Don’t Ask Me Why

I just don’t know.  I am getting so much better at self-soothing.  I’m not anxious all the time.  Just some of the time.  I don’t know whether we can stay married.  I’m not thinking about it right now actually.  Just trying to live in the moment.  Not worrying about the divorce or the reconciliation.  We are going out to dinner.  We are holding hands, hugging, and kissing.  I initiate, not her.  We cuddle at night.  Still me initiating.  She was initiating a couple weeks ago but has pulled back.  She engages if I initiate.  It seems like genuine engagement but I don’t know.

I have a real concern that she will not be able to let her baggage go.  If that’s the case then we can’t stay together.  I’m going to see my therapist alone tomorrow.

Come and Get These Memories

Man she has a long memory.  I got to hear about transgressions from 1993 or 1994 yesterday.  Yet she’s worried that if she throws any physical object away she will forget the memory associated with it.  News flash: it’s not gonna happen.

The therapist called her out on it a bit.  But also gave her some justification.  I didn’t treat her well, but she didn’t treat herself well or call me out on it.  And it’s not like I was doing things on purpose.  I was clueless.  And it’s also a two-way street.  I am still not addressing too much the things she did to hurt me.  It’s not the right time.  But it will have to be discussed if we are to stay together.

We went on a date afterward.  Dinner, then drinks.  Saw some friends at the bar but mostly avoided them.  Same thing happened last night (different friends).

It Could Be Worse

I could die in a car accident.  Get cancer.  Something terrible could happen to the kids.  Life is unpredictable.  You never know the future.  A divorce isn’t the worst thing in the world.  It happens to 50% of marriages, how bad could it be really?

I’m gonna be OK no matter what.

Working in the Coal Mine

I’ll just have to work 3-5 more years to make up the financial impact.  That’s not so bad.  And I won’t even notice for another 15 years, because I wasn’t really going to retire early anyway.  So fuck it.

St. Anger

More talk last night.  Not even sure how we got there, what question I asked or whatever.  Somewhere in the evening I said “I want to get to know you.”  Well, I got to know her a bit better.  She’s a bitter angry person, where it comes to me.  She is very angry at the person I was 5-10 years ago.  That’s who she wants to divorce.  She sees I’m not the same person now but I’m not sure that matters to her.

She sees all this talk and reconsideration as backsliding.  Second guessing herself.  I’m not trying to talk her into staying married.  That won’t work.  But I did ask for time for us to figure it out.  Maybe a separation isn’t such a bad idea but I don’t know.

Therapy tonight.

I get a lot fewer hits when I don’t write about sex.

Fake Plastic Trees

Divorce seems more likely each day.  Big surprise, right?  I mean, she did serve me with papers 2 months ago.

I am working to accept this.  I’m still not totally there.  I’m faking it.  It’s the financial hit that really has me hung up.  I came from scarcity and any financial setback hits me very hard mentally.  I know I’ll be OK.  And anyway it won’t be a problem for years–not til I retire.  And who knows what could happen between now and then.  My dad died at 57 so his shitty retirement planning didn’t cause him any problems at all.

But my heart isn’t racing.  My thoughts aren’t constantly looping.  There’s still a lot of looping but I can break it sometimes.

I can’t stay married if she’s gonna resent me for past sins.  Especially if she can’t let me address my thoughts and feelings, about how she has deceived me over the last years.  If I only get to hear her grievances and have to apologize one by one.  That’s not fair.

Welcome Home

Not really.  Just the first song title that came to mind.  She did come back on Sunday.  She spent the weekend thinking, just like I thought.  She saw some old college friends, and my sister.

She tentatively proposed a separation rather than full divorce, but hasn’t thought about how that would work.  I’m not sure that will teach us anything about how to be married.  Neither did our therapist when we discussed it last week. For me it’s one or the other: divorce or stay married.  Not in the middle.  This is a problem that we have had with compromise though.

She still won’t talk about the affair.  Won’t even say whether she is still talking to him or not.  That’s a biggie for me but I can put a pin in it for a while.  We don’t have to talk about it if we continue with the divorce–only if we reconcile.  I said that if her reservations are legal, I think there’s a solution which would let us talk about it.  If her reservations are emotional, then it’s not fair.  I have to be open to her 10 year old grievances but I can’t discuss my current issues?  I can’t know whether she is still in an affair, emotional or otherwise?  That’s bullshit and I won’t accept it.

He cancelled his Facebook account.  And now she has blocked me from her cell phone records.  I know they have been in communication, makes me think they were using Facebook Messenger and now had to go back to the cell phone.  And that they are still in communication.  She should have just gotten a burner phone.  She’s not good at deception.  Segue to deception:

She said we hurt each other unintentionally.  I took issue with that.  I see that in the last couple of years she acted with intention.  Maybe not intention to hurt, but intention to deceive.  And deception hurts.  We made plans without a shared view of the future.  She already was planning to divorce me and I didn’t know.  We will talk about this in therapy tomorrow night.  She doesn’t seem open to hearing my view–she just says “we have different views on that”.  Well no shit, that’s why we should talk about it.

 

 

 

Nowhere Girl

Yesterday she spent the night at a friend’s.  Old college friend, not her usual “bugout” friend.  We talked on the phone a bit yesterday, and some texting.  She’s spending the weekend visiting other friends.

I’m gonna lay off the calling and texting while she is out of town.  She can call me if she wants.

Somebody suggested that, rather than no longer being in love with me, she still loves me but is fearful that I am toxic to her.  Or that we are toxic to each other.  Could be why she wants to be out of town for a few days, to think about things without me around.  I will try to use the time away likewise.  But blogging about her isn’t a great start.

Shock Therapy

So we had our first therapy session together.  The therapist started out asking “what’s the plan?”  Well, that’s the $400,000 question, isn’t it?  Stay together or divorce?  Instead, we said “improve our communication.”

Therapist asked, what’s broken with your communication.  Today, not too much.  But my wife is carrying a lot of baggage.  Stuff that happened years ago is still bothering her.  I would say we didn’t accomplish a lot in therapy, except get the advice from the therapist “Be yourselves, be sensitive to each other, and see what happens.  Maybe you can be a viable couple, maybe not.  You don’t know yet, because you don’t know each other anymore.  Take some time to figure it out.”  OK, but I’m not stopping the divorce yet.  It feels like she will have to do it.  She’s the one carrying the most baggage.

I said we would eventually need to talk about the affair–hypothetically I could forgive but not without some discussion.  She said she can’t talk about it.  I said we don’t have to do it yet. But if she won’t, that’s a dealbreaker for me.

We had a nice dinner, and afterwards she got out some pages she printed from her journal.  All from 2006-2007.  Even though I blanket apologized for everything, she can’t let it go until she explains how each thing made her feel.  I can do that to some extent, but eventually she has to acknowledge that even though I did something 10 years ago, she’s the one who has curated that memory, polished it, given it space in her head, and let it grow for 10 years.  I don’t even remember half the stuff or more.

I take responsibility for my part.  But she has to take responsibility for hers.  She says the words but I don’t think she feels it yet.  Yes I acted badly.  But I have improved.  She is holding a grudge against someone who doesn’t exist anymore.  She’s got to let that baggage go or it will affect her next relationship too.

At dinner I talked about my experience in the psych ward.  She said she accepted responsibility for her part of what put me there (her having me served–not just divorcing me but how she did it) but not responsibility for my part (the walls).  It’s the same for me with her baggage.

Relax

Not as relaxed as I thought.  Just got a letter from my lawyer.  Nothing really big, just some procedural stuff.  But my anxiety went up when the e-mail came in and hasn’t really gone down much even though there was nothing major in it.

Hope I can be calm in a couple hours, for our therapy.  I want to talk about how to have good communication.  She made a couple of notes the other night also, but I don’t know if she will bring them or remember them.  Maybe she just sent an e-mail to the therapist–she’s the one who suggested that approach to me.