Keep Wearing Wedding Band? [Thread #6]

[Gordie]

AP -- I welcome bluntness and critical thinking. So thanks for your questioning.

My saying that I accept the divorce is ... my attempt to take on a Stockdale-like, unflinching, clear-eyed look at my situation. In theory there is a possibility that my MLC/WW would wake up. What are the odds? 1-in-1,000.

You see my lack of proactive participation in the divorce as passive obstruction. That probably applied more so earlier in my struggle (summer of 2016), when I postponed looking at the DIY divorce paperwork my wife gave me. But actually, back then, I simply could not emotionally bring myself to do it. It was not a willful obstruction.

At this point, I can emotionally handle doing all the paperwork. And if my wife said, let's meet tomorrow night and let's fill out forms A, B and C together, I would comply. But so far she's only asked if I'd live in the same house for up to a year after the divorce, to which I said no.

I could give her a "counter offer" for a plan to divorce. I know more-or-less what I'd ask for, if I were to do so. But I don't want to right now. Why? For one, I don't want to divorce! I want to work on our (deep) problems. Two, since her fantasized EAs in the fall of 2015 and spring of 2016, she has not crossed any of my boundaries. Three, we are living quite amicably as parents, and I'm not in a hurry to break up the family for my two young kids' sake. And four, my wife is very impulsive and has poor life-planning skills, and I've not made it any better because I helped her with everything (and still do too much, probably). I want her to think through what her divorce is going to look like, and struggle to come up with a plan herself. I don't want to hand her the divorce she wants on a platter, all worked out.

And she is figuring it out, at least the divorce part, step by step. (I think her life afterward will be a wreck). And as she asks me for participation in specific steps of the divorce (i.e., let's fill out form XYZ), I intend to comply.

I spell all this out, AP, not to be argumentative, but because it's good for my own thinking to spell it all out; and to invite everyone's feedback on it. Maybe I'm taking the wrong tack on this. I not confident. Just trying to be true.

Things will remain in flux, I'm pretty sure, so y'all will keep hearing from me.

Okay, I better understand why a counter proposal may not be the right path for you. Best wishes in this new phase. I'm negotiating our S now and it is exhausting.