Reply to "Walkaway Wife"

Forum Index » Relationship Discussion (non-explicit)

Reply to ""Walkaway Wife""

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is OP. I just read through this, having essentially forgotten I’d posted it months back. Also it’s hard to believe this was only four months ago! Every week feels like a month.

In summary, we are still married and it’s going better overall. It’s been a bit of an odd and circuitous route — we actually got to a point where I pretty much said I couldn’t bear to be dealing with all these negative emotions about our relationship, that when I thought of all of the injuries and things that have accumulated it makes me want to split up, and he was sad, and suggested we work on building some structure as if we were going to live apart. We basically built a custody arrangement with the kids, where a certain person is responsible for everything with the kids the same weekdays every week, then alternating weekends.

However, we both still wanted to try to be together, like a reset. So we still continued to live in same house and in the same bed and spend time together (no matter whose “day”). For example if I had the kids on Saturday and I planned to take them to the zoo I might ask if he wanted to come with us. There’d be no pressure to join but if he wanted to he would, and vice versa. So we weren’t separated and we weren’t seeing other people.

But at the same time this took away any question of who would be responsible for the kids on a particular day, which 1) gave me more of my own time to use how I wanted, 2) allowed him to have to draw boundaries on work commitments on his days, and 3) in a really strange way brought us closer together. We also clarified a bunch of stuff about what a divorce would look like — how we would do the house, how we’d split finances, how we’d commit to coparenting, etc. We did that more because we thought that’s where we were ending up, but knowing we didn’t want that fully.

I think the schedule has helped me to build more trust that he has changed and was really in this fully, and made me feel like he could better understand my perspective of what it’s been like to do the child rearing for so many years. We also continued couples therapy and have continued to make dramatic improvements in our communication with one another. Since we basically discussed and agreed upon many divorce logistics, we have been able to get past the fear of the uncertainties and actually feel safe opening up more about the emotional injuries without worry that that would be the thing to split us up.

I feel more love toward him and we are affectionate with each other. I can actually envision us being together in the future which I really could not before. I am holding onto that. We have many ups and downs still, and some days it feels like it won’t work. But now we can share that with each other without fear and anxiety (mostly!) and that helps us get past it.  We are definitely not there yet but things are moving in the right direction I think. [/quote]

i'm a guy that posted in your thread months ago  and am so happy to hear this. gives me some hope for my own situation. thanks for the update[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics