Muddle's Waters IV

[MuddleThrough]

It doesn't bother me, it's just strange. At lunch, she wants to talk about it, basically telling me that she doesn't like the fact that I didn't (and generally don't in the way she thinks I ought to) take responsibility for participating in the negative interactions. So blaming me for not taking the blame is her way of trying to help me ease her discomfort because whenever she feels bad, it's my fault because I contributed to the situation and therefore am responsible - even if it's admittedly only the smallest amount it allows her to avoid looking at her own input. Warped. Projection. I told her that I want to entirely take the emotion out of our conversations. I wanted to agree that when we talk about business, we don't let emotion come into it at all. She said she doesn't know how she can do that because I make her feel such and such when we talk about anything. I told her I thought that if we agreed we would just get done what needed to be done without putting our emotion into it, we might do a lot better. She thought that this was my way of blaming her for the incident. I told her I wasn't concerned with blame, but rather just wanted to try and solve a something that was a clear issue by way of an agreement to both change our perspective. There's no way to get around this childish baiting. I just want to live my life and here she is creating all sorts of stuff, blaming me for hurting her left and right. If you don't care about someone, they don't hurt you. She wants me out of her life so bad, yet she's so attached, constantly talking about how badly I hurt her and make her feel stupid or childish, etc.

This is what still has me so baffled. She wants to be done, start a new relationship, etc, yet she continues to interact with me in the capacity of husband/wife. I am past that, trying to detach and just coexist without causing each other pain, and she is so attached that she perceives my every action as something harmful to her, and thinks I should change to stop her pain. This is what I keep seeing as her trying to get me to become a better husband to her because she doesn't want to detach, she wants things to change to meet her expectations so that she ceases to hurt. She fails to recognize that the only way to stop this pain is to take responsibility for what is under her control, her expectations. I can't and at this point I won't change just to make her more comfortable through the remaining days we have left. I'm on track working on myself and my life in a proactive way. It seems she's saying to me "I'm leaving you because I don't like you and I've found someone far better, but please do change to make my life more pleasant while we're still a part of each other's life."

It seems to me that a cheating spouse has something wrong with their idea of what a relationship should be. They expect the relationship to do something for you rather than it being a safe place where you can be yourself and improve yourself and realize yourself. So then isn't there something wrong with trying to prove that we can change to better fulfill our cheating spouses when what they are looking for as far as fulfillment is fantasy? It isn't something that comes out of a real relationship. So, in a sense it's an exercise in futility. I guess on some level, you're just proving that you're capable of change in a way that allows for healthy compromise, but the selfish mindset of a WAS won't recognize that because compromise requires taking responsibility.