Who is this woman&what has she done with my wife 2

[TSquared2]

That's some good stuff to know/speculate.

Has she told you all that, or are you speculating?

Thing is, a lot of what you posted there, my W has indeed said to me, so there is a common thread perhaps. My W has her other issues, but here are some common ones, directly from her:

-Aging
-Through her online adventures, she discovered after all these years that she was attractive, and wanted to act on it "while she still could, before she got old and ugly", have that life she was too shy to have in her teens and 20's.
-Grey hair, and when she found out from the ob/gyn that she was in peri-menopause, and she read up on menopause, and the possibility of thinning/losing hair, she flipped, as if grey hair wasn't bad enough in her mind.
-"She wants to be hot, young, and fun. She wants to date single, exciting men," -- check. But doesn't want to marry them, she wants to be single and powerful.
-The kids age --teens, they no longer need her like they did when they were little. She no longer could be the kind of Mom she liked being. And all the "joys" of the teenage years, she kept flashing back to her painful teen years. She had difficulty being tougher, that was my job, but she resented that I could do it.
-"(We are middle class, but struggling.)" -- W was tired of the struggle. Somehow she had gotten in her head as a girl that married life with kids was like the "Brady Bunch", she didn't expect that there would be so much struggle, problems, why wasn't it easy like on TV? And she resented me because I didn't provide that easy TV life (she was a stay at home Mom) she thought she was getting.(These are HER words, almost verbatim).
-She was tired of responsibility. Tired of meeting everyone else's needs.
-On our last anniversary "date" (lol), she actually said, in an indirect way (based on movie choice), that she "was into fantasy now, not reality".


So, can you use that creative mind of yours to try to trade places, imagine thinking/feeling those things you know or are probable, and try to view the world from her perspective? From her "elevation"? Doesn't make it right, or excused or anything, but just so you can be fair to yourself (that may not make sense right now, but it will, if you do the work).

And I'd like to share something with you from a friend, I don't think she'd mind:

"You know T, I was thinking about your w today. I forgot how old your children are. Anyway, women sometimes look at their lives at some point and feel that they have lived for their h and their children and their home. And suddenly the years are passing and they have gotten lost a bit. Not all women feel this, but many do.

And so they struggle to find their identity. Who are they as women, not as mom or wife? When they start to work again, that often helps with that. But for women in a crisis, it goes deeper than all that. And they may not have the coping skills needed to get through it.

I struggled for a time with it, too. I figured it out, but, I can see where some may have a hard time with it.

They are very real, though, those feelings. And it can be a difficult time trying to reconcile it all. "

Hope that helps see your W's "elevation" some.

This is tough, painful stuff man, no doubt.

The toughest things for me to wrap my mind around were:
-I can't fix this for her (I am a fixer by nature and trade, lol).
-I have no control over her actions. I just have my boundaries, but she's a free human being.
-I cannot plan or control the outcome. There is no tidy, planned, efficient plan or blueprint.
-Though all this is "wrong", she is the mother of my kids, and they are watching. What do I want to show them, I have all boys, so what kind of man do I want to model? (That was a tough thing to look at and answer).
-That cheating doesn't have to be the end of the marriage.
-That this was HER journey, I had my own to walk. That I could do little (and I am not a "do little" kind of guy) except work on me, focus on the kids because they needed a strong adult to help them through all this, and that adult was this guy looking back at me in the mirror.
-That, yes, I did have some things that I contributed to the marriage problems...and I better fix those in me, for this M, or any new R's. Maybe wouldn't have stopped her mlc, but they surely did NOT help.

"She wants adventure. The sad thing is that my kids will only be home for a few more years, and we could have had the adventure she wanted. " --Yup, ours were 18, 13, 10 when she started phase 2...what we had been working for was so close....I get that.

I hope this helps you re-frame some of this for YOUR sake, not hers, for YOURS. This crap will eat you alive if you stay in the anger, shame, humiliation stage too long.

It's time to work on you. What in your life can you make better? The kids helping with the house some would be good, imo. Your thoughts?

And don't stress on the messes, they don't matter in the big picture/long run, right?

I really had to narrow my focus to core necessities and competencies.

So, what can you do for YOU right now , and the kids, this weekend?