Uni. I wrote my furious response to the last few posts 5:30 am. This morning but ran out of time. Much calmer now over your sich and your W's response about "winning her back"
IHC -
Thanks for the long (and impassioned!) response.
You describe well the frustration I feel. I loved this woman, I truly did, with all of my heart. Obviously now in retrospect I see the flaws that were always there, but people are flawed, and I think we had a fighting chance if we both worked at it.
We went through a major disruption in our lives, one that in retrospect may have been a poor choice (moving). I contributed to the failure of our MR, and so did she. Why we couldn't sit down and work through it will always be a mystery to me. We seemed to work well together for a long time. But such is the fickleness of the human heart I guess. She fell out of love, and once that happens, it's basically game over. The following year was just an opportunity for me to feed her narrative. When she was distant and I got upset -- emotional abuse. When she was distant and I respected her need for space -- I was distant. Some of her anger lashing out at me -- all of it, driven by the need to justify her escape. I thought at the time she was signaling me that she was unhappy but still in love, but I think she was done already. I hope that is a warning to other LBS's here, because I think I was mistaking limbo. Limbo was not about my W struggling with her decision to be in the MR. She was already done. Limbo was about my W struggling with how to exit the MR.
I told her during the conversation that I did try to win her back. But I felt like she built up walls around her heart, and no matter what I tried, those walls only got thicker.
Maybe I'm too much of a NG, and should have walked away myself a long time ago. I could have told her Monday that I still have romantic feelings for her, that I still see hope in working things out. But that would be a lie. I don't want divorce for my kids, but at this point I'm resigned to the fact it is the only workable decision. I don't want to be with someone who doesn't value me as a partner.
I wish she would have just told me she fell out of love a long time ago. I can accept that. I can't manufacture feelings. I know there are all kinds of programs touted for "winning your W back" - DB is one of them, but there are many others. None of these are fool-proof, and I imagine the success rate is low by the time we LBS's realize it and take action. Ultimately we can improve ourselves to a degree, but we also are who we are. Living under the microscope is a miserable way to live.
I know she is not being flippant. This is a massive decision. I broke her heart. She doesn't want to be with me. She is willing to go through the pain of divorce, specifically because she does not want to be my W. It hurts, and yet, I know long-term I will eventually find somebody else, if I want to. It won't be the same. We won't build a family together from scratch. Life will be messy. I'm pretty sure I will never give as much of myself to another person (and maybe that's a healthy thing). I'll need to process everything that happened, and why, and I imagine I'll never understand exactly what happened for us to reach this point.
