Expecting BD soon...

[Adam04]

My W and I have been together since I was 19 and I don't think we both matured as two separate independent individuals would have. I mean, we had and hadn't. In the beginning, I could not lose the girl. When I was that 19 year old, I vividly remember going over to my best friend's house and she would drive by his house and ask if I was there since she was looking for me and I would tell him not to tell her I was there. I kept her chasing and I wanted some time to hang with my boys.

Back then I had my own life and slowly invited her into my world where she met my friends, did the things I did, found out what I liked.. I'm sure you guys have been there. What can we do now to bring back this excitement and thrill of living life for ourselves and to share that with those around us?

I'm here alone in my apartment with my kids in the big dream house with their mom and she facetimed me earlier with a grim face because she couldn't park the car in the garage right and almost hit the side column. She chose the style of the garage door and is now not liking what she chose. Her driving is bad.. The point of this is that I am choosing to be happy with less, much less. I am alone right now but not lonely. My boys are with their mom, safe and happy. I do miss them and love them, that is always going to be constant. My W will have her days and be sad or upset.

I talk about the past because I used to think a certain way, that we were supposed to be there for one another to help the other person through thick and thin. We were to be the crutch for one another, I thought this was what love is. She falls down, I pick her up. And vice versa. I no longer have this expectation. I am free and so is she. I became my own burden and in doing so, I became her burden as well. We want partners we want to lift up but not have to carry. This is just generally speaking. I do feel some type of way if there is something catastrophic that happened I think it's a moral duty to stand by your partner when they can no longer take care of themselves physically or if something happened like an accident. I hear many stories of men having accidents and got hurt and somewhere down the road, the W bounced. Now I don't know if this lead to losing a job etc, but it shakes things up and for men who don't usually talk or show the W everything is okay, they start to feel a certain way.

Unchien, its hard to let go of what we want. We want to fix it on our timeline because we are the ones hurting. Your W most likely was hurting far longer and somewhere along the line things got too complicated. Maybe you didn't pick up on the signs or didn't think they were real or that important. Maybe your W held it in to keep the peace. So are we going to blame her and say its her fault for holding it in, if that was the case? I had to get used to the idea that my W did not want any help because she felt like I was being controlling, it was because of what I wanted, it was always me, me, me...

You can still be there, be the rock. Don't get caught up in the emotional turmoil. Empathize with your W, you can show her you still care, respect her boundaries and yours and be the man. Sometimes they need to figure it out on their own. We can not save them. If she wants out, you respect her wishes.

I've had months of being teary eyed and crying because I was remorseful and realized what I was doing wrong. I am in the process of correcting my behavior. I am living in the moment, and I embrace the good with the bad.

At first I had to gain control of my emotions. I too wanted to work on not being passive aggressive. I remember from months ago when AS told me I was being PA or when Steve told me I wasn't detaching correctly. I remember being at work and using thought stopping a lot to make it through the day. I would wake up and say a little prayer on how I wanted to be and named top things that would not get me down. W was always one of those things I said I would not let get me down. Sometimes they were my own behaviors. Wanting to control the situation became wanting to show W I heard her, and I could understand, although maybe I didn't agree. Some things I would agree on like if she wasn't happy and wanted out, I agreed. I too wouldn't want to be with someone who didn't want to be with me. Not said with malice.

Be patient with yourself, shift more focus on yourself, create short term goals and long term. GAL and live healthy in all aspects. Also, realize there is no magic bullet. Your reality may sink in a little better once you realize there is no magic bullet so you won't go chasing rainbows and unicorns, but do some real work for improvement.

Open mind unchien.