You don't know how you will handle the crisis until the crisis comes, but . . . I think that if she had not made big changes, I would have left. Coming here made me come to understand that she and I both had a part to play in creating our sex-starved marriage, and I had not done everything I could do about it. I thought long and hard about whether I was really going to leave, and I decided I was. Saying it to her was the scariest thing I've ever done (no hyperbole there--I thought long and hard about whether I'd done something scarier, too) because I knew that I could no longer lie to myself once I'd given her that ultimatum.
Whether I would have tied it specifically to whether or not she read that first chapter . . . . I don't know. If she'd refused, or if she'd promised to read it and didn't, that probably would have led to divorce if she'd stuck to her guns. But if she'd read it and it hadn't had such a dramatic effect, that wouldn't be so clear. That would just be one more thing that didn't work.
I can't stress enough how long I thought my wife didn't care and how wrong I was all that time. She didn't understand, she was as afraid as I was to commit to changing, she was confused, she was hurt, she felt guilt and shame, but she cared.
