Informally separated from WAW, but DBing my best

[AlwaysTrying]

Welcome to the board, danielf. This "thing" going on with my wife and family has been the most awful experience in my life. Reading other people's stories makes me realize how much worse it could be. There are things that are going well for me.

My social life is broken. There really aren't people who are physically close and emotionally close to me. The four people who I have been closest to in my life are inaccessible to me now. My wife is hard to reach. I have a friend 3000 miles away that I have grown increasingly distant from over the last 16 years. My next closest friend is in Beijing, and the friend I have relied on the most has done something terrible.

I don't know what my closest friend did exactly, but I gather that it was sexual in some way, involved my 15-year-old daughter, and triggered my wife into writing a statement into our separation agreement that says my kids can not see him at all ever. My daughter and wife refuse to tell me exactly what happened, so I just don't talk to him any more.

I talk to my brother and sister on the phone.

I have a friend that has given me a lot of support that I see once or twice a week, but she is not the sort of person I can open up to the way I could to the friends that I have lost.

I have been making an effort to talk to more people.

I'm really a people person. I like to be alone a lot of the time. But I do need to replace these relationships that I've lost. It's hard to see how that is going to happen, though.