Muddle's Waters IV

[MuddleThrough]

Thanks for all your concern. I have been trying to track down a lawyer I can afford a consultation with. I don't really think my W is looking to take any legal action (restraining orders, etc). She hasn't as of yet and she has been herself, in fact we got along rather well yesterday (but you guys do have me a bit nervous). Today she started giving me the "you're not taking care of me properly" act and gave me a hard time: we have VOIP phone service, and the line was experiencing packet loss, leading to a really distorted sound - annoying. So she called me and asked me to call about it. I called from work but they couldn't resolve it without talking to someone on the line. I asked her to call so they could do some trouble-shooting and she started giving me grief about my lack of caring about the problem - something that she could have dealt with herself - and about how I wouldn't have done anything about it if she hadn't gotten me to. I told her that that wasn't the issue, the issue was how we were going to proceed here - whether she was going to call the cable company, or I was at lunch time. She refused to give me an answer, and basically refused to call, but wanted me to see just how wrong I was for asking her to have any part in this. This is indicative of her one-track agenda of making me understand just how bad I am as her husband.

I am going to talk to my parents tonight to try and formulate a real separation plan. We don't have the money to live separately right now, and we don't have the money to file for divorce right now. It's a pretty rediculous situation. It's clear to me that this event has been the final straw for me, and I have detached so much further than before. I truly see my W as someone that's not my W now, someone that I don't really want to have much to do with. It's liberating, and it also is amazing how this has freed me up to be even nicer than I was before, but it's allowing me to be firmly aware of my boundaries, and helping me work towards securing them from her. I am going to have to lead this process because while she has emotionally detached from me, she's still attached in many ways - and she still is trying to prove something and still trying to get me to accept responsibility for her unhappiness (implying that I somehow have the power to rescue her) but I'm doing a poor job with regard to this responsibility.

The sad thing here is that things have not been healthy in this relationship for some time. There's nothing new in this. I was hoping that we could move in a healthy direction, but clearly that's not possible. In fact it seems my W is committed to becoming as unhealthy as possible as a means of proving just how bad I am for her. Well, no more. Maybe she'll get to a better place in time, but I can't be a part of that process right now. Maybe there will be some kind of future for us, but now we need distance, and we need it pretty soon.