Unlearning conflict avoidance 3

[adinva]

I think, Luke, that you are working through a very important thing here. I agree, don't send the letter yet, but thanks for sharing it here.

All this time W has seemed like a very bad person, being mean to a perfectly nice and gentle H like you. Now we have something we can sink our teeth into, something that drives a wedge in marriages and leads to resentment and loss of respect in an almost predictable way. It might explain PART of what happened to get your marriage to this brink, it might yield a CLUE to how you might turn the relationship around or at least begin to heal from what's happening here. The long physical separations may have created a disengagement from the relationship that led to the rest of this.

Throwing yourself under the bus with exaggeration and drama is perhaps subconsciously a tactic. It puts you again (still) in victim mode. You did something wrong but it wasn't THAT wrong, not as wrong as you say, so there's something to argue with and you end up getting to be the weak victim of a mean W. You have even given support to this idea of mine in your followup messages that indicate you even really don't believe your letter - you actually did do some hard work on the house, etc.

Now, the separations may have been not that bad or not that long, and you felt they were necessary for your job as breadwinner in the family, and she may have even given them her full support. Look at how many military marriages fall apart after the separation of a tour of duty, when they knew upfront it would be hard and had resources to try to handle it, and the spouse at home tried to be fully supportive. Physical separation is just really hard on a marriage.

Small resentments become big resentments become lack of affection, lack of respect, lack of love. It happened to me anyway.

So what is the point of your apology? If you follow DB, the point would be to acknowledge her feelings, to show remorse for a mistake you didn't even know at the time but now do, to verbalize what happened so that you might grow from the experience and become a better man. It's not for karma, which if you think about it is a very self-serving reason for apologizing, the fact that you're doing it in order to get something good later on from the universe...do you feel mentioning karma in your letter is going to enable your W to feel validated and understood, or irritated at your self-centeredness? There's a lot of talk on the forums about whether, when, and how to apologize for things you've realized now that you regret. Discussing it here and wordcrafting your thoughts here can be therapeutic, educational, and also helpful in term of whether you have the right motivations and the right approach.

I think it is really useful for you to look at whether you considered her needs during your separations, or whether you limited yourself to what you thought her needs were.

I think it's really big, at least a very big departure from the kinds of things you've posted in DB up until now, to hear that your W has recently expressed that she felt abandoned by you when you worked abroad. Is that news to you as it is to me?

Rather than assuming you now know all she felt then, maybe you could have a dialogue with her asking about it, how she felt then, what she was missing. And just hear her, and validate that it must have been hard for her. You don't want to argue back that it was agreed on at the time, that it was money for her and the family, and yadayada. What you need to know are the facts of what she was feeling about that, which sound like news to you unless you've known and were leaving that part out all the time you've been posting here.

The bummer is that finally realizing what really happened to your marriage doesn't necessarily enable you to fix it. But it does enable you to stop feeling like a victim, heal, perhaps repair some of W's hurt feelings, and move on with more self respect.