Newby here . . . (Thread 7)

[JRuss]

LH19 -- thanks for stopping by my thread, and I'm sorry your sitch resembles mine, or that you have a sitch you have to deal with at all. Keep doing what you can to grow and improve, for you.

At first, I struggled mainly with an intense desire just to fix me, to make myself more attractive for her, so as to fix the marriage by being what she needed me to be. That didn't work, all of my efforts in that direction were perceived to be smothering, and it kept me miserable, because I was constantly living and acting for her and not for myself, and it made me more and more attached in an increasingly not healthy way, which drove her further and further away. Eventually, that gave way to a realization, and it sounds like you are there, that, even if I did everything I could, she had pretty much decided that the promise of new grass, wherever (and whomever) it ends up being, is just greener and more perfect than I can ever be, and the best I could hope for is a W still married to me, but one pining for something she thinks would be better. That ended up not being good enough for me, although that realization took longer than it probably should have had I not been struggling with self-image problems associated with the rejection. I got where I started to see that alone will be better than together under that scenario, and there's certainly no guarantee that alone, forever, is my destiny anyway.

I'm still struggling with losing time with my children, but I'm going to try to see if there's any truth to the coping blurb people throw out, that high quality time, even if less of it, is better than lots of low(er) quality time, which was our reality in the Zombie Marriage -- our home is a sad, gloomy place often, and that's no good for kids.

My mother is a 2 Enneagram.