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If I were you, I would be grateful for anyone taking their time to offer any advice here. Yes, often times it might sound harsh but the advice I've gotten here is worth more than years and years of any therapy. No one here says things to be mean, we have all suffered in similar ways as you and today I am very happy for the veterans here posting on my thread and pointing out my sometimes ridiculous behaviour.

It has made me a better man. I've met therapists that only listen and that may help a little bit but this is just as much therapy for me. Group therapy you could call it.


Me: 38
Stbxw: 35
No kids
Mini bd: February 6, 2019
ONS confirmed Sept 7, 2019
Told her to move out: September 8, 2019
W moved out: September 28, 2019
Divorce filed by me: September 23, 2019
Joined: Jan 2020
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I view this place as a mix of group therapy and talking to the wise at a fireside.
Sometimes the group gives u a huge 2x4 and it might hurt but +90% of the time it's precisely what you need to hear but no one else dares to say.


Me: 34
Stbxw: 30
D:5 D:3
Mini bd: May/June 2019
Married: Aug 2019
BD: 6th Dec 2019
OM Confirmed: Feb 2020
March 2020: I filed for D
Waiting for D to be finalized and W to move out end of January 2021
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I don’t want to analyze you. I want you to analyze yourself. And this is rooted in my core believe that we only have control over ourselves, and that the core principle in Divorce Busting is that one partner’s changes can change the relationship.

But I understand if that’s not what you are looking for, and I will leave your thread alone.

Best of luck.


Me: 44
H: 44
Kids: 20, 16, 16, and 10
Together/Married: 22 years
H announced he was emotionally detached and considering D: 4/4/16
H announced he is going to try to stay and reconnect: 5/1/16
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Originally Posted by tom_h
Originally Posted by Rose888
Originally Posted by tom_h


Well, this could be a long answer, but let's address only one thing now, the matter of love languages. I have no doubt that she will claim that I was either deliberately, or unwittingly, dismissive of her love languages. But that cuts both ways. She would be so mired in her pain that she would not realize that she was clueless about mine as well.

Yes, our marriage was muddling along but when we took our vows 30 years ago we both took those vows seriously, e.g., "for better and for worse" and "for richer and for poorer" and especially, "til death do you part." So I never, ever thought she would walk out. I would have never done it myself, either.

Yet ... had she told me a year prior, or 5 years prior, that our marriage was in trouble I would have done anything to keep it. Truly anything. As Michele said in one of her columns, when the beloved wife walks out, or is a few minutes from doing such, the husband is truly at the lowest ebb in his life and CAN make the changes that his wife thinks are impossible.

I didn't tell you what the love languages are yet ... I thought you might want to comment on the above first.


It sounds like you are more interested in blaming your wife than addressing your contribution to the breakdown of your marriage and your weaknesses as a partner.

Whoa, you guys and gals are a rough crowd.

I got a sense that this forum is meant to help others, and that help can come in a couple of different flavors. There is the kind of "help" where others will listen and be a new friend to others in grief; then there is the kind of "help" where others try to analyze you and fix your problems.

I don't think I'm ready for the latter here. I'm in therapy now and my counselor and I have been working on fixing me for 11 months. I can relate some of that, in time. But for now, on this forum, I think I need the former. The friend who listens. I'm hoping to find other men, like me, whose wives walked out and left them adrift, and who can provide some insight into the why and what to do. Also, I'd hope to hear from some wives who walked out on their man, and can give me some perspective as well. I'll get to analyzing what I did wrong eventually, I have lots of personal insights.

Does that make sense?




Tom, as a man whose W was in an EA and had said she was leaving, but never did, what I can tell you is that the support I got here, the advice, and yes, even the whacks across the knuckles were all invaluable to me and my mental health. One of the things this forum fights against is the victimhood dynamic. You've had 11 months to feel bad for yourself, but victimhood is something that will keep you stuck and not moving forward. This forum is about empowerment. It's about looking forward to becoming the best tom_h that you can be. Your W may come back one day. She may never come back. What you have is the choice to let her choice define you, or you can decide that no one....not even her, will cause you to live anything less than your best life! So yes, this forum can sometimes sting with the insights and analysis. But I can truly tell you, as someone that came to this forum looking for the magic bullet to fix my situation, that the 2x4s I got are why I'm still standing today. And I would have stood even if my W had followed through on her original plan to leave.

So tom, what are your hoping for here? Because if you came here to find out how to get your W to talk to you I'm afraid you may be disappointed. There is only one person that can make her talk to you...and that is her.


M(53), W(54),D(19)
M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017
Ring and Piecing since March 2018
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OK. I got a lot of replies and I'm thankful for all of them. Don't mistake things, I'm not especially fragile anymore, especially given the lapse of time. So Rose888, I don't want you to leave! But a number of you asked questions from different perspectives, and I don't know where to start and how to keep this thread focused.

Are any of you husbands whose wives walked out, especially without warning? At the moment I would like to hear those stories. Also, are any of you WAWs (or WASes)? Comparing notes would be very helpful to me.

As for what I did wrong, I have a good handle on it. Here's a synopsis. Basically, we grew apart. My ex is a very sweet sensitive woman, who wanted a traditional role and a strong husband. She really got the best of both worlds with me, I am a sensitive and gentle man but also am well-educated and technical and had a good career. But the stresses of being past age 45 really got to her. She was the full-time Mom and homemaker for 15 years, yet when she went back to work (my oldest was entering college and we needed the income) she began resenting me for not pulling my own weight around the house; yet, I was always a traveling man so I wasn't around a lot to do my share of the load. We had never communicated perfectly, yet it had gotten better over time. She will say I didn't attend to her needs, her love languages too, which are acts of service and affirmation. My bad of course. We were in mutual bad patterns, of course, as she didn't attend to my love languages either. As she began pulling back, as many as 10 years ago, our sex life plummeted, so did our touch, which is what I need as a sensual man. She also stopped appreciating me and all the effort I put into supporting the family (I earn far more than she) and being a great Dad to three demanding kids. Also, she was always afraid of, or reluctant to, engage in, sex. We had a heart-to-heart about this maybe 10 years ago, when I told her that about everything she didn't like about me -- grumpiness, curtness, not leaping up to help her with the dishes -- was because I was sex, affection, and affirmation-starved. Oh, she half listened and it was better for maybe a week or so. But she defaulted back to her normal MO soon after. She is not an especially sophisticated person so talking rarely fixes things for her. I know that sounds contrary -- she wanted communication but communication didn't work so well for her -- but it's true.

She would also say she wished I would do, on my own, little things. Like she gets out of the shower and sees that I made the bed. Like I volunteer to go to the grocery store with her. Like I volunteer to decide what to make for dinner, or have dinner ready when she gets home after me. Like I have a sleepless night and she wakes up to find out that, during the quiet hours when I couldn't sleep, I did some laundry. One of the divorce attorneys I spoke with said that my marriage began falling apart 20 years prior, as my ex silently began tallying up these little hurts, one nick at a time. After 32 years there were quite a large number of them! And she no doubt concluded I was beyond hope, that I would never, ever change. [She's wrong there, and Michele's article confirms such.]

We muddled along since then. Our youngest graduated high school in 2018 and frankly I thought we would soon begin to work on our marriage. The marriage wasn't poisoned. As I said in the first post, I don't womanize, I don't have any addictions, I don't gamble or take drugs, I don't waste money on cars or other toys. But I believe now that when that graduation happened, that's when she started planning her exit, an exit she had been contemplating for years. We didn't get anywhere in the marriage from June 2018 onward because she had checked out already. I was waiting for the right time to get away and try and rejuvenate things, she was making arrangements about secret bank accounts, getting counseling on how to divorce your husband in secret, and a whole lot more. D-Day was September 2019.

This is very consistent with Michele's articles about WAWs. That's why I'm here. Her articles were the closest thing to an explanation that I'd heard over 11 months.

If you asked my ex, I expect she might say that I was emotionally abusive; I found evidence that she might have concluded such. So I delved into it with my therapist about 9 months ago. We concluded that I was NOT emotionally abusive. Emotionally abusive men have anger issues, they are paranoid and always read their wife's emails and texts, and they are controlling. That was never the case with me. I never said a cruel word to her, never called her a single name, never said a single critical word to her about her appearance or figure. [I grew up in a broken family where that happened all the time so I was very sensitive to that.] That's a reason why I was so shocked that she served me divorce papers out of the blue.

In summary, what did I do wrong?

Didn't communicate well
Didn't attend to her love languages (yes, she'd told me about them)
From her perspective, wanted sex without the accompanying affection and romance and tenderness
An accumulation of little things over so many years -- e.g., not picking up after myself.

OK, ask away. I'll try and handle all replies.

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Tommy,

There is really nothing to ask. You just described 97% of long term marriages. You weren't meeting her needs so she had no desire to meet yours. The marriage becomes unfulfilling for both parties involved. Usually its just a matter of timing in terms of who pulls the rip cord first.

That's why it's now important to separate the desire for the person, from the desire for resumption of control, stability, in your life. Your brain is telling you that getting W back will restore these things, but it won't.

So ask yourself, what do you want and why do you want it?

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Tom, I can add that you won't find many waw's or ww's posting here. It's usually the LBS who find these forums. But a few exceptions would be if you read the threads and posts from sandi2 or AmyC.


Me: 38
Stbxw: 35
No kids
Mini bd: February 6, 2019
ONS confirmed Sept 7, 2019
Told her to move out: September 8, 2019
W moved out: September 28, 2019
Divorce filed by me: September 23, 2019
Joined: Aug 2020
Posts: 199
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Originally Posted by Rose888
I don’t want to analyze you. I want you to analyze yourself. And this is rooted in my core believe that we only have control over ourselves, and that the core principle in Divorce Busting is that one partner’s changes can change the relationship.

But I understand if that’s not what you are looking for, and I will leave your thread alone.

Best of luck.

Rose, I don't want you to bail on this thread (or me), and I posted a long answer that will go some way toward explaining things.

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Tom H,

My BD was coming home to an empty house after a weekend fishing trip about a year ago. The best advice you can get is on this forum from others. There are a handful of great posters here who give great advice. I know that going NC is the way to go. Just make sure that you seek help/advice before doing any thing questionable. In my situation it was working and my W finally reached out a week ago for the first time in a long while. Unfortunately I sent her an email on our anniversary a few days later which was a bad idea. I knew better but put expectations on our previous meeting and made a mistake. Always ask here before doing anything against the DB principles.

Taz

Last edited by Taz; 09/11/20 05:53 PM. Reason: Spelling

M57 (53@BD)
XW55 (50@BD)
S24 (20@BD) S22 (19@BD)
Married 25 (22@BD) Together 28
BD 9/29/19 (moved out unannounced while I was on fishing trip)
W filed 10/19/20 (Informed me via text)
D final 11/10/22
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Originally Posted by Taz
Tom H,

My BD was coming home to an empty house after a weekend fishing trip about a year ago. The best advice you can get is on this forum from others. There are a handful of great posters here who give great advice. I know that going NC is the way to go. Just make sure that you seek help/advice before doing any thing questionable. In my situation it was working and my W finally reached out a week ago for the first time in a long while. Unfortunately I sent her an email on our anniversary a few days later which was a bad idea. I knew better but put expectations on our previous meeting and made a mistake. Always ask here before doing anything against the DB principles.

Taz

Taz, thank you very much for this reply. Can you please tell me what the DB principles are, and whether they apply after the divorce is final, or it is hopeless to expect we get back together? Also, what does NC mean, it's not on the list of abbreviations I have.

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