Longtime coming...

[Awoken]

I've been reading the forums for the past two weeks, since my wife dropped the bomb. I've been trying to get a grip, GAL, and DB as best as a I can.

As painful as everything is, I'm glad that my wife has awakened me to some fundamental truths about our relationship that we both have been avoiding for a very long time.

It's been a difficult 16 years. There have been symptoms of a deep problem in our M the entire time and I'm deeply ashamed that I've had my head in the sand this entire time. I think we have both been focused on trying to being great parents.

1) the bomb
I think I handled this ok, just by instinct, and maybe because we both knew there were problems with the M. From reading here, I think it was a typical speech including ILYBINILWY. She says the last 16 years have been a hell. My main reaction was to say how surprised I was, and that I was so very sorry that she was in so much pain and that I was the cause of it all. When I asked her what happened to make her tell me, she said that she had made her mind up 4 months ago to leave me in four years when our son graduated high school, but realized that night that she couldn't last that long. My only argument was that that I thought it was unfair, because I have confronted her several times over the past five years about her emotional detachment and she has always said it was just her depression and it had nothing to do with me, and I was a "great husband" and she didn't deserve me. I've been sticking by her waiting for things to improve. Or I was kidding myself. She confesses that she has been hiding her drinking from me, and the she has been drinking herself to sleep for years to handle her pain. We ended that nights conversation with me saying I wanted to work on the M, but I would cooperate with her, and her saying she needed time to "find herself" and that "she doesn't know what she wants".