Ha. I appreciate your kick-in-the-butt post. Seriously, I do. But the situation is a little different from what you might expect.
The reason I don't have a job is because my chosen field is highly specialized. My job hunt should be national, or international, but my W had insisted that wherever we moved to, 2.5 years ago, we would be staying and settling there. So we did-- and over the past 2.5 years there have been exactly two appropriate jobs that appeared in this area, and I didn't even get to the first-interview stage for either.
I have four advanced degrees... MFA, MBA, MSc, and PhD. The MSc and PhD are the specialized degrees (Cognitive Psychology) for which there are few openings in this region. My stupidity has been that I have, since moving here, been attempting to "fall back" on the MFA, into *acting and theater*. Which, as I gradually but inevitably learned, pays somewhere between bupkis and squadoo. But that has been my "job search" over the last 2.5 years; throwing myself fruitlessly at penniless theaters and twiddling my thumbs waiting for appropriate and desirable CogPsy work to come along.
So now that I'm actually job hunting-- *actually* job hunting-- I am widening my Psychology search to the national level while attempting to "fall back" on the MBA instead. I never wanted to resort to the MBA because, back when I achieved that degree, I found business and finance work to be desperately unfulfilling. But there are jobs here, and money there, and if that's what I need to do right now to get myself standing and stable then I'm a-gonna doot.
And yeah.. does this sound like someone whose life should be shut down by a WW? Once I get myself in gear it should be pretty doggone obvious that only a fool would leave! (And I already have four different irons burning in their respective fires.)
The saddest part of this, though, is that during this process I have been forced to acknowledge that, in many ways, my W *is* foolish. Mentally and emotionally, she has serious issues, and these issues have only been aggravated by our current situation. Plus, when I look at the financial outcome of a D I'm chagrined to see that, because I've been unemployed, and because my investment accounts have only pre-marriage funds in them, an "equitable distribution" of marital assets means I come out of it doubling my bank while she gets soaked. The sad and plain fact is that, if we divorce, I will come out a better person and I will come out ahead. It seems incredibly likely that I will also find someone who is "better for me", as well. With what W has been and is putting me through, and the positive outcome waiting for me on the other side, and the fact that my mother has my financial back (temporarily), it would make sense to just file the papers and be done with it.
But I am hanging on because I still believe in my commitment to her. This is not out of blind obligation, but because the woman I love is still somewhere in that rotten, foggy shell. I am persisting with this painful charade because, if her love language is Quality Time, then I will not be able to fulfill that need-- not the way I need to, now-- without having the salary to do it. Once I have the means, I expect to give her one solid chance to come out of the fog; not pleading, not begging, not persuading, but a simple choice. If she chooses him, then D papers get filed, and sayonara. If she chooses me, then she's gonna get someone very different from the one she thought she was divorcing, and I'll do my level best to make her happy until I die.
