Thank you all for your thoughts and concerns, and especially Toots for the examples of effective boundaries. Tenbook, you're right. I am not ready to implement those boundaries. And Sandi, I see what you mean that I shouldn't call it a boundary-- or even think that I'm capable of setting one-- unless I am prepared to do what is difficult. A few things have changed since that conversation, sort of for the better and sort of for the worse.
I mainly want to stall her. This isn't because I expect something to go wrong with the A in that time (if only) but because I want to job-hunt. I went yesterday to a meetup group that was for "dating in mid-life"; everyone there was older than me, and when I had occasion to mention what I was going through the group exploded with opinions and advice, which was clearly due to their identifying with my sitch and wanting to help me avoid their mistakes. But even before that, the topic of learning from past relationships had come up, and a fellow made a comment that made me think: he said not only to seek the cause of your current breakdown, but to look back on all your failed relationships and ask if there's a pattern.
And there is a pattern. There's a blatant pattern. I had thought that my W was lured in by A because I was paying all my attention to my work (I am unemployed, but I have my own business) and not to her, and that is true, but my actions were a symptom and not a cause. The real pattern is what I thought the purpose of a relationship to be. In every one of my past relationships, I would find a woman who, through my interest or pursuit, would fall in love with me, at which point I would accept her love and let that be our relationship. Every day, in every relationship, I would marvel at the mystery of how our love kept us together, but be glad of it. And so I never did anything, nor saw the need to do anything, to build our love and our life together. In this case, job-hunting was not my top priority before now because we had enough money to get by, and we had each other, so why would it matter?
But now I see how important it is to *actively* do things together-- not just to participate sometimes in things that she might want to do, but to make suggestions, plan trips, try new things, create new shared experiences and memories. And this is the core problem right now; if she left her A, she'd be again confined to home and whatever activities we could find that happened to be free of charge. And although that can be enough for a loving couple that's determined to make it, we have lived with that mentality for all our years together (she's been wanting to go camping for at least five years now), and if there's to be a chance of her even considering reconciliation I want to be able to show her what life can be like once our salary is essentially doubled. And I can't do that hypothetically. So I need to get a job. And that takes time. Which means I need to stall.
(I think I'll write more in a separate post-- sometimes there's a hiccup with the browser form and I lose what I've written, so it's good to break it up)
