This past Saturday H told me he loved me for the first time since he said he loved both OW and me. He is in this very weird space where he tells me he loves me constantly. Like he's making up for the last 8 months of our lives. He follows me around like a puppy. Eskimo kisses, hand holding in the car, and arms around my waist from behind while I cook. He even sniffed my hair like a weirdo yesterday. The girls are happy. I'm happy, but I'm tentative. The reality is I'm scared. This is the same horrible feeling when you start falling in love with someone wondering if you should just back out now before they hurt you.
Spoke with IC today about ways to start approaching R convos so I can close this chapter of our lives and move on. How I word things I think is going to be quite the dance to avoid H's feelings on me being controlling and a know it all. We worked on strategies for that. I want to enjoy this time with H. I want to be in the head space he's in. He's so in love and cute, and I kind of feel like a duck because I spent all this time waiting for him to catch up and now he has to wait for me to catch up. But there are questions I need answered. There are things I need to say. There are reassurances that I need articulated not just assumed. And I want some solid concrete things from him regarding our future.
I need to know he's going to put in the effort into Retrouvaille or MC or books or online courses. I don't care which, h3ll, he can pick. But I'm not going back to the MR that we had leading up to this disaster. I'm not wasting all this money and time I have on working on myself for a stagnant marriage where we don't communicate. Where we just function in the day to day and have scheduled routine sex once a week. He's so improved on the workload at home. And talking about money. And for sure our sex life. I just need a husband who is ready to be emotionally intimate with me. To be emotionally intimate with someone like me with walls and gates, but feels so deeply.
He feels ready to be emotionally intimate with me. But, I worry he's only really ready for the good things, the light things about me and us. I just don't know if he's ready for the edges and my dark corners. Hiding that for so long and watching my mother's battle and slow death seriously took a toll on my mental health and put me and us in a horrible space. I can't do that again. I need him to want all of me. Not just the good bits, or the fun bits, or the bits he likes best. All of it. And he needs to get that MRs are hard and not a smooth, flat, straight path to 50 years of wedded bliss. They are a journey on a road less traveled and if you want the journey you need to take the good with the bad. The rough with the smooth. The light and the dark. That's what we promised. That's why those are the vows. Frankly he just needs more realistic expectations over all.
Most of all I want him to understand I can't do this again. I'm a strong believer in second chances, but I literally can't do this twice. I won't do 3rd chances. I won't sacrifice the time and energy and emotional bandwidth it takes to weather a storm like this in a MR ever again.
