I thought I would post my timeline of feelings for people who are looking to understand their WAS behaviour:
When I was the WAW I was in shock that it was actually ending that I'd said it out loud. The realisation that my marriage was over. And I felt really guilty that I'd ended it. That maybe I'd given up. So I just kept looking at any of his behaviour to reassure me I'd made the right decision. Anything he did wrong was like validation for my decision. This was for the first 5/6 weeks
Then I was angry about things that I'd never mentioned before. It felt really theraputic to say and you never did this and I always hated this. Just to be able to say things I'd put up with before. This was between 3-6 weeks.
10 weeks in...Then I missed him, his company, his sense of humour. But when we got together old things that upset me were still there. (because he was hurting I think)
14 weeks in Then he detached, GAL, and we began to have better conversations about our relationship. That was also the time I had a change of heart coupled with insane emotional outburts which I think just put us back at square one.
I can now see it in reverse. IE my emotional outbursts only validated his feelings that we needed to just detach.
He told me that he thought I was much further down the road to him (in dealing with the breakup/separation) and I said I wasn't so sure, that I had buried my head in the sand in the beginning and didn't think about the relationship.
One thing I've already learned from this board and from relooking at how I felt when I ended it is that if they aren't ready to look at your relationship, think about reconciling, then NOTHING you do will change that. There will be a time I think that we all look back at our relationship with new eyes and go over it and think could things have been saved. I have to hope that I've grown enough (and not done anything crazy to screw up chances) that he'll think yes there's a possiblity we can work on this.
