brandon, have you ever heard the saying "You can't overnight talk your way out of what you acted for years your way into?"
This is a difficult thing for LBSs to really understand. We all come here looking for the one thing to say or the one thing to do that will turn our situations around. The hard truth is that there is no magic bullet. If there were this forum wouldn't exist. There would be a one chapter book every LBSs could buy that would say: Say this, and do this, and your marriage will be fixed!
I've mostly stepped back and watched. As Kind pointed out, there is a fair amount of denial you are still dealing with. And as R2C is trying to get you to see, you have to change your dynamic with her.
If you keep doing what you are doing you will continue to set yourself up for disappointment. When things do not turn around you will continue to bang your head against the wall. You will continue to have "hearing the hard truth" moments. The fact is that she has made her intentions known unequivocally and you are in the "yeah, but what if I do this and say this" mode.
Marriage counseling has a very low rate of working. That is why Michelle wrote the books to begin with. For decades couples in crisis have gone to couple counseling. And for decades the divorce rate has continued to climb. Also, you have admitted to being bad about giving her space, well MC is certainly NOT giving her space.
What winds up happening is the WAS uses it to try to convince the LBS that separation and divorce is the right path. The LBS is frustrated because they thought MC was to fix things and the WAS isn't doing their part. This is why on the forum we tell LBSs not to do MC, if they are doing it to stop, and then get into IC and work on themselves.
As R2C stated above, date nights are difficult for LBSs because whether we want to admit it or not we attach expectations to it. If things go well we think "Yeah! We are working this out!" Only to be devastated again when we hear inevitably the WAS still wants a separation and/or D. And that is exactly what you've experienced.
It is your situation, you get to decide. But the advice hear will continue to be the same because we've all been through it.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
