I had a really nice day, took D17 to breakfast and had a nice talk with her, and spent the evening with a friend after dropping S19 back at school. Therefore, I should not have been surprised to see this email from stbx in my inbox tonight.
I was very disappointed by your reaction to my offer. I thought that we had agreed in our discussion last month to be reasonable and rational, and to keep the lawyers out of it until and unless we had exhausted all possibilities. Your reply doesn't seem to embrace those sentiments.
I continue to be concerned about the degree to which your decisions are being influenced by external forces. I feel that you're being pressured by people who have no interest in our lives, or the lives of our children, other than to encourage you to "put the bastard through the ringer". It's very easy to sit on the sidelines and give extremist advice when you don't have to live through the consequences. You and I and our children are the ones who will have to live through those consequences, and are the only ones who can be damaged by them. Friends' and families' cheerleading and "go get 'em" attitudes can be comforting and even a little self-satisfying, but both of us need to carefully weigh the probable outcomes and long-term effects of blindly following outsider's well-meaning, but often over-enthusiastic guidance.
Our own emotions on the topic can make it very difficult to separate other peoples' feedback into what's best for us and our children and what's just radical advice and empty platitudes to make us feel better; we have to continue to strive for making that differentiation.
I understand that you're concerned about being too easily swayed into a sub-optimal settlement, and are looking to others for strength, but in the end, the decision has to be yours alone. As I said above, no one else has to live with the consequences of their advice, and most likely wouldn't even use that same advice in their own lives.
If you continue your trend toward the extremes, my back will be pushed up against the wall and I'll have few options left to me, so I reiterate from my email a month ago: I very much want to get back on track and keep our long-term relationship from going sour. Please let me know if you are still willing to have a rational discussion and hopefully come to a reasonable agreement. My goal has been, and continues to be, to finish this process in the least disruptive and most amicable way possible.
He didn't say what he thought was unreasonable in my counter other, just how disappointed he was with it and me, I therefore assume everything was unreasonable. I'm not really surprised. Back to wanting to hate him.
