chicken or egg?

[etc]

Well, I finally hit 99 posts under my original thread, so I figured it was time to start a new one.

The original can be found here:
any hope?

If you read the last post on my old thread you can get a pretty good sense of where we're at. In a nutshell my W wants to proceed with filing and has no real hope for any future together even with all the grief this has caused for our family and children. The three month trial S period has lapsed and her mind hasn't changed one iota.

I've explained to her that I'm not going to fight D, but I'm still interested in trying to get our M and family back on track. Of course, she's not thrilled with my approach b/c she thinks I'm turning her into the villain. My response is that I'm just being true to who I am and what I believe, but I honor her freedom to get out of the M if that's what she truly wants.

So, we'll see where she takes it next. If I know my W, she will proceed with her intentions. When she wants something, she gets it, but I've also often seen her regret her decisions later on, so who knows how everything will actually end up.

So, I title this new thread "chicken or egg?" as I reflect on how we got to the point where we are now. It seems that MLC kicked in for my W after we started getting more and more emotionally distant from each other. We started treating each other more as chores than people. At that point I was so immersed in my own world of projects that my W felt alone and I was too dense to pick up on her depression to try to help pick her up. It was only a matter of time that someone else would take interest in her and so someone from back in the day figured out a way to sweep her off her feet and now she's been different ever since, steeped in an A.

We used to be best friends, but now she sees something new that she believes is better than anything we ever had together, so her prerogative is to become a new person she felt she never could be with me. She's pursuing something new (and possibly better?) at any cost. I've been focusing on being dim, GALing, PMA and though she's curious at times, ultimately she has no real desire to reconnect with me.

My IC thinks I'm doing a fabulous job with everything. I have a few confidants that are very encouraging with how I've handled everything. Other than focusing on ME, there's really nothing I can do to change my W's perspective about things. Though I'm often tempted, I've given up on trying for my own sanity. She sees me as an obstacle to her freedom and though I feel that I would love to work toward more emotional closeness, I've chosen to give her space and not initiate any contact with her unless it has to do with our kids or finances.

So, this leaves me asking... What came first, our emotional distance or her desire to leave our M? Has her wanting to leave the M created additional emotional distance? In me being dim, am I just furthering her cause? I only ask b/c I'm at a point where I'm going to re-read DR, come up with a real plan for MY life and see what needs to be tweaked in my approach to all of this.

Thanks for reading!

ETC