AS, I must have read your post 5 times yesterday. Realizing more and more that I probably repulse her every moment is so confusing to me.
It's years of reading Sandi's posts that really helped me to understand how a WAW sees her husband while she's in the thick of the fog. I think Sandi may even have used the word "repulsive". It is really hard to understand, isn't it? This woman who swore to stay with you for life and did spend many years with you through thick and thin suddenly can't stand your touch or to be around you. It makes no sense. And that's EXACTLY what you need to wrap your mind around- it DOESN'T make sense! Nothing in her head makes a lot of sense right now. You can't figure her out, she can't even figure herself out.
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DB'ing again is so contradictory to what you feel you should be doing.
Exactly, because our intuition tells us how to respond to a loving partner who is just upset at us for some minor infraction. But the very things that work in that situation are things that drive a WAW right out the door.
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I see many paths to an R in my head (I know this is wrong, but I can't help it some days).
It's perfectly fine to visualize that, I personally am all about keeping hope alive as it keeps us energized and keeps us from being depressed and hopeless. Hopelessness is self-fulfilling, if you sulk around convinced that your M is over then it will happen. I just hate to see people here do that (and there are so soooo many) because it sabotages their recon chances. I remember reading a story of this woman whose H walked out and she said "you just go do whatever you think you need to do, I'll be here whenever you get your act together." He went off and had affairs and went on drinking binges and bought a sports car and generally made an ass of himself. She went about living her own life. A few years later he went crawling back and they reconciled and got along fantastic after that. The thing I love about her story is SHE NEVER, EVER GAVE UP HOPE! She knew, 100% that they would recon. There was never a doubt in her mind. She never felt sorry for herself, cried herself to sleep or any of that because she knew they would end up back together. That's the power of positive thinking.
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An observation I'd like some input on. Her health issues are huge. We have dealt with them for a decade and they are not made up. Weird thing is that over the last 3 months since we changed insurance plans, she has pretty much ceased going to the dr. She had one (of many) dr. appointments yesterday. This has been scheduled and rescheduled this will be the 3rd time now. I got home and asked her how it went. She said she didn't feel like it and rescheduled again. She used to have 3-4 dr appointments a month. Is she just giving up?
Hard to say what she's thinking, but my guess would be that she feels like she's already going through so much that she doesn't want the additional "burden" of dealing with her health issues too. Basically she might be feeling "overwhelmed".
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But, if she can just blow them off, stop taking some of her medications and not "worry" or deal with her issues, are they really issues?
Well, denial doesn't make it go away. My grandmother kept blowing off doc appointments when she got a lump on her breast because she didn't want to deal with the inconvenience. By the time she went she had a horrific, nasty black growth (I saw it once when a nurse was changing the dressing and it was awful) that was terminal. She passed away a few months later. I am not at all saying your W is terminal, just suggesting she may have that same "I don't want to deal with this right now" mindset going on.
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And AS, I am truly contemplating your last sentence if this is acceptable to me, and if it is presently, how long it will be.
My point wasn't to make you set a deadline, but rather point you in the direction of accepting that you don't necessarily need a deadline. You have as much or as little time as you want. If you are unsure then my advice is always the same- you need more time. Don't push to end things until you are 100% sure it's what you want. Well, maybe 95%, I'm not sure we can ever be 100% on something like that.
