But in fact what I've learned is not that you can handle it, but that you do handle it. Sometimes well, sometimes not-well; sometimes easily, sometimes not-easily. But you handle it. But you handle it. Why? You have no choice.
In my case, the Handling Of It started a couple months ago, after WAW Herself and I -- well WAW anyway -- had a battery-draining cellphone-a-thon with me sitting on the cold marble steps of the Grand Staircase of Famous Art Museum in Big Midwestern City, where I had taken refuge from the rain.
WAW at that time was still deeply in The Fog, and the spew was typical Walkaway spew. There was nothing, nothing at all, that Smiley's Person could do or had done "right." He was All Wrong, All The Time, and I guess it was some kind of miracle that she hadn't murdered me in my sleep long ago.
So at the end of that session, I just walked out in the rain, up and down the boulevard, and then sought refuge in my favorite pub. And after a couple of Irish coffees -- purely for medicinal purposes, you understand -- I realized: My life isn't ending. How 'bout that?
From that point, things began to change. Power shifted, slowly and subtly at first, until now it's nearly all on my side of the ledger. And the more it accrued to me, the more confident and -- total honesty -- the more happy I was. "Happy? Happy getting a divorce?"
Yes, absolutely. Happy because I knew it would not defeat me. And that was The Fear, wasn't it? The Fear. "I'll never be the same again. I'll never love again. She was the only woman for me."
Well....not so much.
And at that point, I realized that my on-line conversations with Miss Someone -- who I was at high school with -- were actually...nice. Rewarding. I looked forward to them. It wasn't that they were "different" or "Other" than any conversation I'd had with WAW in our lives together. It wasn't that Miss Someone "had something" that WAW didn't. It was that it was uncomplicated -- uncomplicated in the sense of not being polluted with all the spew of the marriage.
So it was easy -- easy in the sense of easy to be honest. To just b.s. for a while on Skype. To laugh about stupid things.
And -- and this was very, very important for me, even if I don't "recommend" it for anyone else -- easy to not be DB'ing -- to not having to be "on my game" and watching everything I thought, did, said, revealed, etc.
It was light. Airy.
But I suspect this is often the case with OPs, which is why I have more sympathy now for WAW vis-a-vis Signore. I "get" it, in a way; doesn't mean I approve of it or that I'm glad it happened, but I understand the attraction of Something Other Than.
Now throughout the process, as many of you know, I simply put on my body armor (gad, forgot how heavy that stuff is) and accepted -- as I did in the war -- that I was already dead. I wasn't going to talk WAW out of the D, beat her out of the D, or otherwise convince her out of the D. It's her play; it's her D. I'm just the collateral damage.
So I focused on me.
And, in doing, began to clear away a lot of Fog of my own. See, I think there's actually FogS, and not just Fog, in these sitch's. When we "lose" the M, though it is perfectly understandable why we do this, we immediately begin to romanticize it. Rose-colored glasses and all. "Oh, she's the only woman for me. Oh, he was the greatest thing since sliced cheese."
But you know, and I know, that during the M the story was different. Sure, the complaints and gripes and dissatisfactions and minor hurts didn't rise (descend?) to the level of divorce -- not for us -- but they sure were irritating at the time.
So the more honestly I reappraised the M, the more I realized that -- though perhaps I was unwilling or even unable to articulate it at the time -- I hadn't been getting everything I wanted, either (though I was of course all-too-aware of the sex-starvation). For example, it wasn't until quite recently -- say, the last couple months -- that I realized (or gave myself permission to realize) just how deeply hurting it was to me that WAW took no interest whatsoever in my work.
I mean, every day I'd ask about hers, listen to the stories, sympathize with the complaints, yet she could walk into my home office, lined floor-to-ceiling with the books I use in my work, see me reading or transcribing notes or writing, and not once -- not once -- say, "Hey, what're you writing? What's that book about?" even out of simple politeness. Oh she could complain about the money associated with it -- she could do that. But even the fake interest you take with the letter carrier -- Hey Sally, how's the Postal Service these days? -- was beyond her.
But my work is a very important part of my identity, and I'm not sure why I didn't make acknowledging that a N.U.T. (sheesh! that book again!). I think maybe I just assumed that's what you did in marriage -- you take one for the team.
When on the rare occasions we'd travel, I'd want to go to the local art museum. I'm not an art expert by any stretch of the imagination, I just like to look at pictures. But it would be moan-and-groan-fest, dragging her along, catching her checking her watch or her mobile out of the corner of my eye. So not only did we rush, I couldn't even enjoy the rushing. But let there be a Grand Shopping District.... And I don't mean to imply a Mars/Venus, aren't-women-stupid-with-their-shopping thing by that. In the M, if it was "her" thing, we were all about it; if it was "my" thing, it was (at best) vaguely tolerated.
Why did I put up with that? Again, I'm not sure. Maybe I thought in some sub-conscious way, "I better not rock the boat; don't want to lose her." That's a lot of therapy to get there.
But the point is, I have some sympathy for the gradual accumulation of grievances that can lead one to walk-away.
So here I am, now, kind of a Walkaway-Left-Behind. What do I mean by that?
I've decided not to let Left-Behind be my status anymore. So I'm walking away from that. Of course, that also means, in a real sense, that I'm walking away from WAW -- which I think she senses (cf, @Gucci / @robx, @aliveandkicking's recent) and is now reacting to.
I've mused on this before. As I evaluate these things, it appears to me that the WAS really, really needs the LBS to remain static -- the logic, the justification for the Walkaway decision only holds if LBS is "same old."
This, of course, is the rationale for GAL and 180 (cf, @Greek's recent here) -- as the '80s self-help guru Tony Robbins used to say, scratch a record and it won't play the same way. "Disrupt the pattern" was the term he used.
But when you do that, even if your goal is "saving" the M, in a real sense you are walking-away -- from the past, from your former self and, indeed, from your former M. That M, the one in which you were the doormat wife or the Mr. Nice Guy hubby, is gone, done, over. It has to be. It has to be, literally, Left-Behind.
Of course it's dangerous stuff. Me? I've figured out that I can leave it behind and be content doing so. And that's where Miss Someone comes into the picture. Now we're not having the Great American Romance. Neither one of us believes for a moment that we're both going to jump from an M and a D into a new R or M. But we like each other. We laugh. We have history but no baggage. And we understand the other's struggles, position, fears, and challenges.
It is, in other words, the perfect EA-->PA scenario. And if it goes that way, and lasts for a couple weeks or months, I say "good for me." Just more evidence that I'm not "really" dead, Spiers Doctrine to the contrary notwithstanding.
I'm Gloria Gaynor. I will survive. But survival alone isn't enough. That's why the Great European Getaway was so terrific. I'm Buzz Lightyear -- I may not be flying, but at least I'm falling with style.
And in the process, I've come to have a lot more sympathy for the "devil" in all this, Mrs. SP, WAW Herself. I at least understand how things could get so gemischt, so botched up, that she would not only say to herself, but believe, that she was beating her head against a brick wall, that things would never change, that the grass really must be greener (or at least not browner). And I can understand why Reality has hit her so hard upon discovering that all of those things were wrong.
And finally I've come to some new -- though here sure to be controversial -- thoughts about marriage, relationships, and coupling. I have a notion about it, about Mrs. SP and myself. It's not refined by any stretch of the imagination, but...well...it sings (@8:31). And for now, that's a victory in my book.
