To be honest Scylla this is all getting a bit angst ridden and boring for me - so I can only imagine how tedious it must be for you.

OK - I understand what you have been getting at for the past few months. You're right - it sux when you realise you've been living in fantasy land for half your adult life.

Now it's time to climb out of the pity party and be a bit philosophical about this stuff. You have realised that you didn't know him ...? Yeah? So, if you think about it, maybe he had made up the same style of fairytale in his own head up until his revelations of 2 years ago. What's to say that he had made you into a completely different woman in his head - and at some time in his personal development - he's just looked at his life and thought "God, this isn't at all how I thought it was, this isn't what I signed up for".

A couple of additional comments. We are different people when we are in our 20s to who we are in our 30s to who we are in our 40s. We see the world differently and we have different resources with which to react to it. I don't believe that your husband deliberately misled you about his feelings, commitment or whatever - he was behaving how he thought he was supposed to behave. Just like you were.

Ever since you first started posting here, you've been "threatening" yourself/him/us/the universe that you are "just about done", "can't do this anymore", etc etc .... well what's stopping you? Be done. There's no law against it.

To be honest - the best thing you could do for yourself is to detach from him and from any "expectations" about rebuilding your relationship. With your attitude and his distance, it's not like there's going to be some miraculous change in circumstances over the next month that's going to make everything better.

Detaching, "going pitch black", "no-contact" (and there's some good stuff around written by women relationship advisors about "implementing no-contact" (google it) - is for you. It gives you the space and energy to focus on the rest of your life and take your focus off your H. You need to do that Scylla. YOu need to do it for you - but you also need to do it so he can really feel what it's like not having "mother/saviour/superorganiser" Scylla around.

Also, taking the focus off what a f'd up individual he is and all the bad things he's done to make your life difficult, will help you move out of the victim role you've placed yourself in. Enough of that.

Is he seeing someone else?

One last point. Dating. I say go for it, but go for it in a healthy and respectful way. There are lots of traps out there for people reentering the dating lifestyle after a long relationship. My adventures over the past few years have included "separated" men who weren't really separated; divorced men still pining for their WAW; young men, delighted with the opportunity of dating an 'experienced' woman; the list goes on and on - and I could entertain a dinner party with it all night - but the point is, you have to be emotionally very healthy to weed out the toxic men. It's just as easy to create those fairytales in our head of new men, as it was to create them about our old spouse.

There are a couple of bulletin boards around that focus on healthy relationship advice that you should look at. One is Loveshack - a bb for relationship advice for all sorts of situations (there's a board for marriages, one for infidelity, dating and ldr, othermen/otherwomen etc) and I'd also encourage you to google Baggage Reclaim - which is a blog that's updated regularly.

Take care girl ... this is tough stuff.

(((hug))) V

V

Never make someone a priority, who makes you an option.