Yes, I have walked away, and then he'll bring it up again later, and try again to get me to give in (assuming there's still time beforehand,) using every trick in the book. And then if I stick to my boundary, he'll bring it up afterwards in other discussions and tell me how unGodly I am, how I'm not a good wife, how us doing things separately is not what he had in mind when he got M'd, that if this is all I'm offering, then we might as well get D'd. To which I tell him, "Go ahead, D me." Then he says he'll never leave me, that he wants to work on things, that he'll go on a float trip with me (it's February!) that he'll do anything I ask because he wants to make things better. Unless I ask him to clean his pitted-out office, or to pay a bill on time, or to attend a meeting for S12 for school because I have class that night and can't. When he doesn't, he has a hundred excuses why, apologizes and promises to do better, has no understanding of my resulting anger, tells me I'm unforgiving and a perfectionist, too demanding with unreasonable expectations.
Currently, I'm not speaking to him at all. I'm avoiding him, going down to my office if he's on the main floor, etc., while he's acting like everything is fine. After about 5 days of this, I'll get sick of his ignoring the elephant in the room, and I'll lose patience with always having to walk away from what I was doing in order to avoid him, and tell him to leave me alone. He'll immediately pick up with the promises again, telling me how much he misses me, claiming how much he wants to make things work, arguing that we can't make it work if we don't communicate (which is true.) And he'll suck me back in to the endless circle discussion, which results in me throwing out some token request, which he'll manage to do this time, because it's a only token afterall, and because he's focused on getting something he wants in return, a token like watching a movie with me, of which he'll watch the first five minutes then fall asleep and think it still counts, and if I don't then I'm ungrateful. And then because he's fulfilled the token request in his mind, everything should be Norman Rockwell wonderful and the cycle starts all over again from the beginning.
If either of us want to reconcile this, communication is necessary. But our communication is dysfunctional at best, damaging at minimum.
God! I really hate that I can see this sooo clearly! I really hate that I can see my part in it and can't seem to break the cycle. I spend so much time thinking about the job I want when S12 goes off to college, one where I travel a lot and it gets me out of the house and away from him. I just can't see a way to do that now without giving up my time with S12. I just can't see how to break the cycle!
I wish I could understand what makes one person think another person is only there for their benefit?
