What I'm doing in my own situation is detaching, not sure if it's lovingly but I'm detaching. We are still separated but we see each other regularly, date every so often, someone on this site called it "married single", it's what it feels like. I have my children most of the time now, 80% or more, I'm actually starting to push back on my wife and getting her to have the kids more of the time. Seriously I could have my kids 100% of the time, no worries but I have to think that children benefit from exposure to both parents, not just one or the other. She tends to slack in that area because she doesn't have to work as hard because she doesn't have them as much (her excuse, her work schedule is very hard for her to have the kids - she works part time). The truth is after I packed her things and moved her out of the home in January, she has been living with her parents and they don't get along very well and when she has them, her parents do the bulk of the "parenting" and take care of the kids more than she does and that is a source for many arguments they have: they are your kids, you have to spend time with them, make them their meals, do their laundry, etc. etc, and my wife doesn't like hearing that from her parents, she believes they should help her no matter what and just support her during this time.
We are currently in limbo, first it was by my wife's design, now it's by my own, I have gotten used to living on my own, in my own house and I feel happier when the children are around and when she is around, she is a reminder of all the bad things and it causes me issues that I'm trying to work through. When she starts acting up: rude disrespectful behavior of any sort, my knee jerk reaction is just to tell her to leave and lately it's a regular thing and then she complains about it afterwards and she has a valid issue, how can she feel comfortable at home around us if everytime she screws up, my reaction is to kick her out, I see it now, I don't give her many chances, I have boundaries and while they're extremely important to have, I have to believe being a little flexible is what is necessary. Before I had no boundaries and she walked all over me, now my boundaries are in place and they're inpregnable, so I'm looking for my harmony or balance to somewhere in the middle where I can enforce my boundaries while remaining flexible.
There are other issues, I think about all the time we've spent in this problem and I have thoughts in my head on a regular basis, telling me to rip the band-aid off really quickly, it will hurt at first but I will get over it and move on. The other side of me tells me to db and to remember what I was fighting for and to continue pressing forward because the prize is just around the corner.
Can a person change? Yes I'm 100% sure of it, I'm living proof.
When a person changes though, what happens to the marriage they were once a part of? At one point in my life, I attributed very little value to myself and I was lucky to be married to someone like her, my self-esteem was extremely low, I had a poor attitude about everything in my life and I just existed. Now I attribute alot of value to myself, I AM HIGH-VALUE, I know it & feel it. I am happy, funny, and really enjoy my life, no more existing day to day, I'm thriving, I need to do stuff, I can't just sit at home anymore, have a busy job that keeps me very occupied and when I'm not working I know I need to do something to offset all this hard work. I am big into my children, we talk everyday, do homework everyday, share meals everyday where we talk, really talk about stuff, I bring them to school everyday, I'm active in that as well, coached the little league teams, weekends are about them and we're always doing something. Heck when my wife has the kids, she usually comes over (she asks if it's ok first) because if she has them and i'm not there, they're usually doing nothing except watching tv which is BOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIING! When I don't have the kids, I'm out on the town, have a lot of friends and seriously I can't keep up with the requests to do this & that, my life is super busy and I need it to tone down a bit but I realize that I'm operating at 200% whereas before I was living life at 10% if that.
So now that I'm this different person, how does that marriage fit in with me, detaching so much so that now marriage isn't as great an idea as it once was. Or maybe it's just this marriage that isn't so great, I realize what i'm worth now and if I can't get that same value out of my marriage, do I really want to be part of it and the fear is if I do, does it bring me back down to that previous level so that I can repeat this mess all over again?
