We come to the forums looking for “answers” and we say we’re no contact and maybe we are but we are still holding onto that hope and still googling those search terms and not detaching as we really should because our brain is tricking us to fight and to keep going.
Some of are perhaps logical in nature and we look at limrence (affair fog) and it’s 6 - 18 months, so is that how long I hold out? Is this what’s causing her to act this way rather than to see there is value in the marriage.
There is so much conflicting information both in our research and in our brains that at times we’re hoeing with each day that we make it through that we’ll have a lightbulb moment that switches to just tell us our marriage is over and the hope we held is distinguished, but instead we wake up in the morning and for that brief moment it’s all right until the grief washes over you until it’s time to get up and the struggle between hope and detachment and no contact begins again (hopefully today a bit easier this time)
That's the dilemma. My first thread was titled "Why Keep Hope?"
I understand the concept of getting a life and detaching. It makes for an easier transition, but I wonder if it's good at all to hang on to hope. It seems WAW are the hardest to turn around, and as I read the threads, I don't see a lot of success stories.
This is what I wrote in my second post:
Quote
I get that the changes are for me. It almost seems like having no hope makes the changes completely about me. The having hope part keeps the changes about her (partially, at least).
I think sometimes we keep hope because of fear. My life is different. I will probably always feel that if I could go back in time before BD, I would try as hard as I could to save my marriage. But, even though my life is different and I have regrets, my life is good. My daughters have adjusted well. I don't have a partner in my life who had grown to no longer respect me... who I walked on egg shells around (because of what SHE was going through). I've been dating my GF for 10 months. Right now, things with her are much better than they had become with my XW--and I'm going to try as hard as I can to keep it that way.
I think the problem is modern society has turned into a binary society. On every issue or topic you are either for our against it, no middle ground. And this creeps into our thinking. "If I have hope then I have to be doing things all the time to try to"fix" my marriage. If I don't then I have to completely give up and get a D and move on!" But there are middle states, where you can be hopeful things turnaround, and still not be doing things that are "working on the marriage". And that's where DBing is so powerful. It is a middle state between trying to "fix" it, and completely giving up on it.
And it can be done. You can still have have hope and DB well. Many of us have done it.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
