Walk Away Spouse Fits My Ex-Wife to a "T" - part 2

[tom_l]

Hi Tom, you posted to another thread asking me to take a look at yours. I went back and read it all from the beginning. Your situation sounds so much like mine that I feel like I could have written a lot of your posts. We had a marriage our friends were all jealous of. We got along fantastic. We had (still have) 3 amazing kids. We did things together as a family, but we also did things separately and maintained some healthy independence. We very rarely fought, in 20 years I would say maybe 3 or 4 times. We were quite religious, faith was important to us. We had a beautiful home that was paid for, sizeable savings for each of our kids to fund college and healthy retirement plans that were going to allow us to retire in our mid-50's.

You are right, our family situations are almost identical.

So you will get closure, but your closure won't be in knowing why, it will be in letting go of the need to know why. Sometimes things happen without reason.

I am slowly coming to accept this.

She's not guilty of an offense, she just doesn't know. There's nothing to verbalize. And she knows telling you "I don't know" is just going to make you frustrated and possibly angry, and so she'd rather just not talk. Plus the separation is her way of letting go, and she's probably afraid that if she sees you she might second guess her decision. This decision she made was a very difficult one and she is wracked with guilt over hurting you, the kids, your family and friends. She hates herself for it. She probably cries a lot even though she may appear cold and indifferent. But she still feels like she must do this to survive. My XW told me all of these things, but not until long after BD.

I think you nailed it on the head here. Especially the fact that she's not really sure why but she needed to do it to survive. In the one letter she wrote me, she said she felt like the house was a prison, that she was suffocating while there. That's why she had to walk away. And ... I guess the hardest part about accepting that is that all that pain, all that discomfort, was because of me. ME. I never thought I was that bad of a guy, in fact amongst all our friends I thought I was the most decent, loyal, loving and supportive of the husbands. WRONG!!!

The most difficult thing a LBS can do is set aside their own hurt and see things from the WAS's perspective. She is in extreme pain internally. If you knew how badly she felt, if you could step inside her for a moment, you would probably feel real anguish for her and back off and leave her alone to help her recover. All your attempts to talk to her and find out why and negotiate are just making her feel worse.

I understand. I do, at least intellectually. My heart screams otherwise. It took me a week or so, but then -- believe it or not -- I did understand how our circumstances might have driven her to want to leave.

The most painful part, though, is that she gave the marriage zero chance. There are so many things she could have said -- "Tom, I want to move out and get away. It might be six months before we can talk again, but I ... must ... have ... this ... space." Sure, I would've accepted that. Or, she might have said, "Tom, I'm filing for divorce, but during the process we can perhaps work on things to see if we don't need to sign the final papers in a year." That would have been a bigger shock, but I could've handled that.

But she gave me no chance. Zero chance. After all those years!! Held inside these hurts for so long and then just walked.

She undertook a few bad actions that poisoned the well, also, no doubt at the advice of her aggressive attorney and an angry sister. Took all the money with her. Left the house on BD day with the best car. Collected all the tax refunds. Had the attorney accuse me of stalking, violence, harrassment and more and threaten a restraining order. This did not make things easier, although I have already forgiven these as well. [As a Christian, I am commanded to forgive, but there is no way I could be angry at her or hate her anyway.]

I love the life I have now, I don't know that I would ever want to be married again. I have a lot of good friends, and I have my own home set up the way I want it. I do my sculpting on the dining table, why? Because I can, haha! I eat when I want, I go the gym when I want, I ride my motorcycles when the mood strikes. Sometimes I go to bed early. Sometimes I stay up late. I'm not going to lie, it's all pretty darned awesome!

Well, I know some of that now. But I am made for relationship, I am certain of that. I already told my kids that someday there will be another Mrs Tom. And I guarantee you I will not be available to my ex in 15 years, much less 5 years.

So did you ever date? Are you dating now?