Keep Your Hands Offa My Mojo

[hoosiermama]

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.
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).

And that's where the balance of power changes, indeed. In my case, it took away his power to hurt me emotionally, altho in all the externals, he continues to devastate all that I held dear in life. For me, many factors being different and xH being uniquely resolute in cleaving to new/old soulmate (she is an official witch, after all). Funny--as soon as I let go of the pain, my own Someone (Dr. Someone, in my case, not from high school but still from 25+ years earlier) popped into my life, from 800 miles away. In precisely the same sort of state in life. And what developed was exactly this:

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 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...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."

After ~9 months of uncomplicated "like," enjoying the state of being enjoyed, it is perhaps becoming more complicated wtih Dr. Someone, because actually Dr. Someone does have something that WAS didn't--something like a soul, an understanding that the universe does not, indeed, revolve around him. Which no amount of me giving in, giving up, being a doormat would have changed in WAS. Being accepted has a way of recalibrating one's mojo--and if I could just get out of my own way I might actually be able to enjoy this instead of living in dread that I will somehow contaminate it as I did the marriage. Baggage is difficult to drop.

However--and it's a big however, I also have some sympathy for the devil (hoosier daddy, in my case) because I understand as you do how attractive it is to just "be" in an unpolluted-by-life relationship. The however, however, is that both you and I probably understand that in spite of the attractiveness of that pristine and shiny new R, leaving behind Themselves as collateral damage is a much Bigger Deal than the shiny-ness and sexual attraction of an uncomplicated new R. You don't take down a whole family because some shiny feel-good thing catches your attention. Guess that's where the sympathy kinda ends for those of us "left behind."