Gogofo - Piecing with the W

[gogofo]

So I came back from a hunting trip and before I left things were feeling up and down.

The W and I had a talk last night and she is feeling the same way she was feeling last year before our S, or similar to it. What I don't understand is that these feelings seem to be from mostly internal talks she has had with herself.

The changes I have shown bring up feelings in her of anger because they were not done previously when things were bad. She feels that I am changing just to change for her and that I would soon regret who I had to become to be with her. The new me is has her feeling angry that it was not the old me when she just would have took the littlest of improvements.

It is also close to her BD when I told her "I would never change", last Thanksgiving, and I think it is bringing up fears in her that she feels we have not progressed. She seems like she is hurting pretty badly, but things with us have been better than a year ago. I seems she is frustrated by the "two steps forward, ten steps back" as she called it. I see it as two or three forward and one back, but the perspective also goes along with how we are currently feeling.

She talked about not wanting to "compromise" and when she uses that word she uses as having to give something up. Her analogy was she can have either a glass of red wine or a glass of water, but when she thinks of us together it would be like mixing the two together. She said she would rather have wine or water, not the mixture, and she is viewing us as the mixture. I said that my perspective is that we both have wine and together there would be more to go around.

The last week in September when she asked me to move in she also wrote me a note in a card saying how we had both grown in the last year, for the better, and how she knows we can work through any problems that we face.

Now two weeks later we hit a backslide last week and she is now feeling like we are back to where we were a year ago.

I understand her fears and her feelings, but now I think she is not looking at our current state and when she does she is doing some score keeping and not moving "from this day forward."

She asked me to move my stuff out, which I kind of agree may be good right now, may still be premature to live together. We got a little carried away when talking about our lives and started talking about building a house and things like that which was a bad idea as we had only been living together for a week. But we both were enjoying the dreaming.

She said the people who get along well when we are alone or on vacation are fantasy people without kids or jobs, but when we get back to reality we don't work. My opinion is that those people are who we can be and how we really feel about each other, but we are having trouble translating that back to our regular lives.

She mentioned MC when we talked about her PA, I said I felt we did not need it at that point. I mentioned MC when she asked me to move in, she said she felt we did not need it. Last night I said we needed the skills to work through dealing with these bumps in the road. We need to figure it out or get help. She then echoed my denial for MC and then I echoed hers. She did not seem too open to it, but did not flat out refuse MC either.

We need the help and I will have to talk to her again about it.

She said that she thought the reconciliation would be easier and I agreed that I thought it would be too. I did not expect all the old feelings to come up again. I know this is what is causing her feelings right now, and she is feeling overwhelmed by the idea of dealing with it again.

Her schedule is so jam packed that she barely has time to breath. And then to try and work reconciliation into the mix seems like way too much for her and makes her feel that it is not worth the effort. She flat out asked me what does she get out of our relationship. She then ran through all the pros about not being with me which were things like not compromising, more free time because she get full days off from the kids and me, if we get rid of the house she could start to save money. She told me she doesn't want my money, she doesn't want any of our stuff, she sees her life as simpler and better; so what can I offer her? I responded that we could have the best life together, not just a good life. We could both feel completely in love and have an awesome relationship were we both felt fulfilled. She is big on pro and con lists and laying out the facts, but I don't think she is accounting for emotion.

I keep thinking about how much she told me that she really loves me and how in her card she said we could work through anything, but now she feels overwhelmed and it all looks bleak to her.

Is this hot and cold view towards the relationship common during piecing?