Am I Dreaming or Played a Fool?

[Matrix]

Exactly -- for most people you can think of your well being as a pie, for simple arguments sake say half of the pie is what you do for yourself, in terms of your emotional well being, and the other half is what you get from your relationship. Sometimes you get less from the relationship and your slice gets bigger by comparison, sometimes you need to lean on the relationship and your slice gets smaller by comparison.

For your W, she's had three slices, what she does for herself, what she gets from the relationship with you, and what she gets from her EA.

When everything goes south, here's what happens:

For her, the EA piece is completely missing, she feels guilty and bad about herself for what she's done (although usually she won't show you that), so she's incapable of picking herself up to make her slice bigger, plus her relationship with you has gone off the rails so that slice has shrunk as well -- it's a huge void. She has three choices to fill it: (1) entice you to lean back in and fawn all over her, (2) pick back up with the OM or a new substitute OM, or (3) do the hard work on herself to grow her own slice and make her feel better about herself by addressing her deep seated issues.

The last one is the most difficult and most painful, with no guarantees, so she's going to fight like hell against that until she hits bottom. Instead, she's going to try to manipulate you into #1, and do what she can to get #2 -- that *appears* to be her shortest path back to feeling good and requires the least amount of work.

Now let's look at your side. You had your two slice pie. Now the relationship slice is completely gone and you have nothing to fill it. That's completely destabilizing. It's the same challenge she's confronting but in a different way.

You either need to fill the relationship slice by stepping up what you do for yourself, *or* convince her to come back and fill it. Everyone here convinces themselves that this second path is the shortest path back to feeling good and requires the least amount of work, so people get obsessive about making it happen.

The worst case scenario is that you both end up rushing back together for no other reason than to fill a void, and you go forward no better off than you were before and with more scars and hurt to add to what is already undoubtedly a stack of resentments.

You each need to fill the void on your own, for yourselves. That WILL happen. You were single before you got married and you survived that, you can survive this, it just takes time for your slice to grow and to establish a new norm.

Once you both go through that painful process, you'll be on equal footing and can decide to come back together by choice, versus out of perceived necessity. That's the difficult path, but the one that's going to last.

Your description of your marriage sounds like you were in a perpetual "one down" scenario, where you were more committed than your W, and were trying to extract more from her than she was willing to give to the relationship, and she was trying to keep you at bay while spreading her attentions elsewhere. That's not an equilibrium you want to re-establish.

If you re-engage, you want it to be as equal partners where she is with you because she desperately wants to be, not because you're the easy and comfortable choice. To get there, you need to step away and give each other space "to be" on your own.

Ironically the shortest path back together is a straight line in the opposite direction. That requires a leap of faith, but it's really the only way it works long term.

Acc

ALL OF THAT ABOVE!!! WOW!!!

This might be worthy of being put into the newbie required reading. Just an incredible way to think about this whole sitch we are in. Even though this is not my thread, I thank you for every word of that. I might read this daily.