Affair, no feelings...is there hope? IV

[44tries]

I think all you can do is encourage her to seek IC. If she approached her mom and felt as if she was dismissed, that certainly didn't help anything. If she is slowly opening up about something in the past, then she must feel she can trust you.

This is what I did. I wasn't pushy, but I told her it sounds like she really needs to be able to talk to someone about it, and perhaps a counselor would be best since she said she would "never tell another soul" after what happened when she told her mom.

You are right, she definitely trusts me. I think she still feels a high level of trust and closeness with me, despite everything. I believe this is where all the "I need you and don't know how to live without you" stuff comes from. It just isn't in a romantic way right now.

That is progress. Holding her feet to the fire. IDK about her, but a lot of manipulative women will take different approaches. When they finally see you are on to their game, I am crazy enough to think they finally give up........at least to a big degree.

I hope you are right. After all my reading, here and the many books, etc, the problem seems so very clear to me now. I think she wants a happy, loving MR with me. It is pretty clear she does not truly want a real separation or to lose me from her life. She just doesn't believe our MR can be fixed or fulfilling and if nothing changes, she knows she would rather walk than go on with status quo. She also may naively think we can still be in each other's lives to a significant degree even if we D. At this point, she is telling me she is past the place of looking for hope or wanting to try together for change. But I have to think deep down, it is really what she longs for (feel free to tell me if I'm just delusional).

She doesn't respect me and that is the key. I KNOW this is what I have to fix and I know the things I need to do to make it happen. It is hard, slow work and now that I can so tangibly feel that everything rests on my ability to succeed, I do feel immense pressure. I am worried that if it doesn't work out and we eventually get divorced, I will always have the feeling that it was right there in front of me and I failed. I know it is possible she has her own emotional and maturity issues that could prevent success no matter what I do. But obviously right now I am focused on my part and I am trying to balance the need to push myself and work extremely hard, but also not apply too much pressure. I know the work I am doing will pay off for me personally no matter the outcome.

It helps to look back and know it has only been a little over two months of starting from zero to where I am now. In the beginning, I was clueless about the real problems and my own contributions. Now, I have invested countless hours learning and I have a roadmap. I have changed and continue to push everyday. There are steps forward and back. Yesterday, there was an incident that I don't think I handled the best way.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going surfing with some new friends next weekend after W and I return from our trip. Last night, W freaked out about it when she realized I was actually intending to go. Went into full blown jealous, manipulation mode. She had started drilling me about the new friends a few days ago and I refused to answer her questions that were essentially the same old "is this a romantic thing?" stuff. She has been making snide comments about my refusal to answer ever since. So last night she launched into a contrived monologue about how it was unsafe to go on the surf trip as I barely knew the people and I was being so reckless and irresponsible, etc. She found a way to insult me and put me down (telling me I was always unaware and too trusting of people and had made a lot of questionable decisions in the past, referring to experiences that I had before we even met), while simultaneously trying to make it seem like the trip was a bad idea and I shouldn't go but not because of any personal problem she had with it. She even got her mom involved to try to prove to me that I was being reckless.

I did not give in and say I won't go, but I didn't stand up and tell her she was being crazy either. I wish I had a stronger response, but I didn't want to argue and that's what kept coming to mind. She wasn't telling me I wasn't allowed to go, which would have been a lot easier for me to know what to say. I will also admit she started to make me question myself. FWIW, I have only met the people once a few weeks ago at a meetup and we discussed surfing and I was invited to join this overnight trip they had already planned. They are similar in age and, like me, are foreigners to this country looking to make new friends and explore (hence why we met at a meetup). I don't think it is all that strange or dangerous. I am adventurous and perhaps too trusting, but I am also very pragmatic and to say that I have a history of making reckless decisions is ridiculous. I simply do not let fear of the evil in the world prevent me from experiencing life or seeing new places, people etc. As far as I'm concerned, W's tirade was completely out of jealousy and attempt to manipulate me out of the trip rather than any real fear for my safety.

We leave for our vacation tomorrow and I'm really hoping it goes well. I'm sure I will get plenty of opportunities to display changed behavior and I want to make the most of them. I am also reading through DR yet again, reevaluating the goals and checkpoints I had written down previously. It's funny, two of my original goals/positive signs were that she would end her A and that we would take a vacation together. I am happy and grateful those can already be checked off after a relatively short amount of a time. It's motivating and helps keep me positive, even though I can't really be sure how much that success was just happenstance vs a result of my work. My next goal is that she will come back to the bedroom (not sexually, that is many more steps away). MWD says the short-term goals should be something that can be achieved in ~2 weeks, so I am trying to formulate some that are more realistic in that time frame. Winning the small battles to regain respect is an omnipresent goal, but I need to find a better way to quantify it.