I'm married until I'm divorced. It's simpler for me, and it feels right, and I pledged myself, my heart and my life, to a commitment to marriage.
I understand what you're saying, but personally when I hear people say things like this it makes me think they're clinging to something that no longer exists, and that it may be keeping them from detaching and moving forward. The point I was trying to make (and perhaps didn't make too well) is that your old marriage really is dead and gone. As Michele says in DR, what you should be striving for is not a restoration of your old marriage, but building a new relationship and marriage moving forward. Your spouse doesn't want to go back to the old M, and you shouldn't either. Admitting to yourself that your M is dead does not mean going out and having sex all over the place. It just means acknowledging that the only way forward is to forge a new path WITH OR WITHOUT your H.
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Do I tell them, hey, it's fine to date, have sex, whatever, with anyone now; we're no longer committed to each other, we're no longer required to be faithful, because honestly the marriage ended when dad started emotionally cutting me off, and it really ended when he moved out.
That's not the point. The point is it only takes one spouse to end a marriage, and they end it long before a D paper is ever issued. What you can tell your sons is this: "Sons, let this serve as a lesson to you. Do not ever put your marriage on autopilot. Do not ever assume your marriage can survive anything. Do not ever assume that your marriage is fine and needs no work. Because what I have learned from what happened between your father and me is that marriage takes consistent, hard, faithful work to maintain. It takes a serious commitment to stay in constant communication with your spouse so that you know not just how you feel about the M, but how they feel about it too. Because when you quit knowing or caring about your spouse's feelings, then your spouse will wall themselves off and begin the end of your M, and you cannot stop them. So view your M not as static but dynamic, you will have to change, grow and adapt to keep it strong."
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The rest is just a meaningless piece of paper. So don't worry, as soon as you don't feel married, you're not...go ahead, have fun, move on, you deserve to be happy.
That's exactly what your H (and society) is teaching them. You need to teach them a different view. You need to teach them that it's NOT about the paper. But...
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to BE in the marriage while you're in it, to make a good faith effort to FIX it when it breaks, and to at least wait until it's legally over before hooking up with someone else. That's what I think I would tell my boys, and that's what I intend to live.
...they are going to be more inclined to follow your H's model than yours. Unfortunately that's just the way life is. Sons model their dads, daughters model their moms. So do the best you can, but understand that you can't force their destinies.
