Thread #8 - It's time.

[Navyguy]

Hello everyone. Long time no see.

It’s been 3 months, so I’ll start by bringing everyone up to speed.

I am doing well. The new job is becoming quite challenging, but I have moved from being the peon to the boss and I have a great staff working for me…it has made going to work fun again. Stressful at times, but fun. I made friends with a great bunch of people that I met on a soccer team over the Fall…I can’t wait for the Spring season to start. I have also planned a trip to Costa Rica in September to see a friend from Grad School and to see the USA v. Costa Rica World Cup qualifier. Should be an awesome experience.

The kids are both amazing (with brief moments of extreme frustration such as D7 dropping her new iPad on the sidewalk and cracking the glass last night after being told at least a dozen times to not play/watch things on it while walking around) and are both doing really well. D7 is up to Red belt and S4 is up to purple belt in Tae Kwon Do. They are both doing great in school and my relationship with them could not be better.

Ok, ok, I know…enough stalling, I’ll get to what you’re really here for now.

To start, I would like to point out that 3 days from now will be 2 years from when I joined the DB boards. I am not D’d, nor am I S’d…and I’m nearly certain I would be if not for the strength I gathered from being here and the support you all provided.

When we last left off, W had gotten her job and was working on saving up enough money to get her own place and I was getting to the point where I was ok with that. Sometime shortly after my last post I think I got to that point, and W and I talked and we set a “goal” for her to find her own place by Thanksgiving. She looked for a couple weeks, and then it seemed like she stopped looking.

Thanksgiving came and went.

I waited about a week after Thanksgiving and then picked a night to go talk to W out on the back deck. I told her that Thanksgiving had come and gone and I felt like we were moving back toward limbo and away from progress toward separating. I told her I refuse to go back to limbo. We also had our annual Christmas trip to Colorado coming up. I asked her how she envisioned that going. She said “pretty much like normal”. I told her I was not willing to go home and “fake it” again. She said that she guessed that she could tell her family what was going on. I said ok, and then went inside to go to sleep.

W came in about an hour later. I was still awake, so I said something along the lines of “what’s up?”. She said she was confused. I asked her what about. She said “work….and us”. I asked her if she cared to elaborate. She spent the next half hour telling me about issues at work…I just listened to her. Eventually, I steered the subject toward the “and us” part of her being confused. She didn’t elaborate …just told me again that she was confused…which somehow led to us ML.

Since then, things have changed. The isolationism has stopped. Physical touch and sharing activities have come back. We are getting along great. Making future plans together. W has made no mention of moving out or separating. She has talked about quitting her job and going back to staying home with the kids (since she was just doing it so she could support herself and now she doesn’t need that). All positive signs…I think.

So we move to me….and what I want. I am still feeling W out at this point and want to make sure I’m not going to get burned again. While all the above are great and positive actions, there has been no “declaration of love” from her, nor any direct action to make our marriage strong and make sure this doesn’t happen again. I know what I want from an M – and I am not entirely convinced at this point W can or will give me that. Things have been good and I really do feel good about that past 2 month’s changes but at the same time I realize there is a lot of work to be done on both our parts if we want to make this a real M again.

Well, that’s pretty much it. I’m sorry I haven’t been by more…I’m still kind of in a place where I am trying to keep myself out of the weeds of my R with W, and when I post on here I tend to get way into the weeds. I don’t know if that makes sense to anyone or not. Hopefully if things continue on a positive trend I will be back more often with some inspiration for everyone.

I hope everyone is doing ok out there. I will try to catch up on some of the old-timers stories and chime in where I can. Thanks again to everyone for everything….as I’ve said before, however this works out, I’m going to be great.