I’ll do my best to give her the space that she needs.....but right now I feel like such a fraud.
Why is that, because you feel like you are hiding how you really feel from her? That's what she wants right now though- no pressure. So you are just giving her what she wants.
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Pretend like nothing’s wrong. It’s one thing to be a teacher where the job is isolating enough because of the long hours and personal / professional boundaries I have to maintain. But then to effectively be isolated at home, too.
No matter what the outcome, a few years from now this will all seem like a bad memory. It's absolute hell to go through but you WILL come out the other side. Some of us come through with reconciled M's and some of us don't, but most of us end up happy and fulfilled no matter what the outcome of our M. So try to keep in mind that this misery you're going through right now is temporary. I know it consumes darned near every waking minute right now but that's just your fear of the unknown. If you could see the end result you probably wouldn't be worried at all.
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Maybe I shouldn’t have married W? What if I married someone else—why did I pass up all those other women at various points in my life? God how F-ing stupid I was not to see that that girl was into me and I couldn’t or wouldn’t cash it in. Would this still be happening to me? Maybe, maybe not.
My ex and I, I would have told you we were made for each other. We got along so great it was crazy. She thought I hung the moon, absolutely idolized me and I thought she was pretty darned great too. We were together about 5 years and had even bought a house together before we finally got married. We were both quite successful in our fields and we had some beautiful children. Throughout our 20 year M we were very happy with each other and had a great sex life. So what went wrong? I have no idea. All she ever said was she changed her mind about wanting to be married. I hope everyone here will take this lesson away from my sitch- people change. They can change slowly over time, or they can change so rapidly it leaves your head spinning. Sometimes it has something to do with you and sometimes it doesn't. But here's the thing- pretty much every long-term M goes through a major upheaval like this. I'e spoken to elderly couples that have been married 40+ years and they've all told me at some point they went through something similar and went through an in-house or out-of-house S. So you ask if it would have happened with someone other than your W? Yes. Maybe sooner than 7 years, or maybe much later. But yes, it's pretty much inevitable.
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And then I also think about....’you know what, maybe I do want her to pull the plug on this if she’s that unhappy.
But you are losing sight of WHY she is unhappy. She THINKS it's the M, but chances are it's not. So you've got to give her time and space to figure that out.
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She wants to nuke this and leave, then I’ll push for an annulment and hope that it will be granted so I can be free (in time) to date and marry some young, hot, faithful Catholic honey who would be worthy of me, respect marriage and actually be proud to bear me children and help me raise them.
