I dunno Andrew - it's mystifying to me as well, and I've not had any Lait de Poule ... I'm excessively impressed with your cabinet scrubbing and cleaning. I need to do a whole lot of that over here as well ... I seem to be working on the furniture moving - moved a sleeper loveseat to the office and the chaise and love seat from the office to the living room ALL BY MYSELF! ... sorry, a tad proud of that ... anyway, what I'm trying to say is "Avoid the Cheeseless Tunnels" ... it's taken me a while to figure out the many ways they can present themselves. I've decided that trying to figure out the MLC mind is one of those ways. The problem is we apply logic where logic has long since left the building, if not the city, and perhaps even the country.
I'm sorry you are left feeling that you cannot trust S22. I understand. I think you've done quite an admirable job of not putting your children in a position of having to take sides, or defend one parent vs the other. It's difficult in these situations and you are to be commended. I also think it's good to let the kiddos know that you are moving forward in your personal life. A man who cooks, can tidy up, is well read and contemplative - don't know why you think the minor celebrity is out of your league... you're probably the most "real" person she will meet in 2017. Just keep moving forward, you will get through the next few days, I promise.
How about setting some intentions for 2017? I'm banning resolutions in favor of intentions. Intentions are a bit different, in my mind, as they are more about goals than resolutions which to me seem as absolutes "I will/will not do xyz" which set one up for failure.
If you believe in these things, 2016 is a "9" year - meaning end of a cycle. 2017 is a "1" year which is a new cycle. What do you want to bring into the new cycle and what is past its expiration date, like those items you discarded. I do not mean to imply your marriage, to be clear. However, there may be certain dynamics/patterns which play out there and in other relationships which no longer serve you. Only you can determine this. I just throw it out there as grist for the mill as you move into the new year, as its a topic which I've been contemplating quite a bit lately myself.
Wishing you peace, solitude rather than loneliness, and companionship ... prosperity, love and joy in the year ahead.
xoxo
M 20+ T25+ S ~15.5 (BD) BD 4/6/15 D 12/23/16
"Someone I loved once gave me A box full of darkness. It took me years to understand, That this too, was a gift." ~ Mary Oliver
Happy New Year my friends. I remember writing quite some time ago that I would dearly love to get my hands on the forum database. Not to look for some "magical secret" but more from a a process and analytical point of view because I love statistics like that. What is the pattern of new arrivals? How long do people lurk before the post? What is the frequency of posting? How long do people stay on the forums before moving on? Does this forum actually drive a significant amount of traffic to MWD book sales and counseling services? Etc Etc. I haven't seen one thing that I expected which is a big bump up in posts today - New Years Day. A day for me at least of reflection and renewal.
New Year's Eve was tough but fairly good. After a nice dinner of roast pork and potatoes I watched a bunch of NetFlix, drank some beer and ate some food that was bad for me. I did not send any sort of message to W although she did take a look at the SnapChat I posted right around midnight. I of course heard nothing from her. A dear friend kept me company via text message through the evening regularly reminding me to not text W. She had had company earlier in the evening but spent the end of it alone as well. We haven't seen each other in some months and I managed to convince her to have dinner with me in a couple of weeks. I sent Happy New Year greetings to S22/D24 which were returned. That made me feel good.
These few days around the New Years have always been a time for me to organize and tidy. Usually confined to my workshop but this year I have full roam of the house. I added 4 more boxes to the pile in the front porch including our wedding photo albums. A huge pile of what I had thought were rags in the laundry room yielded up a few nice blankets. Now that I have that corner dealt with I can go forward and get that room whipped into shape as well. I also did up my annual shredding posting a picture on SnapChat for D24/S22 to see as a reminder that they should also be doing a similar tidy. It included a shot of my desk - which no longer has a wedding photo on it.
Even though it's contrary to what I've been writing here, I've been telling myself and others that after the New Year that I have some tough decisions to make. I honestly don't know what that result of that decision is yet. I may get a whack with a 2X4 for this but I have indeed been keeping the lines of communication open with the nice lady who sells me my flowers. I've not asked her out nor has she asked me. I have no clue if the interest that I see is real or just a figment of my imagination either. She wasn't working this past weekend but I did mention to her co-worker that I was working through some tough decisions and would be happy to see the end of 2016. I expect that will explain to her why I've not asked her out and she does know that it has "only" been 6 months since W walked out. I don't believe I told her that this has been going on since March.
While the 2X4s are swinging, I also went on to Facebook and updated my marital status to Separated and added a "life event" for BD1 setting that as the separation date. If you set the audience of this information to "just me" it does not appear on any news-feeds visible to others. I went on to my newsfeed and then removed the "life event" posting so this information won't accidentally be broadcast. One of the decisions I need to make is if / when I make this information available to anyone who happens to look.
Over the last week or so I've also updated my information with Revenue Canada to be separated and have been going through bills to attempt remove W's name from them. Annoyingly most places reasonably require written consent from W to do that.
Like Altair posted on her thread I too am struggling with the whole "sh!t or get off the pot" thing with my W. I am in a trap of my own choosing and construction allowing her the peace and space to "find herself" and make up her own mind without interference from me. More and more from what I see in the narrow window I have she is becoming more "normal". That doesn't mean though that she's coming home. Perhaps her posts about being strong, love and family and making choices and decisions are intended for OM and her "other" family. I can't know. I expect that if I asked that she would not answer.
Perhaps because she very likely expected it and I felt like disappointing her, I have taken no overt action with regards to our situation today. A single posting that said "Happy New Year everyone. Time for fresh starts and putting the past behind me" is all that is obvious. What is not obvious is that I have now blocked W from my SnapChat story. If she wants to know what's going on in my life or to see the latest antics of the cats she can ask. Generally I post something daily but it will probably take her a few days to notice if she does notice it at all. I suspect that she will and that she will find it worrisome. From "footprints" that get left I know that she's done a pretty close review of the new "AndrewP only" budget. I'm not sure when / if I'm going to close that down. The sneaky b@stard part of me wants to be sure that our old books have been replaced on her computer by the new ones which will only be done by her using each of her devices to look at the new budget. This is to remove her visibility of historical financial information. The less she has access to, the more control I will have during any financial disclosure during a separation process.
I had hoped that writing this here today would help me form my thoughts more. Unusually it hasn't. I am conflicted between what I want, what my feelings of Duty tell me, what I can achieve on my own, and what is real.
What I want is for her to make up her mind and tell me if she is done and leaving and to initiate the process for separation and divorce.
Duty tells me that as long as there is ANY chance that W will want to come home that I must stand firm.
What I can achieve on my own is to continue to build as full of a life as I can. While I know that I can indeed have a fulfilling life on my own that isn't what I want. Honour requires me to first let W know that the door is closed before even exploring another relationship. I did in part when I told her that I was considering dating to which she had replied "I wouldn't blame you" which was an incredibly unhelpful comment that couldn't have been more carefully crafted to keep me hanging.
What I can also achieve is to no longer conceal that I am separated which will also help free me to explore other relationships openly.
Another thing that I can achieve is to do all the heavy lifting of arranging a separation agreement knowing that if I do that I will not fare as well in the settlement as I would if it was something that W was pushing for. Doing this would also push W away and cost me several thousand dollars just to ante up into the game. Money I'd rather not spend.
What is real is that yes, I do still love W. I also want to be loved. I have never believed in having a "soul mate" or "the one". That is why I think we had such a good marriage for so many years because I at least knew that you had to accept the bad with the good and that you had to work at it. I know when she was younger that W believed in soul mates. She did do a pretty good job of accepting my flaws I thought as well. Since BD1 I have done more to love and support W than probably 99% of the men in this world would have done. I have endured scorn, having the affair rubbed in my face, been lied to and also by omission lied myself. Through it all I have been true to myself standing tall and proudly holding my lance while being buffeted by blows both from outside and within.
But I am tired my friends. So very tired. Earlier in my time here on the MLC forums people were very careful to not mention to me what sort of time span could be involved. They quite honestly said that the amount of time it will take for W to complete her journey is the amount of time it will take. More recently people with perfectly good intentions have regularly commented "you are early into this" and then I see others who have been Standing without a glimmer of hope for multiple years.
Well - that's about all I have in me right now. Time to go out and yet again clear out the driveway and gather up the Christmas decorations. Instead of just packing them away as usual I am going to decide which ones I am keeping and then put the rest with the boxes for W. The boxes that have been sitting since July with no sign that she will ever come for them.
Just a normal, quiet day in the Cabin.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Wow, A.P., you are making changes. It all sounds positive for you to me. I'm on a very similar if not same page, of course. re, your thoughts of analyzing the stats of this place- I've had exactly the same thoughts. Well, it could absolutely be done. this is an open web forum. you could easily set up a scraper and get every last post on here. The data is rather messy so there would be a lot of cleaning involved. For example, the signatures are not standardized, you'd have to clean up bomb drops and such. Pattern of new arrivals- easy to query by user+ first post on earliest date. (those name changers though will affect results but I wager name-changers are outliers). How long do people lurk before posting? A tougher one-- but they start or get moved to newcomers. You'd run a script with keywords and phrases (particularly the word "lurk") and with some machine learning (if you're fancy) or plain old hand-analysis, you could get a number. I'd guess it's 2-4 months on average, based on my already-have-thought-about-this. You? Frequency of posting- again, pretty easy by username. (This is a PHP-webforum I am familiar with, lol) My guess with this one is there's probably a few categories of people that fall into certain frequency patterns. Like say someone, posting for like say, a year pretty frequently, entering D or piecing or just wiped out, taking a break, coming back sporadically to report for the next few years and lessening each time is a pretty common one. Forum driving book sales and counseling? I would say absolutely. I'm leery of buying self-help books without seeing the philosophy behind them myself. I have resisted doing this webscrape although it is a treasure trove of data (and already anonymized, and could even be more so by not scraping location, etc., of which well, you could do a world map) One reason I resist is I think I already know what I would find. I really doubt I'd find any surprises? What does that mean? Well, it does mean some things for the state of my marriage, for sure... OK I geeked out on your thread. I was actually doing some work so that's where my brain is at-- analysis-- so best to leave it there, otherwise I'll sit here and eat jellybeans and cry, and that's no good. Over and out.
me 42 H 32 T 7yr M 6yr BD 5/2016 ILYBNILWY Separated 7/2016
I guess I should add this for non-computer people-- this is not done by breaking into the system, this is getting everything on here via the web that we can all see. Since this is a public forum, that's why our dear moderators keep all identifying information out
me 42 H 32 T 7yr M 6yr BD 5/2016 ILYBNILWY Separated 7/2016
Altair - I've written scrapers before and while they are great at pulling a large amount of data you are absolutely correct that the data is pretty un-organized. I suppose if I wanted to I could probably figure out how to pull the actual database which would at least be somewhat organized but hacking a friend's server isn't really kosher.
I was originally considering churn rate as the most interesting metric but you are right - doing a broad categorization of visitor by gender and relationship type would add a lot of depth to that analysis. I think that this is a great resource that MWD and her team have supplied and am grateful for it. I think that they are a bit light on the tech side themselves but the site keeps running and does what it needs to do. They are also quite discreet and polite about offering their services - Cristy's posts are always thoughtful, appropriate and not a shameless plug. I think we all appreciate that bills need to be paid and there is no "free lunch".
Determining outcomes would be a very tricky bit of analysis. I think that many people who come here leave part-way through their journeys so figuring that out would be tricky.
Anyway - enough shop talk for now. We must indeed visit IRL when you come up to Toronto. I suspect that we'll bore the pants off of anyone who eaves-drops.
I'm off to find some jelly-beans now myself and try to hold it together while splitting up the Christmas stuff.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Hi Andrew - Happy New Year! I do so enjoy reading your thoughtful posts. You are so eloquent. Just wish all of our posts were prompted by more pleasant subject matter.
Our timelines are only a few months apart - but you seem so much better at detaching than I am. I like that you have taken control and tried to remove W's name, packed her stuff, etc. So empowering for you, regardless which plans you follow through on. I am honestly too consumed with fear to take those steps. Not fear that I will not survive without H and my M, I will. But fear that I will push H further away. To give the impression that I am anxious to have a final decision that I may not be happy with. So, pat yourself on the back! And Altair - pass the jelly beans. I could use a handful right about now....
M:49 H:49 T:28 M:26 S24, D19, S15 BD/PA: June 2016 H living separately next to OW
Andrew- deal on Toronto. I'll look into taking a trip out there before June. We'll talk about databases and chicken milk. I agree- determining outcomes would be super tricky. Over my work life, it would be stuff like this that would cause arguments with co-workers who would try to majorly extrapolate and make some crazy claim and my brain would freeze-- aaahhhhhh you can't do that!--- and I try to be nice and explain why it can't be done. In fact right now a co-worker is doing a particular data analysis, she jumped on doing it I think to show she can, I'm not happy with what I am seeing, but am biting my tongue. I might let it go, but I'm the lead on this one, eh, we shall see. Not that I haven't gotten along with co-workers over the course of my career, because I feel I do, but I'm trying to look at DB principles and whatnot in my worklife to see if there's improvements I can work on. Our team is mixed technical/non technical which presents a challenge.
OK one more ramble-- The best way to do a (longitudinal ) study on this site- 1. when members join, have a robust intake survey collecting bomb drop, etc. 2. the db (as in database) analysis of activity over time 3. random sample of people ideally from years ago who agree to follow up surveys 4. control for whatever..Look for correlations! 5. super cool to compare to general populations somehow
Anyway, back to my own, sparse, not-scrapeable, messy, old, disparate datasets...
me 42 H 32 T 7yr M 6yr BD 5/2016 ILYBNILWY Separated 7/2016
d-rose, here's a handful of the jelly belly mixed (not tropical or sour). Very Ronald Reagan style. Don't worry about pushing H away. Your fear will hold you back from being strong. You need to be strong!
me 42 H 32 T 7yr M 6yr BD 5/2016 ILYBNILWY Separated 7/2016
Andrew, you are certainly asking yourself all the right questions. I remember how scared I felt when I first read the MLC chapter in MWD's Divorce Remedy. I knew that she'd written it while somehow being in my house, as it fit our situation to a "T" and I also realized just what I was up against, especially in terms of time frame to resolution.
In my situation I opted to let my wasband do all the heavy lifting. We didn't meet for mediation unless he initiated it, we didn't do anything without him initiating it. It didn't stop our divorce, sadly, but I think it slowed things down. The downsideiocles hanging overhead, just waiting for my husband to cut the cord. It was very stressful, but the thought of initiating it myself was even more painful to me. That's how it played out for me anyway. I think you are right to ask these questions and to continue to contemplate. I like that you are not "in your face" about the separation but not allowing cake eating either.
Happy New Year! I wish you peace and happiness.
xoxo
M 20+ T25+ S ~15.5 (BD) BD 4/6/15 D 12/23/16
"Someone I loved once gave me A box full of darkness. It took me years to understand, That this too, was a gift." ~ Mary Oliver
Reading along and catching up. Thing with this crisis is ... well there is not a timeline nor a guaranteed ending at the end of it. I too was one who looked/read/studied on various sites and compiled a ton of information figuring I could put all that info up on my war-board and improve my odds. Thing is ... what everyone says is the truth .. 'The crisis takes as long as it will take' and sadly we all can agree its not weeks nor months.
Reading you as I have its obvious to me that you are used to being in control, and you currently find yourself in Limbo and you are struggling with it as we all have/do. In response you will do things to try to get a reaction from your MLCr ... facebook posts, SnapChat blocking, hinting to your kids that you might be dating ... this is all normal but will not really get you anywhere when done for reasons outside of yourself. But like me you will have to learn this on your own I am simply planting a seed here hoping you will down the road.
What many here will push for you is what you are starting to do ... begin looking inward and making changes for yourself. You will need to do this regardless if she comes back or not. Its hard and it stinks but is is required for you to become a success story.
