XYZ is here, and it looks like I'm staying...

[XYZ]

Harrier -

I can say without hesitation that the period of time leading up to me moving out sucked a$$. I'll try to give you a little more detail....

The history goes like this. "mini" bomb on 9/6/10; I start all the wrong stuff (cry, whine, I'll change, I'll do the laundry, blah blah); "full" bomb 9/26/10; W is incredibly angry. Hostile. By 10/21/10 I tell her "If you can't work on this, I can't be here. It's too painful"; I move to my parents house on 10/24/10; 11/4/10 She asks me to come home. I did - I almost ran, no ground rules, just "yes, honey. Be there in 5 min!" and was happier, more hopeful then ever before. Ultimately I would move out again on 5/7/11 after 6 months of trying. Here's what happened during that 6 months....

It started fine. She would say ILY. She'd even kiss me hello/good bye (nothing fancy, but a peck). We had sex on 12/31 - after she says to me "don't think this changes anything, I just wanted sex". I was devastated. From there it got worse and worse. We'd be civil, polite, but she wouldn't spend time alone with me. Kissing stopped. ILY stopped. We'd pretend that we slept in the same bead, but 75% of the time she'd either fall asleep while putting one of the kids to bed or leave because I was "snoring"; the other 25% she's stay downstairs until I was asleep. I planned dates, she cancelled them. I'd try to sit with her one on one and she'd leave the room. It got worse and worse. By April, I basically gave up and said "it's all or nothing, I need to know if you want to work on this". She said "I don't know". I handed her my ring and said "I'll go look for apartments this weekend." That was pretty much it. Between that and the day I moved, the venom and crazy talk came back in full force. "I'm dead inside to you", "you've hurt me for 10 years", etc etc. I realize now that "Forcing Piecing" = "Pursuing"; under the guise of trying to piece, I had gone back to being melty man and pursing the hell out of her.

Harrier - I know that moving out has helped me. I know that J3B says he's against the LBS being the one to move and I get that, but disagree in certain circumstances. I don't know if it will help you or not, but here is what I do know. The place you are now (I mean emotionally, not physically) is the worst place of them all. Limbo [censored] worse then anything. You're a big boy, you make your own decisions, but my perspective and experience is this: When you have your space, you WILL start to realize that you'll be fine alone (not overnight - took me a few weeks for this to really happen). And your W MAY realize that she misses you and have the space to admit it - first to herself and later to you. The first has to happen for you to heal and be healthy alone or together. In my mind, this is a step forward regardless of the direction you M takes and that beats limbo all to hell.


Dawn -

Thanks for the perspective. Intellectually, I know what you mean. My career is a sort of high-level project management (I've spent 20 years either owning or running software companies or divisions of software companies); in my field I look at multi-year projects break them down to component steps and timelines and tasks my team with frequent milestones. It's in my nature to apply that here, and I know I really can't... after all, if I fire my W because she misses a due date that's sorta self-defeating isn't it? haha. I'm trying to understand it from her perspective - that's some of the work I'm doing on ME.

X