I thought everything was okay....(Part 4)

[MCS]

V,

Thanks for the post, I'm having a bad PMA at the moment and then I read through this and it got me in a better place. It's some pretty deep stuff that I'm going to need to digest and re-read a couple times to give you an insightful response. However, I'll go off the cuff for an initial reaction.

So, I think a lot of my feeling of unconditional love is right in a marriage is that I'm actually pretty novice in the love department. I think this goes for W too; but in different ways. W and I got together in college. We actually became good friends quickly and were both trying to negotiate other relationships. W pursued me and definitely caught me by surprise and if she didn't we probably would have just been friends. I was the type of guy that had a lot of friends that were girls, but never really dated much. So suffice to say, I've been in love once in my life, and as such; I've never have fallen out of love with anyone. To put it in perspective and since we're all anonymous W and I were each other's only 'partner.'

So, the only love I've experienced up to this point is parental love, family love and of course marital love. So in my eyes, I've held all of these in the same conditional feeling in my heart. It may be also why some of my issues in M were most likely me taking love and M for granted. So, I know a little about your background and you've been in and out of love for a variety of different reasons. So, I think you have much more experience in this and these feelings I'm having have never happened in my life.

So, the other thing is that I'm usually an optimistic, idealistic person. I'm the type of person that takes the impossible tasks at work and just looks at them as 'easy' to overcome (there's the idealistic part) then when the going gets tough, I usually have a good ability to control the chaos and get things working the way they need to. This is part using high expectations for myself, but also I have a great team of folks around me (that we've been together a while) that have similar goals and work ethic. This is a diatribe, but is a little bit about how I thought our M was. I felt that both of us had these same attributes and goals and I saw us as a great 'team.' I'll get back to this point in a little bit.

So also, I believe that very few people actually do things that they think are bad knowningly, but more often than not; are doing what they think is best given the situation. I guess there's never been much 'bad' in my life that I can't explain away as a miscommunication, bad decision, temporary lapse of judgement, etc. So that's where I think this righteous anger comes in for me. In my head, I could understand how W got into the situation she did, but the continual pursuit of this while me, the kids (and even her, dare I say) are suffering is where the anger comes in.

So I'm mixing thoughts, but I'll see if I can get these all together at some point. So for me, I see that what W has done in the last year was at least somewhat understandable from the perspective of her getting in her mid thirties and having some of the 'now what' moments. Compound that with her feelings that I wasn't there emotionally, I see her needs were getting met elsewhere. I see that since neither of us has had 'Love' other than each other; that feeling of the A for her may have caused her to see that as Love and not our M. This coupled with her desires for self-sufficiency (she always has) especially because she felt that she was 'trapped' in our M.

So, the engineer in me explains all of this sitch on her side, but then that leaves MCS. This is where the true person inside me is struggling. For me, my personality is to think idealistically (Wife is lost, but still cares for MCS) and also use my desire to take on challenges that others see as dire (stick with M, even though so much disrespect has happened.) The third piece is the fact that I 'still' feel that M is based on unconditional love, mainly because that's all that I've experienced in my life. Lastly, this whole feeling of not being a 'team' with my W, especially with regards to our children is another 'new' feeling that I'm struggling with. We always seemed to have the same goals throughout our M, but its obvious that over the last 1.5 years our goals were very different and I had no clue. Yet another piece of anger in me.

So as far as getting back to what you are saying. I justify my anger to myself, because I have a good reference (the Bible) that W is doing things that are 'wrong.' Now my anger stays in me for the most part, but does come out as frustration to my W. MCS is not a yell, throw, vindictive person at all. All of my stuff above has been validated in my head because W has been acting so crazy and not herself. I used that to essentially go into denial that W is making these decisions logically and still is going forward. Now that she's acting back to normal and I don't see a swing in her attitude to D, I feel that I'm justified to be angry; but I also wonder if this anger is trying to bubble up to cause myself to fall out of Love. I see my W and get that same feeling of Love, but I'm worried that its just there because its comfortable to Love her.

Lastly, people ask me all the time about forgiveness. I said to the MC that I know I'm not there because even though I tell myself that I forgive her for what she has done, I see that I have expectations on that forgiveness. Additionally, I see that her current actions compound what's happened before, so obviously I haven't forgave her yet.