great White North, which was pretty much just like America except their money is weird. Some queen lady or something all over it.
Anyway that's neither here nor there -- or wouldn't be, had I not received in my absence a nearly $3K bill from The Mouthpiece. Um, dude? Mr. Dude, sir? You know exactly how much money I (don't) have -- so how is it you think I'm going to pay this? Time to get a new mouthpiece, methinks.
(Gosh I love WAW. This sure was super-swell of her. Can't thank her enough.)
Back to divorce-busting. Not sure where things stand. May or may not be going to see Fabulous MC#2 tomorrow. WAW is still upstate with Themselves, so I'll get an answer later today.
Here I have to make a correction to an earlier post. Reading WAW's emails on the computer, as opposed to the iPhone, I see that she wrote: "the fact that I am apologizing for handling things badly [the freakouts] doesn't have anything....." (and then there's some organizational talk). So she apologized or nearly so -- I mean, she never says "I'm sorry," but six of one, half-dozen of the other.
So let me here stipulate and declare -- I misrepresented when I said WAW had not actually apologized.
After the full moon waned (or did it wax?), WAW sent what were, by her recent standards, surprisingly lucid e-mails attempting -- unsuccessfully, but trying anyway -- to clarify her POV.
I'm pasting here what is OBVIOUSLY a limited sample, a representative flavor, before we carry on with our explorations. What I will ask -- given that this is Page 54 of the thread -- is that IF you have thoughts, please don't cut-and-paste via the "quote" function, as that soaks up a lot of room and the mods will weigh in here and lock the thread e're long. -----
I'd be lying if I said I hadn't had a small hope that I was wrong about everything between us
Okay, fair enough. But when didn't you say this? Oh, I remember -- you always didn't say this. Half-empty or half-full? Truth or retrospective reevaluation? Or what you want to believe right now? -----
So then I queried why she had said the things she said and, directly, if it was true that she'd thought she might "be wrong," why had she insisted on walking-away?
I was angry and I wanted OUT. That meant a lot of things but first and foremost it meant a physical separation. I absolutely had to have that. And whatever happens or doesn't happen between us, that was without doubt the right decision for me.
So what do I do with that? Leaving me and the children was "without doubt the right decision." So now working her way back -- is that "without doubt the right decision"? Should I expect another "without doubt the right decision" in 6 months, a year, a decade, where she again wants "OUT"? ------
another thing I think we can both agree on is that our communication is terrible.
I told her I absolutely agree with this but, as I've been reflecting over the totality of our relationship, I can see that it always was. In fact, we had 12 years of a very good marriage in spite of our sh*t communication abilities, which I actually take to be rather complimentary to the both of us. ------
I thought we would be "seeing" each other in addition to whatever else might be going on.
This one I just can't get my head around. So she'd ILYBNILWY and do all the other stuff, move out, break the kids' hearts, be with Signore... but we'd also be "seeing" each other. Was I supposed to infer that? "Know" that instinctively? Guess it? Is that in the Walkaway Manual -- I'll give you a mercy poke from time-to-time to help you get over things?
I asked her how this was supposed to fit in with Signore and now with "my" Someone (whom WAW knows about).
I thought I didn't care about sex anymore and what I realized was that I didn't care about it with you.
*Sigh. So all the times I tried to initiate in the year leading up to the Bomb -- that meant that "I didn't care" about sex anymore. And given that she realized SHE "didn't care about it" with me, what would have been the benefit of this "we'd still be seeing each other" thing? -------
So I reminded her that she'd said Signore was merely a plaything, not the cause of the D, and that all of the things she objected to in me were, by and large, still things she objected to.
There are varying degrees of "problems." The lack of ambition and spending habits are fairly significant to me, especially because of the implications for my own work life. The lack of intimacy is a dealbreaker. Ditto the "not being there" for me.
The "not being there" refers specifically to 2004, when I'd just come back from Iraq. So that's STILL a "dealbreaker," which would lead me -- maybe not you, but certainly me -- to wonder what the hell the rest of the discussion is about.
Now there's a nice DB road-map there. Intimacy can be built. "Spending habits" refers to a long-standing dispute over what is and isn't an appropriate use of money and I'm not sure that one can be overcome.
I'll use a trivial and not-real example. I'd like a coffee table. There are lots and lots of coffee tables. I'll judge them by size, color, design, and price. I'm prepared to trade off color or design for price. She, on the other hand, inevitably "must" have what is inevitably the most-expensive of the lot -- and because it's the most expensive, we don't get it. We "wait."
Well I get tired of waiting. Here's a real example -- this house that I am living in, 5 years after we bought it, still doesn't have window treatments because she didn't want to buy "cheap-looking" ones that we could afford and so chose instead NONE against future really-nice ones.
As for the last, I don't think there's anything I can do about that one. I've apologized, validated, opened myself to "being there" on all sorts of things since I started DB'ing, etc. Until SHE forgives, that's just there. And she herself, in one of our "good" convos, acknowledged my accusation -- which, as it happens, turned out simply to be a true statement -- that she'll keep moving the goal-posts so that I can never be forgiven for that. -----
So anyway, that catches you up on nearly everything. We'll see what happens in re: Fabulous MC#2.
