Confused but committed, Part 2

[Liz11]

You guys, I don’t know what I’m doing. With this pandemic, with this situation. My heart feels like it’s being pulled out of my chest all over again. I don’t know whether to have faith or not. She sure sounded definite. I’m failing at DBing. I’m failing at detaching. I’m failing at not bringing up the R. I feel ashamed to post here because of how much I’m f*ing this up. I’m going backward.

I miss her so much. I’m lost.

I could have written this, Hoch. You're not alone. I did 7 months of BD-ing, as best I could at least, and my WAH announced he wanted to come home, and said and did all of the right things. He spent a couple months convincing me how ready he was to come home and how happy he was, and after 1 month of being home, he just left again.

I find DB-ing in this pandemic so hard, but LH is right, you dust yourself off and keep trying. Do your best to restrain yourself from R talks, and try to find things to distract yourself and focus elsewhere.

Your W is on a journey. Let her do her thing. You do yours. (I know how hard it is to follow this advice.)

[Thornton]

Hey Hoch -

I don't know your situation but I saw your last post and had to respond. I feel for you man, the word that best describes it - despair.

The fear is real and can make a mess of your sitch if you let it.

You didn't ruin your chance with your W by having one more R talk. But you do need to 180 and make immediate changes.

Going forward.. ANYTIME you feel compelled to have a R talk with your W, come here first and post about it. You are so knee deep in your emotions, it's triggering your fight or flight response. You feel compelled to DO something. Unfortunately, that's not how you will get your W back. Post here first and let people that have zero emotional connection to your W, reel you back in before you make a mistake. Deal?

[Hoch]

^deal.

Thank you so much everyone for your support and understanding. I should have known that I didn’t have to feel ashamed to post my mistakes.

LH19 - thank you so very much. That was what I needed to hear. Get up, dust off, keep going.

I’m trying not to spiral. The things which are helping keep me afloat are this:

* she is on her own journey
* it often gets worse before it gets better
* there really is nothing for me to do, decide, or take action on right now. Just be with my small boys and love them and breathe the air.

I still go back and forth on the question of if I’m a fool or not, if she’s actually asexual or is just so traumatized that she would actually hold to being closed off forever. Maybe I always will wonder that. But as I process this terrifying uncertainty, I can only make my decisions based on my values:

I won’t hate. I will believe in the good of people and the ability to change. I will do everything in my power to build a happy, and intact, home for my young boys. Given those, the only path in front of me is to stay the course, DB, and hope.

I think the stories I need to find right now are the ones about having hope in the darkness, in the face of certain failure, and about how it worked out. Anyone have any of those?

Thank you all for being here.

[LH19]

H,

I think you need to repeat these two statements in your head:

I did not break her therefore I cannot fix her.

I will be fine no matter what the outcome.

[Hoch]

You’re right.

Those ones are hard to say out loud for some reason. Because they contain hope for me, but not for the situation. I’m clinging so hard to hope, but I know I need to develop my indifference to outcome.

This wouldn’t be nearly as hard if I didn’t have my two boys to think about. And if we split to separate households, the thought of missing half their young lives to another household just threatens to break me. I love them with every ounce of heart I have, and the thought of a life with them missing half the time, plus being in this pandemic... god, I’m spiraling again. I need to stop and go hug them.

[LH19]

H,

The thought of losing half the time is overwhelming but again not as bad as you envision it. I am closer with my children then I have ever been because of the quality time we spend together. Being away from them gives me a chance to miss them. Then when I see them again it brings a real joy to my life.

Right now you are going through is catastrophic thinking. Google it.

Try to breathe Hoch.

[Spiral]

LH is right. You really aren't losing half of your time with your boys. You'll adjust your schedule to be much more present during the time that you have with them and to focus much more on them. Also, you might find that you'll have them more than half of the time. That part of the catastrophic thinking definitely did not come to pass for me.

And you need to GAL.

-Spiral

[Steve_]

I thought about something today regarding hope, maybe it will help you.

I don’t need hope, I have DBing, other research, and time on my side, one way or another I will win from this situation. I will get better and better as I get farther away from this sitch and either my WW will have to make genuine changes that I have the support here to sort through or I will eventually find someone better and be happier. So no matter what the outcome is, I win. And so do you.

[may22]

Hoch,

I know exactly how you feel. Especially about the children. None of us signed up to have children only half of the time. I totally, totally get it.

But if I may... pushing these R talks simply IS NOT HELPING. Maybe she finds an apartment. Maybe she doesn't. It is all completely out of your control-- unless you apply more pressure, more R talks, more more more... that may be solidifying her decision. The more she hears you love her the more she feels guilty that she doesn't feel the same way back.

What can you do to STOP talking to her about this stuff? I get it that it is triggering to see her looking at apartments. it doesn't mean she's getting one. I think this is one of the reasons that GAL is such a big focus here-- you need something to take your mind off of your W and put it back on you and your kids, and honestly to get physically away from her so you aren't peering over her shoulder at her computer and freaking out about what she's looking at.

So, can you make a plan for the next few days? Things for you, things for you to do with your kids? Get yourself out of the house so you can avoid putting yourself in a situation where you feel compelled to say something? And, have some strategies for how to deal when you are triggered and really really really feel the need to say something to her. When I felt like I couldn't stop myself from saying something to my H and opening up an R talk, there were a bunch of random things I would do to stop myself, ranging from opening and closing my hands over and over and repeating a mantra in my mind (ranging from "he's an a-hole that I don't want to live with anyway" to "amor fati") to hugging my kids or coming to this site or calling a friend. Eventually, it got easier. (And I need to start this back up again.)

And not that my sitch is anything anyone would want to emulate and we are not in piecing, but FWIW my H looked at apartments and found the perfect one and put in an application and got it. And that was what turned him back around (for the time being). But he had to do that 100% on his own.

I just think the more time you can spend focusing on yourself and what you need to calm down and re-center yourself, and the less time you worry about whether or not she's really asexual or is going to finally follow through on her threats to MO, the better. One thing that helped me here was focusing on my kids. It sounds like your W is going through a very rough time, no matter what, with the drinking and the rest, and your children are going to need you at your best. So do what you have to do to pull it together for them.

You can do this, H.

[sandi2]

First, you never love unconditionally. That isn't even logical. Loving unconditionally literally means "no matter WHAT she does". I am sure there are things she could do to make you not love her. Love her, but admit that there are conditions to that love. Unconditional love is an extremely rare thing, and should never be, in my humble opinion, how we categorize the love we have for another human-being with the exception of our children.

Thank you! Years ago, I expressed the same viewpoint on unconditional love. The closest thing we come to experiencing complete unconditional love is with our children. I relate it to a pregnant woman who loves her baby before its even born. That's unconditional love.