Long-time lurker, first time poster here. Got finally inspiration to write my story at least to vent a bit and hopefully also to be able to give & get some peer support… First time I hit the DB community few months ago, but last days I have been reading your stories very intensively. The good spirit and all personal experiences have encouraged me deeply – I am not here alone. What a great and wise people you have here!
Me and my wife got married at 2003, both at the age of 24. I have to say looking back these almost 15 years, they have gone fast! There has been some unbelievably beautiful moments, such as birth of our son and daughter and also great memories with W, but also unfortunately many issues and resentment. Despite of the problems we had, I was committed to our marriage and had a dream of us growing old together and being a family until the end. Hence, it was The biggest disappointment in my life to understand that my W do not feel the same way anymore and wants to continue her journey alone.
I should have seen it coming though, I got all the warning signs over the years – but I did not just believe she would really leave. That being one of my biggest mistakes over the years – taken her for granted. I have actually made a long list of my mistakes during our marriage that has driven us to this point: I did not made her feel loved & appreciated, I lacked in emotional connection, neglected her feelings and was not comfortable being physically near – to start with. Maybe someone of you thinks I deserve to be alone after being such of a husband and honestly, I have blamed myself to the level of torture. However, I have tried to practice forgiveness towards myself. And even I understand that my wife had a part to play in our marriage as well (I did not feel accepted and respected either), I have decided not to focus to any of her faults but to take 100% responsibility of my own actions. I do not believe anymore the classical 50%/50% setup, but rather take a model from a soccer team if they want to win: you can´t score if the other team has the ball – you need to take 100% responsibility of your own game. As I have been trying to understand the pattern where we went wrong in the first place, I have come across with the term “cycle of conflict”, which as I understand is quite common root-cause in many martial problems. Looking back, I see this pattern repeating itself in our communication: W addressed some concern of our marriage which I took as complaint and pulled myself back. When I withdrew myself, W was more concerned of our marriage and drew back even more. Vicious cycle was in place to contaminate the relationship. Regrettably I never understood the “cycle of conflict” as a potential root-cause, nor did I understand how it supposedly led to the neglecting I described above. In my eyes we only argued of everyday problems but obviously the reasons were deeper. Not even marriage counselling ever focused to any cause, it was only about trying to solve effects, i.e. who said what and how…. Anyways, since I wanted our marriage to work better, I tried to implement the changes I thought she wanted me to do based in her feedback --> since I travelled a lot for work when kids were small so I cut the time with friends to zero to maximise time home (mistake), or since she felt that our life spins around me I started let her to initiate almost everything in our daily life (mistake), and so on.
Nothing helped in making us functioning as a loving team, so my wife decided to mentally check-out from marriage at the summer 2016. We still tried to figure things out until summer 2017 when I really understood that she is truly leaving. Getting this felt like nightmare and I admit I did everything wrong in the beginning (1-2 months of “sexy” clinging). Finally at July/August 2017 I started my process of letting go and GALling – meeting friends, going to gym etc. Detaching is not easy though and I truly wish that we could reconcile, although I´m prepared to continue my adventure alone and as a better man. As of Jan 2018 we rented an apartment where we alternate every other week with W so that kids could stay at their home. We also started emotionally focused therapy 1/week and even my hopes are high it could enable us to attach emotionally, I afraid there is too much damage done for a fresh start.
ATM the biggest challenge in DBing for me is to adjust the level of contact. Since she feels that she needs space I obviously do not want to smother her, but on the other hand cause she felt neglected in the marriage I´m afraid that going too much dark will send the wrong message as well. I have explained to her that I´m very committed for a new beginning, but also want to let her feel how her life would feel without me.
I´m sorry for a meandering post. Wanted to include enough background what brought me here - still I feel I only could scratch the surface…
