Newbie In Need Of Guidance #2

[Accuray]

rminer,

I'll just chime in that I think you're in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. She is unhappy in the marriage and on some level wants to leave it. At the same time, she doesn't want to be the bad guy and be responsible for breaking up the family, so she's looking for any excuse to pin that responsibility on you. If you're the bad guy she doesn't need to be.

Therefore, when you do nice things for her, she likes that you're addressed past complaints, but at the same time she resents that you're not playing your role as the bad guy.

If you don't play to her historic complaints, then she resents you for your ongoing shortcomings (in her eyes) but appreciates that you're validating her decision to leave.

See the trap there? You can't win.

Unfortunately there's not a path forward that doesn't suck. That's not an easy thing to accept. It took me a couple months to accept the fact that there wasn't a "win" hidden somewhere and surrender to the fact that *any* path forward implied pain and badness.

Once you've accepted that, the consequence of your choices doesn't seem as severe, if that makes sense.

You're putting a lot of focus on her, what she says, what she does, and trying to distill the hidden meaning from her seemingly contradictory behaviors. That path only leads to frustration.

As Sandi has spelled out for you, her issues with you are deep seated and long running.

You focus, ideally, will be this:

1) Understand and articulate (to yourself) her *long term* complaints. If you don't feel you have a grasp on them, let's explore it. If you do truly feel you understand what she was upset about long term, what made her resentful, then proceed.

2) Evaluate the complaints. Just because something bothered her about you doesn't mean the complaint or criticism was valid. If it bothers the hell out of her that you wear shorts in the summer instead of long pants, and wearing shorts is important to you, then that's really her issue to deal with and not yours, or you can open yourself to some form of compromise. Point is, there's a spectrum for complaints to totally reasonable and well-founded to irrational and batshit crazy, and you don't want to respond to the crazy ones -- that's where you have to be assertive and establish your boundaries. Sometimes your own yardstick is not effective at evaluating how reasonable a particular complaint is, so it can be useful to discuss with an IC, group of friends, or here. Often an LBS will give too much weight to BS complaints.

3) For the complaints you agree with that bother you as well, chances are they'll bother anyone you interact with on a long term basis. Come up with a plan for yourself to address them. Make the plan reasonable. If you think you're too beta, don't make your plan to suddenly become Tarzan. That will only frustrate you and make you feel worse. For anything you want to improve, evaluate where you are on a 10 point scale. If you're a 2, focus on being a 3. If you're a 3 focus on being a 4. Small, incremental improvements.

The focus of this plan is entirely on you. If you're being the man you want to be, then W will either see and appreciate that, or she won't. Either way, you'll know you're living with integrity and being true to yourself, and in that context her decisions won't really matter.

Acc