Well I'm posting here because, as I see it, the 'Big D' is a process that she has started, despite her verbal smokescreens.
I prob wasn't clear enough above. While she has said she has no plans to file anytime soon, she means in the next couple of weeks...however, and you'd have to know how she carefully chooses her words when discussing this stuff with me, she has said she could file as early as this Fall and has already consulted at least one attorney that I know about. She has also said that if she had enough of her own money right now she would already be gone. I have brought up a few possibilities for counseling or some other kind of work but she shoots them down, isn't open to anything at all.
I've already been down the DB road as well as the "jointly work on our marriage road". She did it just long enough to placate me, to insure I wouldn't divorce her for adultery, and to insure that I wouldn't go running around telling everyone what she did. Once everything settled down and we got back to what resembled normalcy and relative stability, she started moving in her own direction workwise and socially and has never looked back.
In short, she did her adultery thing, got scared when I was on the verge of divorcing her and throwing her out, used my love for her, my desire to make the marriage better, etc. to defuse the situation in her favor.
In this situation, there's absolutely nothing I can do to work on this marriage. I agree with you about her ability to finally be financially independent (she really always had this ability, but is very picky about her jobs and didn't want to be stuck in a job she didn't love just because it paid the bills) and what that means should she decide to engage our marriage again. If she came to me and said she wanted that, I'd still go to counseling, and work with her to have a strong marriage. Absent of that, there's not much I'm interested in doing at this point.
DB, it seems to me, is made up primarily of two components. One big part of it is simply teaching or reminding people how to be strong, independent, and "healthy" individuals...which is something we should all strive to be regardless of our relationship status anyway, and bad marriages, as well as bad personal choices we make within our marriages, slowly cause us to become much weaker individually. That is what GAL and all that is all about. The second part, it seems to me, has to do with making choices relative to your spouse's behavior (such as intentionally going dark, intentionally not pursuing or discussing certain things). Well I do that too...not because I want it to make a difference in our marriage, but because I am, for the most part, done here.
If I could have what I wanted, she'd choose to recommit herself to our marriage and we'd go down that path together. I don't think that's what's going to happen. She has looked me in the eye and said, "It's been 16 years. This has never really worked for me. It never will work for me. I feel absolutely nothing for you and have no interested in working on this marriage at all, or in staying married to you, so I am going to be the bad guy and file as soon as I can afford it, which, at the earliest, will probably be sometime this fall."
Given the above, all I'm interested in doing is to continue to live my life, be the best dad I can be in finishing raising my son through HS graduation, and wait for her to file. If she has a change of heart, I'm fine with that...it would be my preference. If not, then I know I did everything I could do.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -- Inigo Montoya, 'The Princess Bride'
