New emotion for me about my sitch this AM - Intense Anger!
This felt strange to me b/c I am not an angry person in general. I was thinking about M vows this morning and the whole in sickness and in health thing. In all of our years of M, I have never placed any kind of significant burden on her that required her to invest a lot of emotional effort to "support" me. For the duration of our M, I have been unwaivering in my love, commitment and support for my W (of course I now understand that we had different LL and she probably did not realize how I was expressing my love). My recent depression is the first time that I can know for sure that I presented her with a significant relationship problem that had to be dealt with.
In her career, my W is the type of person who, when faced with a problem, gathers all the information she can about the problem and then puts serious thought into ways to solve the problem. She is a very strong problem solver because of this approach. Why could she not do this for her R problem? She let this build and build without really having a significant discussion about it. There is so much information out there on dealing with relationship problems and depressed spouses but to my knowledge, she never tapped into these resources to better understand the problem and to help determine possible solutions. She essentially had two options in front of her:
1. Really try to solve the problem and come to me and say "H, I really love you and value our M and all of the years that we have spent together. Over the past couple of years, your depression has been increasingly putting a strain on the R and that is why I think you should get help and perhaps we could also benefit from MC. I will fully support you if you are willing to work on this. If you are not willing to work on this, I don't know if I will be able to continue in the R as is. (This would have shaken me out of my funk in 2 seconds!)
2. Begin an affair and throw our marriage under the bus
Of course, W chose the easy and selfish approach. I know that I have not been a perfect husband but I have always been there for her through thick and thin. I would have never gone down the option 2 path if the shoe were on the other foot and just can't believe that she did and most likely continues to do so knowing how badly this is affecting my life and our M.
This is having such an impact on me emotionally and is also affecting my sleep, health etc. It is affecting my ability to focus on my very stressful job. If she moves out, it will completely push us to the brink financially and strip away what little cushion that we have.
I know that WAS involved in an A are operating based on brain chemicals and not logic. It is so hard that I can get through to her with reason by showing her how much damage is being done.
Sorry for the ranting but just had to get that out!
