Muddle's Waters V

[MuddleThrough]

You might be right, Whatis. Hopefully she'll get to a place in her life where she can save her own world.

I do understand and have compassion for the feeling of being trapped that my W has. I think I can relate a bit in that I too feel a bit trapped in the situation, as there's no "easy" option regarding the relationship - ending it or fixing it both are tough tasks, one more difficult to see acheiving a satisfactory outcome, the other more costly initially and in the long run. But I have stopped fighting it, for the most part. I have been living in the moment, day to day, and truly enjoying myself and my life. I don't think I'm burying my head in the sand here (although I know I practice selective denial to a certain degree - I think this is necessary for happiness and health), I'm being proactive about a lot in my life now that I let slide in the past.

I care now where I didn't before. That's one of the things that I think eludes my W's view of me. She is constantly telling me, trying to prove to me that my actions don't convey that I care about her, even though there are just as many actions that convey that I do. It's her choice to perceive them. It is confusing now to know how much of an investment I should be making - and I think I do a good deal - as opposed to what she seems to think I should be doing but am not. I know that she uses manipulative tactics to try and control my behavior, and this is one of them. She will tell me that I'm not acting like I love her - with the expectation that I try and jump through her hoops. The funny thing is that she often follows this up with a "it's too late anyway" comment, as if she's trying to remind herself that it's over. I'm not sure she believes it.

The other night, while in the midst of our deep discussion, she said to me that we don't have any money, and we will never have any money. This is the reason that we're still together today. So now she's got this other wall that's keeping her where she is. We're going on a year here, and she hasn't found a way to make money to get out on her own, and it appears that she's not really trying. Well, it's something that can go either way, but I was hoping that she could do away with her dependancy and staying (should she change her mind and decide to do so) would be truly her choice, not the absence of options.

Some points about where I am regarding my perspective on our R issues:

I placate her - I respond to her manipulative attempts to control me by allowing my fear of her withholding her love to overcome my rational perspective.
This has undermined her respect for me, my respect for myself, our financial status, our whole home environment and more. The really negative part of this is that it is integral to this cycle where I accept responsibility for her feelings, thereby my actions seem to be required to change her feelings. Her feelings are usually based on her own issues and in taking responsibility for them I rob her of the opportunity to make a positive change in her life and allow her to experience living at someone else's mercy. Well, not really mercy, because she knows she has some kind of subversive power - which is another problem, interwoven with this one. The lack of direct communication.

The lack of direct communication seems to have two possible sources - the unwillingness to articulate needs, desires, dissatisfaction, etc. and the other is the lack of awareness of these things in ourselves. The latter seems to be true in my W when it comes to her apparent dissatisfaction with our relationship. She didn't realize she had emotional needs that weren't being met until she was in an affair. She didn't realize that she was unhappy with the relationship until she was in an affair. She was quite vocal about things that annoyed her, but she never looked into herself until she was looking for something specific. She was looking for justification, facts that supported that her misery was caused by me, not feeling miserable, owning it and figuring out how to resolve it. I think a part of this can be chalked up to immaturity, to the lack of self knowledge and life experience. I know that I could have been more aware of her experience in life, but when I asked her how she was, I never got an honest answer.

I am a pretty direct person and I don't like to read between the lines because that's where I can muddle up the interactions with my own skewed perspective. I think my W is someone who wants to be read, who wants to be known. Or maybe this is just a gender difference. A woman wants someone to be attentive to them to the point that they know what is going on in their head and communicating in a straightforward way is not appealing. Men just need to be told flat out. Or maybe there's some middle ground. Maybe I need to be more willing to take risks and make a statement about what seems to be happening within my W to show her that I'm attentive and allow her to correct me and give me a straightforward idea of what's really going on. Maybe, but nowadays this is fodder for her Muddle hate, proof that I don't know her, never have, never will. Even her mom subscribes to the idea that women want a man to just know what she wants. Well, to me that's the difference between idealism and realism - what you want is not what you get, you have to be flexible in your expectations.

I have been aware of this all and as time goes on, I recognize that knee jerk reaction I have when I impulsively allow my fear to motivate me and stop it. I have been finding a kind of strength in responding to this tendency in general, and I have been far more aware of boundaries that I have neglected in the past. I am a little worse off when it comes to communication. Because communication is necessarily a two way street, it's difficult to communicate openly with someone who is trying hard to convey her lack of interest in a relationship with me. I have made a sincere effort to be aware of where I am with regard to my needs and wants that are within the scope of our current very vague relationship. I don't allow myself to forfeit my boundaries in order to gain ground with her anymore. As I am aware of her manipulative tendencies, I am aware of my own, and working to be more direct rather than coercive and underhanded.