[stumps]

In my circumstance, as best as I can tell at this point W believes that we just sort of grew apart and got overly focused on the kids and paid little attention to us. Now doesn’t believe feelings can change and is not willing to do anything to try and get those feelings to change. I partially agree with that – oldest is almost 18 now and we didn’t go away ourselves for the first time until he was around 13.

At that point, went away with another couple for a few days to a resort and had a good time. After that we started to do a few things here and there w/o kids for a couple years (dinners, bands, parties etc…). Had lots of friends, active intimate life, many of our couple friends have told us that they wanted to have what we had, etc…..

About 2.5 or 3 years ago W dropped the B and seems to have been following the script and re-writing history along the way. Many of the standard WAS comments like ILYBINILWY, if I ever did love you it changed somewhere along the way, I am not sure I ever loved you, not willing to work on things any longer, etc….. My initial reaction after B-date included all of the wrong activities (for a longer period of time that I care to admit) and ever since I have been working on integrating the DB principles.

Wow... very similar to my sitch (although I guess a lot of us could say that). Although in my case I think there is at least to some degree some self-medicating on W's part with alcohol. Also, I guess I'm lucky in that my sitch is newer and I started employing DBing much sooner.

Also, I wholeheartedly agree with the following (in fact, for better or worse I'm pretty sure I said something similar to W one of the times she brought up the R and D and asked me what my thoughts were)

So far I have been staying because: I made a commitment and honoring that is important to me, I think it is important to show this example for my boys (given that there is not any abuse, fighting or 3rd party involved), I made a choice to love my W for better or worse and something deep inside of me tells me it is still not the “right” thing to leave/give-up.