14 Months Secret Separation: talking mediation

[adinva]

Accuray and CV I'm still going back in your posts and thinking on them. There's a lot there.

Sometimes in this process we learn our paradigms that we live by don't match what others experience or what is considered "normal" by most people in our culture. I wonder how someone can write a book that truly explains people when each person interprets the world through their own brain and realities don't match. It's like, how do you know I experience the color blue the way you do? We look at the color cards as children and learn when you see "that" that is blue. But there's no way to know that it looks the same to me as it does to you. Love is even more likely to be different because it's not something you can point at or even describe very well.

So, agape is how I've always viewed married love. It's something you have and give even when your spouse farts or embarasses you at a party, or doesn't pick up his underwear off the floor. I didn't realize there was much you could do about the annoyances because I lacked the tools to navigate effectively when my H's actions intruded on my comfort or happiness. And vice versa. We'd bicker or nitpick or tolerate, but there were better tools we didn't know about. But through it all I felt agape type of love.

Acc I did confuse your word attraction for physical or sexual attraction. I don't really understand the magnetic pull or spark you talk about. It seems foreign to me. I have felt a spark for guys in my life but not really like what you described you meant. It sounds sort of mystical and vague and outside your control, and I don't relate with that idea at all. I know I haven't done the reading that you have. Maybe I've always been missing something...or maybe it is that your book is overanalyzing.

What about arranged marriages? I've heard in countries where they are the norm they can be very happy and fulfilling, lifelong partnerships. They don't have the expectation or search for some ephemeral "spark" - they just learn how to make a good marriage and do that. Not that they're all always good, but I find it hard to believe that they're all always unfulfilling because they're not based on a "spark."

With my H, in the worst of times, I thought of this as an arranged marriage, that I arranged. I chose him, I gave myself to him, this was what we had, and we needed to make it work. I failed to see that we also needed to make it good. I let a long time go by where we were not making each other happy, and just thought in time we'd figure it out. We should have felt responsible for fixing it before it got worse.

CV, you're part of a majority that wonder why I'm with H, and I'm wondering it more and more too. From the beginning this seemed like a lucky chance at a do-over, even if it was a painful bomb. But I don't and didn't want to be someone who thought so little of marriage that I'd walk away at the first request for a D from my H. I feel responsible to myself and my kids to leave no stone unturned to find a chance for reconciliation.

When you read about the phases of marriage, it seems like a lot of marriages make it past rocky times to a more mature and better love, and I hope for that. I won't put up with it for 25 or 10 more years, all I know is today I'm not done.