WAW, not sure how to proceed...

[dearme]

In the past couple of days, I've been given the opportunity to employ a very important 180... that is, allowing her to criticize me or say something that could potentially hurt my feelings without me reacting by either "punishing" her by withdrawing from her and going silent, or by getting clingy and looking for reassurance from her.

As far as new/different 180's... I'm starting to wonder if it's time to back off completely. Maybe move more toward the LRT, which it seems a little bit like I had been advised against because of how well my wife and I still get along.

She came home from dinner at her parents last night and told me her mom and sister had given her a bit of the third-degree for potentially leading me on. They notice us hanging out and doing things together, and just generally having a good time...living in a way that would make outside observers surprised to find out what's going on between us, and they are worried that my wife was giving me the impression that it meant everything was going to be ok and work out between us. Apparently that got my wife worried about it to, and she wanted to know if that was the impression I was under--that things were going to work out between us, because where she is now she says she's been doing all of those things with me because she still loves my company and enjoys being with me, but she still wants a divorce. Although, she said, when she actually thinks about setting that process in motion and the consequences of it and what it will mean for the kids, it makes her sick to her stomach.

I told her that I'm doing the things I'm doing, making the changes I'm making, regardless of what happens between the two of us. Saving our marriage? Things working out? She knows that is something I haven't given up hope on. I don't say it anymore, but I said it enough in the beginning that she knows. The changes, I told her, are about ME...being the person that I want to be...being the person that, in fact, I used to be. It isn't even so much about changing...it's about returning to who I used to be. The upshot being, I said, that no matter what happens between us, this is the person I'm going to be now, and the fact that as a result we're still getting along and doing things and enjoying each other's company is the gravy on top.

She picked the conversation back up this morning, and essentially said that she had made a decision a few weeks ago that she just couldn't risk putting herself out there, couldn't risk putting her heart out on the line again, and so it was less about what she feels toward me than it is about not wanting to take the risk that the changes she sees in me won't be permanent. She said it's like there's a battle between what's in her heart and what's in her head. She said she alternates between believing the changes are real and thinking they're just temporary. And, even when she believes they're real she said she finds herself getting angry...resentful that saying "I want a divorce" is what it took to make the changes happen. I told her I completely understood her feelings, and in fact gave her credit for even being willing to entertain the idea that, at only a month and a half into my "transformation", the changes might be permanent. I said that I completely understood her mixed feelings, and that if I was in her shoes I wouldn't even begin to trust the permanence of the changes until I had seen them consistently for months and months and months.

The conversation touched on a bunch of other topics...her feeling like she had lost her identity and how to reclaim it (both of our individual counselors advocate the idea of solving this within the marriage, not outside of it); her feeling like she was on a path of growth and personal discovery that might not happen within the marriage; and her posing the hypothetical of us continuing on the way we have for an extended period...that is, with us living like best friends, but continuing on without sex and declarations of loving each other. She wanted to know how I would feel about that. My view on that, which I shared with her for better or worse, was that it took years for us to find ourselves where we are, and my assumption is that it would take months upon months to work ourselves away from it to someplace better.

My final contribution to the discussion was to tell her that she was her own person, who had her own experience in our marriage, that she had the right to forge her own identity, and that I had to honor her thoughts and feelings and opinions about what had happened between us, and about what should happen next. I told her that no matter what, she had to decide for herself and own her own decisions, and that the changes she was seeing in me were the result of me doing the same thing, and that I'm going to continue on the path she sees me on no matter what happens between us and no matter what she ultimately decides.