Does this sound like a MLC or am I just in a SSM?

[adinva]

My threads continue to this day. If you click on my name I think you can see all my posts, and my current thread is about disappointment.

My H was always kind of emotionally distant with me. He was very critical but masked it with humor, which I loved. For example he didn't like how messy my bathroom was in our first house after marriage (I used a different bathroom than he did because we had already figured out this difference in neatness), and he came in acting like he thought someone broke into the house and strew all the stuff around in my bathroom. It was charming back than and cracked me up, but later he kept the critical and dropped the funny. He just didn't have tools to effectively tell me something was bothering him, and I didn't realize that.

He was not very loving or romantic, calling those things "gay" starting a while after we had been married and slacking way off after we had kids. He started falling asleep in their rooms and I'd come looking for him in the middle of the night to ask him to come to bed. Our sex life went from not enough to way not enough. I found it very depressing each time I threw away an empty birth control packet and realizing that we hadn't had sex that entire month. I thought H might be having ED problems but we didn't have the tools to discuss things like this, I didn't want to make it worse by making him self conscious about it, I just thought it would get better in time.

When the kids were about 2 and 4 he was learning to play the guitar and his friend was in a band so I'd watch the kids and he'd go out to see his friend, help them tear down at the end of the show, and come home around 2 or 3 am. He made friends with a woman from there and invited her over to our house for cards, or we'd meet out at places with her and her son. I didn't like how close they seemed, and how he lit up for her and not for me, touched her but not me, but I tried to be friends with her assuming I was overreacting. H was a very stable, loyal, very good guy who would not be a cheater, even if it looked like it.

One night he stayed out all night and I called his cell again and again, and the club, and thought about calling hospitals and police, and he answered at 5:30am on his way home from her house. He said he had some drinks so he and another guy decided to crash at her house and it was nothing. I called BS and let him know I considered this an EA and it wasn't ok and we needed counseling and he said you're wrong, I'm a happily married man. (I found out much later that was a lie but I accepted it then.)

I said OK then some things need to change. If you won't go to counseling ok, but we need to start having fun togehter, doing things together, because you light up for other people and you bring home to me only your bad mood and criticism. We decided to go out once a month, I would plan one and then he would. We tried but the dates were not very good. I tried so hard to think of non-kid subjects to talk about but he just seemed bored and not really there. The dates fizzled out after about the third one.

I decided since he was "a happily married man" and refused counseling, and just seemed to be unromantic and uninterested in being affectionate and nice at home, I would just decide that's fine with me and we'd stay married becuase I wanted an intact family for the kids. In the back of my mind I planned to be gone with the kids before he got home if he stayed out all night again, but he didn't.

But things did not get better. They stayed about the same for a bunch of years and then over about a three year period took a turn for the worse. He started sleeping all the time, yelling about stuff the kids and I were doing wrong if he wasn't asleep, addicted to tv shows like Kramer's money show, which he'd watch hours on end and I couldn't stand to be in the room with. I thought Jim Kramer was ruining my marriage. But I kept tolerating it because I knew he was a happily married man and would not leave me. I suffered nearly abusive constant derision and sarcasm, complete lack of affection, or if he was in the mood he'd be so rude about it that I'd be turned off. I was sad to turn him down, knew it wasn't good, tried really really hard to get over my mental block. Toward the end I thought I really had to start trying to communicate with him to make at least sex possible, and tried playing music so the now teenagers that our kids had grown to wouldn't hear us so I could relax, and tried telling him how I liked it when he kissed me (compared to his new way that he had recently picked up of engulfing my entire face), and tried other things to set the mood, but they werent' working.

When I went away on business, he did not miss me. He wouldn't call, had gruff answers until I stopped bothering him. When I got home he'd brag about how much better the house was than when I was there, cleaner, more organized. He was becoming intolerable to me and I didn't know what to do. We had some arguments where I would cry and he would yell because I was just not getting any of my needs met and he was being so mean and unreasonable all the time. I also had some calm conversations expressing to him my alarm at how much time he was spending in bed all afternoon and evening and all weekend, thinking he was depressed or had something wrong with him. He disagreed that anything was wrong with him.

And yet, the bomb did come out of the blue in June 2011. I had no idea what was wrong but I always thought it would be me to do anything about it. I couldn't believe he was going to leave me. I thought I was tolerating him when actually he was tolerating me, barely.

In hindsight, I did none of us any favors by avoiding therapy, by accepting his words when his actions still weren't fulfilling to me, by letting this continue to build without thinking about what point I should think about walking away from it.

Therapy for us was supposed to be MC to help us communicate and potentially coparent, but he didn't attend much, and it ended up being about me learning what I was doing wrong in my marriage, how I contributed to the problems and how I could learn to do better. How I could separate my emotions from his, not let his demeaning talk stop my efforts to get a point across, how I could set my pride down and realize that I should have been working harder to satisfy his need for order in his home. Things like that. It would have not hurt to learn these 10 years ago before the little hurts piled up into a giant snowball, and it might have enabled us to turn things around.

I was so used to smothering my feelings that I didn't know how unhappy I was. I actually thought I was happy, and thought this was a normal marriage with its ups and downs. I thought I was fine. H wasn't really fine but I wasn't either. I should have learned that way back then, to start deciding what to do about it. At that time, I thought divorce was not an option so being unhappy was pointless; why explore that messy stuff when you could be just looking at the bright side and putting on a happy face?

So from June 2011 to now, there have been many threads here describing how little H ever did bring to the table, how he never once gave an indication that he wanted to work on anything or ever change his mind. I worked and worked to do 180s and GAL and improve myself and be a better partner in a relationship.

Our household improved immediately because I immediately stopped bickering back at him and stopped resisting his reasonable requests. He seemed more peaceful and less irritated, and there was less yelling. He still went to bed all afternoon. He never once touched me in any way, and he slept in our bed with a wall of pillows between us. I noted progress and noted his responses to what I tried differently, and I felt like I was learning things in IC that really could turn my marriage around, but he was a brick wall, resolute in his decision.

He started going out every weekend and a lot of weeknights after our separation, with a guy friend from high school. Nothing I could complain about except the extraordinary amount of time away from the family. Started staying over night now and then, then more and more. It because a source of talk among S14's friends and they were asking me why H stayed out all night. Finally I felt we were providing way too bad of an example to our teen boys and told him if he was going to stay out all night we needed to inform the kids that we were separating, and he needed to move out. After that he gave me a separation agreement, and moved out. He comes to visit now and then, and does me favors like fixing my car brakes, but never ever gives any indication of having a change of heart. He continues to be resolute.

He has never given me a reason for wanting to leave. He just said he was miserable and uncomfortable. He won't say what he's hoping for in his new life, and he won't say there's an ow or he's gay or anything at all that I could point a finger at and understand this. I know we weren't making each other happy but I thought he would at least TRY once he had some idea that change was possible. But no.

And over the course of this year and a half I've learned a lot more about myself, and my needs, and what I was doing to myself tolerating so much for so long. I learned how that resentment builds even if you don't label it as such, and how the pain grows even if you don't know it's pain. And that one person cannot make a happy marriage. I've learned that he might have given me the gift of a lifetime by leaving now and never looking back. I'm appreciating the fact that I'll be able to have an actual relationship with actual ILY's and hugs and talking, and that there are men who actually do this stuff because they want to. But I'm still pretty angry and still wish I could fix the marriage I had.

So that's a quick recap of the last 10 years so you don't have to go looking for my posts, but they are all there, every step of the way in excruciating detail all the way up to now.