Over the Shock and GALing 6

[Thinker]

W has been in a total snip all day, ever since I called last night to say my flight home was leaving and opened the call with "Hi Beautiful!". After a while I asked her to step aside and said "for the past 18 hours you have been angry and resentful and unpleasant. I don't know where your anger is coming from, but it is directed at me. What is bothering you?

She said "you are right, I am angry. It's because of us. We don't even have a relationship any more and yet you still try to be all happy and friendly ..."

As a logical person I find her circular extremely frustrating - "we don't have a r, so I don't want to talk to you or do anything with you. And we don't have a r because we never talk or do anything together.

She said "we can't agree because you and I want different things. You want to stay together and I don't". (This is a very old argument of hers). I replied. "I want to have a good, healthy, intimate r with a woman, preferably the mother of my children. I do not, however, want to be married to someone who does not want to be married to me. If you do not want to be married to me, then I would rather get d'd and move on with my life. I agree with you that our r right now is practically non-existant. It can't stay this way. We either have to work on putting it together, or work on taking it apart."

Her response was complete pessimistic negative thinking: "it can never work, I can never be happy, etc"

I said "do you want a d?" To which she replied "I want to be happy" ("I know you want to be happy. I asked you if you want a divorce")

I said "each day we are either working on. Improving the r, or we are working on dissolving it. What do you want to do today? She replied "I want to go put away the christmas decorations"

I said "I am willing to stay married to you if you can tell me the following 2 things 1) I want to stay married to - at least for now, and 2) I want to work on improving our r". She cried a bit and said "working on our r can never help. No c has ever helped us". I replied "this is because you start every c session with "I don't believe our m can work, I don't think I want to stay m'd, and I don't want to work on it. Of course it doesn't go anywhere. DO YOU WANT TO TRY TO IMPROVE OUR R?"

She cried a bit and said "I can't say I do", to which I replied "OK, then the consequences are that we are going to get d'd."

The remainder of the conversation was her playing naïve "I don't even know how d works" or playing the injured party "you are just going to make d ugly - why can't we just be cooperative about it?"