I too go back and forth between wondering if this situation is a gift or a curse. Perhaps it's both.
I do NOT think it is NGS to be hopeful for your future if it does not contain W in it. I think it is healthy to see that your future can be positive no matter WHAT it has in store.
Thank you, Yail (((HUGS). I was considering if the GUILT about any potential hope was NGS, not having hope itself, and I apologize for the confusion.
Telling myself that things will be okay regardless of the outcome is a rather big mental step for me. I tell my students that I try to be both an optimist and a realist—some days the optimism wins out, other days the ‘realism’ of what awaits me potentially without W looms in front of me and can be hard to accept. But the optimism is beginning to gradually overtake my mind—slowly.
Originally Posted by Yail
This is the amazing gift of hope for the future. Stay with this thought process. It is so much better than fear. You're correct that you don't know what the future will hold, but I really applaud that you are doing: seeing something potentially new in your future, and not running from it. That's really the best we can do.
I really appreciate the affirmation and validation. It’s hard to not give in to the fear. One of my less attractive tendencies that I’ve had to fight at various times in my life is running from things. Some times in my life I’ve been super-good about facing things head on and crushing it—other times, not so much. A personal 180 for me recently has been TO NOT RUN from things, though once again, the temptation is hard.
No matter what, there will be something / someone new—MR 2.0, or hopefully someone else, in time.
Originally Posted by Yail
Also, regarding your hesitency at finding someone who shares your faith and values: I think we all feel that way. Folks on the "other side" feel the same way. Isn't that interesting? I find it so. I'm gay but I have the same fears you do - that I won't find someone who is right for me and my values and interests. We will find our people that are right for us. We did it once - we can do it again.
Thank you for your honesty.
What is one of the shocks about all this for me is that I really didn’t think S / D was on the table for us. But now it is. When I dated / married W, I thought we were so ‘in sync’ on many things, and that we had relatively similar values. While in some respects I have changed (we all change over time), the changes I’ve seen in her (and that she’s admitted to) kinda shock me—the embrace of birth control over my objections (I know people do disagree over that, but this was a value I held to throughout dating / pursuit, and I held it as a personal boundary / condition of dating / marriage), S / D. I don’t think W’s current work environment helps her in this regard—a large amount of her coworkers are S / D, and her federal agency had a rather high-profile adultery scandal not that long ago.
I may have mentioned this a while back in a different post, but.....when I look back on my single early young-adulthood (I know—I’m only 35, so I hopefully have a long life ahead of me to give to someone, MR 2.0 or not), I do seem to remember that every now and then (at least once a year or so—I know, probably sounds amateurish and that my game is weak), there always seemed to be a woman that I was interested in or who was interested in me—and that a good amount of these women held values rather similar to mine. That, for a good amount of time, there was a period of time in my life where I relatively consistently had someone who was interested in me, or I was into, or both. That I had options, basically. I wonder if that will be the case down the road, too.
