Wife no longer in love with me - Part 4

[grebjack]

Hi, Cam. I've just spent the last couple hours reading through your series of posts. And I'll start by saying I'm the last person you want to get advice from, 'cause I'm just as crazy and lost as you are. I'm going to offer some advice anyway...

I have always succeeded at everything ive done, but the most important thing in my life I failed miserably at.

I hear you on this one. I too would say that relationships - family and friends - are what I care most about and that is where I am a failure. And I wish I weren't going to wake up tomorrow morning and all that. But since I'm not going to kill myself, and focusing on my failures doesn't help me live, I try to follow those thoughts with things I'm grateful for. Sure I don't care as much about my garden as about my marriage, but I like my garden, and I know I'm blessed to have so much food that I would eat well even if I didn't have it. Sometimes those thoughts just feel so small in comparison to what I've lost, but small things to be grateful for make me feel better than just thinking about what I'm NOT grateful to have lived. (and I know some people with more experience on these boards will say I will eventually become grateful for this experience too - I'll just concede that as a possibility)

I don't know if anyone else has experience with a WAW who just doesn't ever want contact or to see the H again???? As we don't have kids, she feels there is no reason for us to see each other or talk anymore...

Yep, my husband and I don't have kids and so there is nothing to FORCE him to talk to me if he doesn't want to. Longest we went was four months. I F***ed up a conversation, well, as badly as you have, and he just totally withdrew, and I feared I would never speak to him again. But at the end of the four months, I called him from a calmer place (you should have heard me and my DB coach planning all the things I had to get right to make sure I wouldn't slip up when I called). It was a circus. But he agreed to let me buy him lunch for his birthday. Yeah, five days after his birthday while he was on the way to somewhere else. But he agreed. And I obsessed about all the things I could do wrong, and then reminded myself to Act As If. The short story is my mind was racing the whole time and I was fighting not to burst into tears some of the time, but the face I showed him was my bubbly best self. I can't control my emotions, but I control my actions, and I was determined not to do any of the things I knew would push him away. And now we're friends again. I dunno if it'll ever be anything more than that, but that's a heck of a lot better than what we were at the start of those four months!

You keep riding the roller coaster and talking to your wife when you're in the midst of freaking out, and all I'm saying is I have no idea how to detach - how to get off the roller coaster, but I think you can decide how you act in response to those feelings. When you feel like you can't take the pain anymore and you need to blurt something out, ask yourself if you're prepared to push her farther away or if you'd rather summon the strength to control your behavior a little longer. Call your wife when you're at the top of the roller coaster; quarantine yourself when you're at the bottom; and if you're in the middle of a conversation when you feel the dive, politely, QUICKLY tell her you need to go and hang up.

Maybe if she was a complete bitch to me, nasty and horrible then this would be a lot easier.

Maybe, but I doubt it. I think no matter how it goes, this is painful awful agonizing interminable hell. Like you, all of my friends are married with kids. Literally all of them. So I joined a divorce support group. I have nothing in common with these people, except for the one thing I don't have in common with anyone else, and it helps. A lot. And they tell me stories of ex-spouses who are nasty and horrible and I am grateful that my husband is still the sweet, thoughtful man that I married, even though that makes it hard to let him go.

But one thing to consider, if you think she'd be easier to leave if she were nasty and obnoxious: what happens in her head when you are nasty and obnoxious?

If you read through your own posts in close succession like I just did, one thing that stands out is that your feelings are inconsistent. One minute you're so frustrated and angry you just want her out of your life; the next post you're sobbing and you miss the woman of your dreams. Has it occurred to you that her feelings are probably on the same sort of roller coaster? You're so upset when she acts like she's tired of it all and just wants you out of her life (and you vilify her for being ready to trash a marriage so easily) and then next post you're so confused that she seems upset. Divorce just [censored]. For both of you. Nobody gets married wanting it to fail. Nobody. Give her the benefit of the doubt. If she's telling you she feels nothing for you, just remind yourself that if it were true she wouldn't need to say it. And then go on working at being a man you and she can both respect. No point reacting to the state of the relationship, how you and she feel right now. 'Cause really the only thing you know for sure about your relationship is that a month from now, things will be different.

That's my two cents. Take it with a grain of salt - I've been separated for four of my eleven years of marriage. And it doesn't hurt any less now than it did four years ago. So I don't know what works. But I have a lot of experience with what doesn't work, and I'll be damned if I'm going to make the SAME mistakes over and over again.

-Rebecca