Thanks Pain. I am getting there I think. My emotions are steadier, I am less sad, I am starting to take things less personally, I am coming to terms with the fact that I have no influence over my H and that trying to influence him (by action or inaction) only adds more pressure to the situation. His whole “I need you to let me go” conversation on Sunday was an eye opener for me. I haven’t been pursuing him in any overt way but his guilt is so immense (makes sense considering how long he has been lying to me) that he sees pursuit in EVERYTHING I do at this stage. My only hope for me, and for him, is to go as dark as possible but that is so darn difficult to do when we have young kids. There are always things to communicate and communication, for us, is challenging as it seems to remind him of his guilt somehow. It often seems that I am d*mned if I do and d*mned if I don’t.
So my only choice is to let go in earnest (and I am being honest when I say that I am MUCH closer to that than even a week ago) and let the chips fall where they may. I have come to realize that while I am very much a nice, open-minded, accepting and generous person, there is also a part of me that really does want to control things in my life. There is comfort and safety in “running the show” and I very much did that in my marriage. There are a lot of ways my H benefited from that and relied on it but he also grew to resent it at the same time. I thought I was doing my part as the CEO of our marriage but it did not match up well with an H who is deathly afraid of conflict and will not let his opinion be known regardless of how opposite it is to mine. That fact has become crystal clear to me in this process and I can see where I could have made some changes in our R if I had only known that is what was going on. But hindsight is always 20/20. I will be much more aware of these kinds of dynamics when/if I ever find myself in another R. That’s a hard one to imagine at this stage but one never knows what the future might bring.
