Personally I never believed in 'not giving up'. I think hope equates to attachment. I think giving up is absolutely the right answer.
Here's my question- if you "gave up", what would you DO differently?
Would you stop working on yourself? In that case you'd be just doing this to win her back. Would you burn bridges, tell her off, have a rebound affair? In that case, might as well go ahead because I don't think the marriage can be saved anyway.
But say knowing 100% your M couldn't be saved, and having given up...would you instead try to find the healthiest way possible to grieve? Would you try to grow from the experience? To act maturely in a hard situation for the benefit of your children? To live in a way that you could look back on in 5 and 10 years and not regret?
As far as I am concerned, your behavior shouldn't differ whether you give up or not. So go ahead and give up. Don't worry about your love cooling off. That's actually part of detachment. Emotions follow behavior, so if in the future she wanted to R, you could figure out if you wanted to at that point, and if you did feelings could be reborn. But that is a much better approach than constantly recalculating the % chance she will come back, and recalculating how you feel about that idea, and how it would play out, and whether or not it would be possible to rekindle those feelings. Just let it go, give up, and take care of yourself.
To me that is dropping the rope, detaching, and moving forward.
Me:38 XW:38 T:11 years M:8 years Kids: S14, D11, D7 BD/Move out day: 6/17/14, D final Dec 15
