I've been away from this board for a while (though not away from these problems, not by a long shot), and that absence has given me a chance to think about the advice I've been given here, as well as that I received from reading the DB book and others.
It's been helpful. But even though I've seen so many warnings against impatience, I have to say that I'm frustrated by the continuation of the status quo in this fiasco that began so long ago as a marriage. I'm also confused about how to differentiate between dealing with my role in the misery and dealing with her infidelity.
I think that's why I'm writing here again. I'm sorry, but I still could use some more input on everything. Hopefully you can help.
For instance, your counsel, Timothy, about the 5 love languages was well-taken: I've read the book, done a test on myself (the result was not surprising), and tried to anticipate the region where my wife's own "LL" would have been concentrated. I wasn't unaware that we'd been talking past each other, but looking at it in such a manner made some of the reasons behind it more clear.
Yet trying to address that side of what my wife needs is a challenge in itself. You see, there is what appears to be a sort of "block" that doesn't exactly nullify what I do, but it nevertheless renders it somewhat inconsequential. My wife has decided that a marriage with me could not work for the reason that I've let her down in the past and caused her pain - thus implying that life with me would necessarily entail the continuation of that.
That's what I say that I'm locked into a cycle of frustration. When many of the people on the board speak of "getting your own life," of making yourself into the person you would be proud of being, and so on, I don't find myself slacking off in that regard. That's not to say that I'm altogether pleased with myself, but I haven't succumbed to self-pity, bitterness, or failure just yet. I've been practicing more introspection (actually, I've been wetting my heels in that cold ocean for some time now) and I might have gotten something out of it. I've given up pursuing behaviors, and I've tried to express undemanding love without making myself into a doormat. I recognize that my wife's course of actions, her mentality, and her values are her own responsibility - very much the matter of her own life, and not mine - and I resist "knowing better," as I had often done in the past.
(I also realize how formulaic that all sounds. I sincerely hope that I do not somehow reduce the conduct of my life to the execution of a menu.)
But when I look at things as they are, all of that doesn't add up into anything at all. My life would go on, more or less, without her. But my overwhelming preference is for things to work out between us.
And that's showing no signs of happening.
My wife brushes up against abject misery sometimes(I fear for her health and sanity then), but usually bounces back to a relative normality. I know that she is tempted to make a go of things with me when she is in the pits, but it never makes it past that. Given the fact that her decision in that case would be for all the wrong reasons, all the better. But it goes to show how deeply she feels a sense of hopelessness in our union.
So I think that I'm up against a dual blockage. One is the OP. The other is our past.
I'm not sure about it, but I suspect that my wife's inability to forgive me over hurts she experienced in our life together very much set the stage for her involvement with someone who "understands" her and "makes her happy."
(I'm abstracting from how I feel about an individual who would step into another couple's marriage, however troubled, by offering the wife a "rescue".)
When we met, we were relatively young, inexperienced in life, and pretty much confused about where we were going. Part of that contributed to the attraction and later to the attachment. (Birds of a feather...) But I didn't recognize until too late that a confident exterior (and a sometimes prickly, sarcastic, and tough one at that) was layered over a very insecure person.
What I mean by "too late" is that things that she did (lying about her accomplishments, putting on various pretenses, attempting to make me jealous in different ways, faking sicknesses) to apparently make herself "look better" or "more lovable" in my eyes only angered me when the truth came out. She also seemed unconsciously intent to "cut me down to size" when the occasion seemed to call for it.
And I was too callow to realize clearly enough where all this was coming from - I knew it a bit, and understood somewhat, but mostly couldn't see beyond my own angry and hurt feelings. I'm not proud of this, nor do I excuse myself because I was "young".
Let me say that somehow within all this, I thought I saw the person inside and loved her. My wife's genuine qualities are more than enough to make her very attractive - she just couldn't see that.
Anyway, my great "understanding" did not stop me from doing some unloving things. It's very clear to me today that I had a lot to learn about what it meant to love someone.
Apparently my best weapon in the expression of my anger was the word. Things I said very much hurt her. In truth, it felt like I couldn't say to her that these things she did hurt me, but I could be angry. I could tell her off. That felt more natural, less "artificial". I felt justifiably angry, I suppose. But I had some inkling of why she was acting this way, and I should have had the courage to admit that it hurt me instead of lashing out verbally. I didn't. Perhaps I thought I would have looked "weak". Maybe I wasn't trusting enough.
Over time, I found out that this was the worst thing I could have done. Hurtful language was maybe the one thing that tortured her the worst - it fed into all the fears and self-doubts that had been fostered in her since her childhood.
There is a lot more to this: my own family was less than helpful in making her feel accepted. The interactions between someone trying very hard to be accepted (far too hard) and a somewhat blunt and sometimes insensitive set of parents and siblings are predictably uneven.
Here again, I had a failure of understanding that was probably also a failure of courage: when I "stood up" for her, it was never seen as enough. Objectively, it might not have been enough. I don't know. I thought I could make sense of what was going on for her benefit, but I apparently just ended up seeming to rationalize everything to the detriment of her feelings.
Over the years, I tried to make good on these and other things. But it was never enough, and nothing else I did ever made up for it either. What has been done cannot be undone - I was made to feel this very strongly. It was as if there were a permanent stain on the whole relationship that no forgiveness could erase.
So now, the whole "walk-away-wife" thing makes sense to me. By her own admission, she's carried this like a germ for all these years.
I don't know how to "show" her that I understand these things and that I am not the hurtful person she fears. We've spoken at length about this to no avail. In some ways, our problems are not even about how we are now - rather about the after-effects of how we were before.
She cannot trust me because she is afraid of being hurt. She cannot forgive me because her hurt was too deep.
So now, as she carries on with her "friend," I am left to consider that a good bit of this has its source in what I've done in the past. I can't change that. What she makes of it is her own business (and obviously I think that she doesn't need to make it into grounds for an affair and divorce), but I was there when the seeds were planted.
I'd appreciate your advice. Since there are two sides to every story, I've tried to give you some idea of why things have happened as they have. It makes me very uncomfortable to think of my wife as a "typical" case - no matter how applicable the model might be. And I hope that knowing more about the background to this can help an outsider looking in to analyze it better.
