Trying to Detach

[may22]

Job, Hope— thank you. I know this intellectually but in the thick of it, it gets difficult. I also do sometimes get frustrated with myself. It feels like it would be sooooo much easier just to say F U to my H and walk. Call up all my friends and family and explain what is going on. Wash my hands of him. And then I'm wondering why I'm so resistant to this and can't I just listen to everyone? I guess I’m just not yet at a point where I feel I can do that without regret— and that is really important to me, the no regrets part.

I did stop by to talk a bit about the p!ssed off at the leaving vs the actual affair. I wrote what's below back in January. Maybe it can help you sort out where you're at. I was never as upset as people here or IRL think I should've been about the affair. Abandoning me and our marriage and our kids because he was too stupid or stubborn to face his issues head on that, that upset me.

I was actually re-reading your threads from back then, WF. (And got annoyed at myself for some of my posts to you, sorry!!) And I read this and it stuck with me. For me, it is less about the rewriting of history, because that seems to have gone by the wayside. More recently, since this last BD, he’s actually been romanticizing our early R, said he worshipped me, the silliness I brought into our R that he’d never known, how his brother made so much fun of him for our dumb nicknames. Stuff I’d forgotten. He said, maybe that May grew up. You aren’t silly like that with me anymore. And in M2.0 he doesn’t want to worship anyone. He wants a partner. He doesn’t want someone who can read him like a book. He wants someone to write the book with him. (Not sensing he thinks I’m that person… I’m the one who can read him like a book.)

What frustrates me more is the part about your H calling your home HOME. My H absolutely sees this as his home and me and the kids as his family. He just wants this other thing and maybe wants it so badly that he’s willing to blow this all up and cause all this collateral damage. He has said he thinks the damage he’s done to me and the MR is so great that maybe it can’t be fixed and maybe it is smarter to start over. And that just grinds me— that you can have all that history and all these years and the children and our lives together so entwined and yet not be willing to actually work on what went wrong, be ready to throw it all away and start fresh because trying is too difficult. As I write this, I wonder if this is maybe part of the reason I’m standing— because I do believe so strongly in the foundation of what we have and it is worth fighting for… much like you just wrote on your own thread.

I also wanted to mention that I've dealt with the same thing you've dealt with of how much easier this would be if H was a "duck" (god I love that cardinal..lol) all the time. I see how hostile and combative some of these WS/WAS are and I think well that would've been easy. And maybe it's charm for the sake of charm, and maybe it's them being themselves for just a little peek but I think it makes everything harder when you see who you thought they were.

I love that Cardinal too… “duck” brings a smile to my face every time.

I think the problem is not we see who we thought they were, or (for the most part) that they have textbook NPD and are purposely saying things to keep us off balance and where they want us. I think the problem is that people are complicated, and have both the ability to lie and cheat and also still be in many ways the same person they were before they cheated. I’m sure some people totally break and go completely off. But I don’t think that is my H. I think this is why my H is so glommed onto the SSM as his reason for straying, because that allows him to excuse his own behavior without needing to lean on the “we’ve never been happy” rewriting of history, or being mean to me to provoke me into being a B and prove to himself he was making the right choice. He did that early on, before I even knew about the A. He was a textbook a-hole WAS, hostile, mean, picking fights. If I’d been BD-ed then I never would have even looked for this site because I would have been long gone. Somehow, in our individual journeys through all of this— and I do think DB-ing helped a lot, the 180s and validating and GALing I did all before I even found out he had “feelings” for someone else, just knew ILYB and that something was really wrong— we’ve left much of that behind. Which is frustrating both because mean H is a lot easier to hate than the H I have right now, but also because it shows that we are capable of growth as a couple.

Now I’ve spent all this time talking about H and our R. But, it definitely helps me to parse out how I feel about all of this, why i’m still here, what I’m really angry about. But I promise to keep focusing on me.

Sage… OMG. You do see me. I was overwhelmed reading your post. I am going to think on it and respond later but wanted to just say thank you.

Tonight I felt sad again. No R talks again (pretty good, you guys. Nothing since he said he was going to break it off with AP and I said uh… ok….let’s not rush into anything). he’s researching for the trip, being kind and funny but I sense he’s sad too and I think the trip planning is just his version of GALing. We both have IC appointments tomorrow…. will see what happens after that. At some point I know I’ll have to ask WTF is going on with AP if he doesn’t volunteer it, because of this trip. But I’d really rather not.