hope456 - he filed, what now?

[KGirl]

Hope -
When I start to think about how other people on this site seem stronger/happier/more positive/etc., I now think to myself "keep in mind the population you're looking at!" It's going to be a little skewed because everyone on here is taking the time and effort to follow DB and take the onus, rather than blame everything on their partner and go nuts. I mean, think of what we COULD be doing instead - keying their car, filing as soon as they said they didn't want to be M anymore, blasting them on facebook, trying to make their lives miserable, etc. But we're not. When I talk with people at work or my IC about what I am doing and my internal thought process, they generally say that they are amazed I am handling this so well... even though it really doesn't FEEL like I'm handling it well. And, as I've been recently told on here, comparing yourself to others doesn't help - there will always be people in a better situation, and there will always be people in a worse situation. This is going to take time. It s*cks. Someday (or so I hear from my D'ed friends!) it will feel better. But it does s*ck right now. I hate it too. I hate that my H doesn't want to put in the effort when I feel that the things he's unhappy about could be resolved with some counseling or conversation. But he won't, and I can't make him.

What I was trying to articulate in a prev. post but labug did much better is this: "it's unfair to fault yourself completely for something that has other actors."

You can certainly tell yourself "Right now, I don't really feel like reconciling after D," knowing that that's how you feel at this point in time. It might change if you D. It might not. No if-then decisions need to be made right now. An interesting anecdote I read in a book the other day about a W whose H had an affair - she said that when she drops an M&M on a relatively clean floor, she has no problem picking it up and eating it right away. The 5 second rule applies. But if she were to drop a piece of broiled fish on that same floor, she wouldn't pick it up and eat it - something about that piece of fish has changed now and it's not the same. She felt like her H was that piece of fish after his PA. We don't know yet if our H's are M&M's or pieces of fish, I guess, is what I was going for here but there's really not much point in dwelling on it until if or when they actually would WANT to reconcile. Otherwise it's just all conjecture right now. That was hard for me, though. What I ended up doing instead of thinking about it all the time and swirling arond in my head was telling myself "OK, so what would you need from him if he were to come back? Make your list, then put it aside. You know where it is if you need it." Then I don't have to think about it anymore. It's kind of like how some people write a to-do list for the next day before going to bed, otherwise they have trouble sleeping because they keep thinking about what they need to do.

I've been pretty stuck in the "why not just end this right now? how would I ever be able to trust him again if he DID come around?" mindset lately. A book that helped me was "I love you, but I don't trust you." While I'm not in a place to implement it, just reading it gave me some things to think about re: trusting someone again after they've betrayed you and steps you and the other person can take to rebuild that trust and overcome the hurt. It also gave me some insight into what lead to all this in the first place.