You are both right. I need to get my anger and resentment under control. It has been cyclical for me, and the final dotting of the I's and realizing the ridiculously bad choices and investment that I made in this relationship made all my anger come to a head this week. I am happy to say I am on a positive vibe for now though since she actually did follow through with the papers and I have executed them so the final thing that needs to happen is for the judge to sign which I will be extremely happy about!
I sent W the following email with my response as an attachment, not contesting anything:
---------------------------------------------------------------- Here is my response to the divorce petition:
I have sent the original asking that it be filed to the X County Clerk of Superior Court XXX Address
I'm going to leave the rest of this up to your conscious and what you think is right to do because none of it is worth fighting over. You verbally stated within the last month that you would give me the rings back if I made this easy and you had no legal fees. I held up to my end of the bargain.
I'll also leave it up to you to consider the charges that you chose to continue to run up on my credit prior to my finding out about your behavior. Do you think it is fair that I burden your expenses that you charged to me prior to finding out what you were doing behind my back? The only reason you had access to my accounts during that time period was because you were hiding your elicit behavior, and you know this. I have legal grounds to pursue you for this but have given up those rights based on the attached document. How to deal with this is also up to your conscious to process.
We spent some good times together over the holidays. In May you came to me for support when your Sister was on her death bed and I proved my unconditional love for you and your family then as I have over the past year. I have done nothing but positive things for you and the children in the face of the way you have treated me. I had to take possession of the car for liability reasons based on your choices in how you chose to treat me financially in the past year. Your children have college savings accounts because of me. I made mistakes and tried to atone for those to no avail, and you know in your heart everything that I have done for you since the day that I met you. It is truly sad that it comes down to this.
So as I have done for our entire relationship, attached is what you wanted and I hope it makes you happy. For the last time I ask you to please keep your word and do the right thing W. ----------------------------------------------------------------
Given the fact that she cannot be trusted and her word is worth nothing, I am certain that she won't keep her word and give the rings back. In all likelihood this is the last communication I will have her. There is nothing more to think about or process. When push came to shove she is more of a con artist than a wife, I let my emotions override my logical brain over the past year and it has cost me dearly.
I think back to the day that I uncovered her affair. I saved and locally cached all evidence of it which would have been indisputable in court. Instead of bringing this up with her of confronting the OM in any way I should have just held onto this data and authored a FAIR separation agreement to my wife and got that executed, then dropped an alienation of affection lawsuit on the OM. Oh how things would be different if that were the case and hindsight were 20/20... That would have avoided all of the financial hits I took which are the fuel for my resentment and anger.
I know I need to get the anger and negative feelings out of my system. Now that this is finally OVER I feel it is going to be much easier to do this. I think this may be different for men and women. Now that this is truly over and I know that dealing with this woman in any way going forward is a bad idea, I can finally move one. Don't know why it took me so long to draw this conclusion or a legal paperwork exercise to get here, but now that everything is signed I feel much better than I have in some time.
So Zig, my goal in short is to put this situation out of my mind. Life has been great and moving forward otherwise. Basically the interactions that I had with her are what always set me off, and there shouldn't be any more of those. I anxiously await the divorce decree with the judges signature on it hopefully sooner than later.
Still need to work on forgiveness but for all practical purposes she is dead to me. The woman I fell in love with is no more and in all likelihood never existed. She worked me over to improve her standing in life. She got full custody of her kids, got out of bankruptcy, and got 22k of bodywork that enabled her affair with a more lucrative financial host all because of my actions, then left holding the bag for all the bills. Well played I guess... lol
Lesson learned and life goes on, be extremely careful who you trust. It is becoming readily apparent she is never going to own up to her behavior much less apologize or try to make it right. StubbornDyke and Zig you are right the anger only hurts me and I am going to work on squashing it. I know I will cringe every month when I pay my bills until I clean up this mess, but hey it's only money right, that doesn't make anybody happy, with the exception of my STBX apparently...
Thank you both so much for your time and feedback StubbornDyke and Zig I greatly appreciate it! Good luck to you and everyone in your respective sitch's!
me 38 W 30 T 3 M in 05/2010 Separated 08/2011 Stephchildren (all hers) SS17, SS12, SD8 I filed 8/27, she countered I filed response 9/5 Anxiously waiting on the judge!
