180man Thread 4

[180Man]

Bdog -- Thanks for the supportive reply. "Control what you can control. Focus on yourself. Detach and continue to GAL. One that doesn't involve your M making you happy."

Okay. I will try.

Leahsue -- "Whatever feels right to you today, do it." This one helps. Really, it does. Today I feel like making a big dent toward putting her/our stuff in boxes. Anything that is hers and anything that is ours that reminds me of us. If it's really over, I cannot be looking at it all the time thinking of the time we....(insert memory here). It [censored]...like this original artwork we bought in Panama when her Spanish skills helped us negotiate a great price and my beginner's Spanish was barely able to keep up with understanding the conversation...or the nick nack we picked out in Argentina from the old artist we met on the street...whatever it is, it makes me think of us. She can deal with it. She has been able to walk away from our life without having to do much heavy lifting at all. I'm not trying to be punitive, but if she wants this divorce, she can take the stuff and figure out what to do with it. She can sift through the memories and see how it makes her feel. Due to the military, she has been able to easily live/sleep at work a fair amount of the time, the rest of the time she has been renting a room. Point being, it was easy for her to kind of leave our life without dealing with it. Anyways, I'm rambling now, but I'm going to have my lawyer contact hers this week and tell her to send a storage POD to the house. I doubt she will even look inside until post-deployment. If we never fix anything, I don't need to be reminded of it. And if we do fix things, well...she'll have whatever stuff of ours she feels like keeping.

Kaizen -- Thanks for sticking it out with me and continuing to push me and ask the hard questions. It's frustrating sometimes, but I know you're right. Don't worry about whether or not I need to hear it -- we both know I do, even if I don't always want to.

My plan...I guess...is to follow this whiteboard I have sitting here next to me (the list of stuff I posted about doing on page 1). Keep checking items off my list every day, keep improving myself, work on all areas of life -- body, mind, spirit (and career stuff too, I suppose). I think when a person first shows up at this website or reads MWD's books they cannot possibly comprehend what it is to detach. You may think you have an understanding when you first read about it, but probably only a superficial one at that. Over these past several months I think my view of detachment has been evolving and growing deeper. It's probably directly proportional to my ability to endure more pain and hardship. You can only handle so much, I guess. This email last week really pushed me a further along on this detachment understanding. I know on the surface this email appears to be only business, but knowing my W, it's so much more than that. Yes, she's trying to be fair, but that's who she is. She knows deep down that she fùcked up and isn't going to screw me over. At the same time, regardless of if the A continues today or not, I don't think she is prepared to deal with what has happened, emotionally speaking. It's going to take her a long time to allow herself to reflect on this and figure out who she is and who we were. She probably feels she has that figured out already, and perhaps she may, but I honestly don't think she has allowed herself to feel much yet. Being this busy with work, having so many people rely on you...it just doesn't lend itself to a lot of alone time needed for self-reflection. So, I pray that she finds the time to do that for herself one day.

On the forgiveness conversation, yes I know what you were saying. I knew it then and I understand it even now. Yes, I guess I did have expectations. But I also needed to do it. For me. I think she also needed it. I did not expect her to come running back, but I was hoping we could pump the brakes a little bit. So I learned this one the hard way.

The ring...her words aren't dictating what I believe in. I believe in marriage. I believe I love her. I will always love her. I believe deep down somewhere she loves me, too, but it's clear that it's over, at least for the foreseeable future. Her words dictated when I put the ring on in the first place. And right now, her words have made me realize that the marriage, relationship, friendship, vows, love, pain, hurt...all of the shared experiences between us that we had are now completely past tense. That anything between us which occurs will have to be a new marriage and a new relationship. And, thus, the bond we had is now broken. I can work on myself, build a better life, and pray that we have the opportunity to create a new bond, but that's about it. I need to stop looking for all the rainbows and unicorns. Fact is...she's gone. She was gone before I even found out about the A. I spent a lot of time alone with the dog last summer waiting for her to come home. It wasn't her fault, she was gone for extended periods of time last year due to work. It has been just me and the dog for a while now...and this is just further solidification of that fact. A marriage can only take so many deployments and time away from home before it's at risk...and we didn't make it. Possibly because we thought we would never have to worry about it -- complacency. If I am ever in another R...if I have learned anything, it's to fight complacency every day. Every God damn day. I can't put a finger on why it was the right time to take it off. I had been wearing it faithfully all this time, but I guess that email kind of pushed me to the point of having to realize that it was time. Idk, it's hard to explain.

Meanwhile, my friends are telling me I should go on a date or two, just to...I guess...to remind myself that my W is not the only woman on the planet? To help with my confidence? I'm not sure, they seem to have a whole host of reasons. Actually they have been telling me to do this for a couple months, but I have ignored them. The more adamant a particular friend was about giving up and moving on, the less and less I talked to them. It caused me pain to hear a friend say "Yeah man, I'm looking for the positives all this time and you told me X, Y, and Z, and...dude, I think she's gone. Time to throw in the towel." It hurt to hear various friends slowly fall like dominoes and tell me this in various forms. Now they are...get this 25yrsmlc....they want me to talk to the cute JAG in my office. Sigh. As nice of a distraction as that idea may be, I'm in no place to be doing that sort of thing right now. At all. I know they mean well, I guess MWD is right...friends don't want to see you in pain.