Maybell XXVI

[Maybell]

Part of me feels guilty at promoting my needs and desires above the commitment I made when we got married. That I want to quit standing because I do not believe he ever wanted to make me happy. (and I don't mean he needed to make me happy, but that he didn't want to participate in my happiness. He just wanted me to shut up and be happy). I feel guilty about this. Not that I have any choice about whether the marriage is healed.

I feel like I'm supposed to want the marriage healed if I'm here. I DO want the marriage healed. But I don't believe it can be because H doesn't see anything wrong with his choices.

I feel like he thinks I'm trash that he threw on the side of the road, and that HE'S worthy of passion and excitement and adventure but that I'm too dreary and boring and anxious to be worth it or to want it. That hurts a lot, that he would not see me or want to see me. After years of me saying "Let's go X" and him answering "But I don't know where to park the car if we do that."

I want to email him and say "Do you just want to have dinner so you can tell me again how little you want me? Do I have to sit through a whole meal to hear this?"

And I want it to be OK that I look back on my life and see that all my efforts didn't matter. That there were indeed times when I was a little controlling, but there were MANY more times when I said yes to everything he said, or tried to forestall him being anxious or annoyed, and that I was always worried about him being unhappy. I don't want to be accused of reinventing the past.

When I learned about the affair I asked him what was so wrong in our marriage that he had to do that to me and he said: You weren't friendly to my sister (which was true the first five years I knew her, but I've been closer to her than he has in the last ten); I didn't like the way you got your hair cut when S8 was a baby; I don't believe in God and you do.

When he wrote the four page letter telling me he wanted to separate, he said that OW had taught him that he could feel passion again and he just didn't feel that for me. Of course not. How can you compare an affair with a 26 yo pole dancer to a sixteen year marriage that you've deliberately withdrawn from for reasons I don't understand at all?

Is it wrong for me to give up on my marriage under these circumstances? Don't I deserve to free myself for someone who actually WANTS to know me and care about me, rather than someone who doesn't care and doesn't want to be around me? Somebody who has the integrity to stand by me and actually speak up for the relationship when things aren't going well?

And do I really have to go to dinner with him and listen to the awful things he'll say to me AGAIN?