Well, I’m about 99% sure it’s over.  I’ll reserve 1% for the miraculous.  We’ve discussed splitting everything up, she got in touch with a mediator, we’ve both looked at apartments, we’ve discussed selling our home (which we both love SO much), we’ve scheduled consultations with attorneys, and the list goes on.  I’m completely devastated!! I know it’s not, but my world and my life seem so broken.  Here’s what I’m really having a hard time understanding.

We BOTH massively contributed to our original problem that lead to all of this which was broken communication. Me in being negative about things and her internalizing that and seeing me as a downer.  Her big failure was lack of communication.  Hers, more so in the sense of ineffective and ultimately halting communication altogether. She says she tried to talk to me about all these issues, but when one method failed, she never tried a different method of communicating with me.  Just kept trying the same method expecting different results.  In the end, she stopped trying to talk.  Her pain took years to build.  I’ve had all of mine in a month.

She told me so many times that she wished the man she fell in love with would come back.  The happy, confident, outgoing man I used to be.  Honestly, I never considered myself that far away from that person, but that’s a moot point now. About 5 weeks ago I had my eyes really opened to how she was feeling and what was going on, I can’t remember how I came to that realization, but I did, in a big way.  Turns out it was all for not.  She says she been in  a state of apathy since January, which begs the question, why the hell are you still here six months later if it was so unbearable?? She claimed if the person she fell in love would come back then everything could be saved and all would be good especially since she is the type of person who greatly feeds off the personality of others.  My happiness and confidence would rub off on her and we would be back to us, which she used to say when we were good, we were great and totally untouchable.  With my eyes opened, I understood and still understand what I need to do.  I almost immediately began implementing those changes and started being happier, avoiding negativity and not allowing myself to go there.  Really watching the tone of my voice during conversation, which she claimed was one of her biggest complaints.  I stopped smoking cannabis cold turkey(which was a huge deal for me), I lost a bunch of weight, started going to the gym again.  I was making some real positive changes in my life.  She acknowledged some of them and still does and will say she’s proud of me for making those changes.  But she was too far gone.  She was beyond the point of no return despite her telling me repeatedly we could work on it.  That our recovery would be slow and could even take 6 months before she really starts to open up to me, but I didn’t care how long it took.  I would work on it for the rest of my life without a hesitation. I mean, we’re talking about my wife and my family.  I’ll never stop fighting for those things in my life.  Even after all this and we sell the home and get divorced and she came to me years down the road and showed interest in us, it would unbelievably hard not to pursue that.  I think I would kick myself in the head for doing it, but wanting to be with the mother of my child and for my child to grow up in a loving two parent household means so much to me. Sadly, that, for the immediate and probably distant future doesn’t seem to be the case.

If we didn’t have a child together and could walk away from each other completely, all of this would be so much easier, but I’m faced with a divorce I want nothing to do with.  Everything I love most in life is being taken away from me against my will and I will still have to (or get to, not sure on that one yet) deal with my ex wife for the rest of my child’s life.  I will still have to see her multiple times a week and talk to her regularly.  That is going to be, at least for a while, unbearably difficult and feel like it will rip the scab off every time.

Something else I just can’t understand is why wouldn’t you fight for your family?  If we could look each other in the eye and say we gave it 100% effort, but it just didn’t work, I would probably be okay with a divorce.  We haven’t even tried though.  We’ve gone to 3 counseling sessions together and she hasn’t even started seeing her individual counselor other than an intake session, which doesn’t even really count since it’s all info gathering and whatnot.  The effort to save our marriage and our family, in my opinion, is in its infancy.  People take years to get over this kind of stuff, but she looked at me and said she doesn’t even want to try.  She just wants to be on her own and have her independence.  But, let’s not forget that she has told me and all her friends and family multiple times she was happy she stayed and was happy we’re working on it, even if it will be slow.  Literally, on Monday she told my sister in law she was happy we’re working on it.  Two days before that when one of her best friends asked if she was happy she stayed, she said yes.  Then by our counseling session on Wednesday, she was done.  The flip flopping back and forth and feeding me false hope has been astounding.  In the session she basically admitted she never had any intention of reconciling and that she always wanted a divorce, but didn’t want to hurt me.  As if leading me on and giving me so much false hope was a better option.  Everybody is so dumbfounded by all of this.  It doesn’t make sense to anybody that knows us and knows what’s going on.

I still just want to believe she’s not thinking clearly and is clouded by resentment and hate and can’t or won’t get passed that.  I truly don’t think she’s actually thought this through and all that it will entail, but nonetheless, there is nothing I can do.  I hope she is thinking this through and is not horribly confused and unsure of what she actually wants.  I hope she truly realizes what is right in front of her and what she’s throwing away.  A completely committed, devoted husband and father of her child, that will spend every day for the rest of his life making sure she knows she is truly loved and appreciated.  A husband who wants to give her the world and romance her forever.  A husband who knows and has taken accountability for all his failures and shortcomings in our relationship and has already changed so many of them and will only continue to work on himself to make sure she never feels this way again.  I hope she knows what she’s doing.

It seems impossibly difficult to think about right now, but the only thing I can do is move on.  Keep things amicable and civil for the sake of our child.  Try to maintain a level of respect with each other, so we don’t turn in to bitter parents who hate each other.  She says she wants us to be amazing co parents and still do so many things together and just raise our child as co parents.  Personally, I think she’s a little crazy expecting that to be so easy, at least right off the bat, but if that’s my only option, then that’s what I have to do.  Give her the divorce and remain a strong positive fatherly influence in my child’s life.  She wants the divorce to be easy and agreed upon through mediation, so I should probably be very thankful for that as well.

My final hope is that she learns to let go of the anger and resentment and shutting down and withdrawing and that somehow opens her eyes to what a strong great man I am and how great we can be together.  I’ll never believe this was strong enough to break us.  In the meantime, I have to move on and take care of myself.  I can’t dwell in the past and what used to be.  I have to look forward and embrace this as a new beginning, even though I never wanted one and still don’t.  I still love my wife more than anything and would still do anything for her, but unfortunately the sun is setting on that and she will soon be my ex-wife.  I can only hope and pray “ex-wife” is temporary and we somehow find our way back to each other.

Thank you all for the input. I very much appreciate it. Last night was a little rough, but wait.

I got out of the house for the day and went golfing with my brother, which is always nice, but I can’t shut my brain off. Everywhere I look is constant reminders of her and nothing but happy couples and families enjoying themselves. It’s painful. She even bought me my golf clubs, so there’s that reminder as well. After golf I had a great talk with my brother and his wife that probably made me feel the best yet. In a short version, my wife has been surrounded by negativity and pain, one could argue, the majority of her life starting in childhood with a verbally abusive, short tempered father. That, then continued with me, so in a sense, I became the same persona her father portrayed, which undoubtedly brought back a lot of painful memories which erects walls quickly. My sister in law (SIL) suggested to simply kill her with kindness. Like you said Mark, put all my feelings aside. Do nice little things for her and eventually she’ll come back. She’ll feed off it, it’ll take time,  but she’ll come back. Stop taking about us and just be the person she needs right now. Be positivity in her life. My brother and his family are leaving for a week and my SIL offered my wife their house so she could have a break and get away from me. My wife turned it down saying that we’re going to go to counseling and, Anita, there were already plans in place for my wife to move in to the spare room. Thank you for the suggestion as well. I offered an actual separation where I would go stay with my brother and we would just coordinate care of our son for however long it took, 2 weeks, 6 months, whatever. She wanted me to, but didn’t, I think due to her witnessing my devastation of not being able to be around my son every day. I can honestly say I probably have not cried harder in my life than realizing what was happening, or about to happen, at that moment. Her turning down the offer to stay away from me, to me, says there’s hope in her somewhere. Her saying that she could see us getting back together years down the road, to me, says there’s hope within her. We agreed to go to counseling like I have mentioned before. A stipulation for our marriage counselor, whom we’ve seen before, and she’s amazing, is that we both see individual counselors as well. A big difference in counseling, I felt, was that she was going with the thought of an easier divorce transition, and I with the intention of us reconciling. I have never wavered in the thought that we are so much bigger and stronger than this.

I don’t know what happened but I could just see it in her face. We’re over, no hope, it’s done, stop trying, throw in the towel, game over. In no way do I want to stop trying, but no matter what, there comes a time when you call it. I don’t know what that triggered in me, but it was hail mary, 4th quarter, end of the game time. One last time to lay it all out completely, so maybe at least I can tell myself I gave it my all, I don’t know. I laid out my plan for us. How badly I screwed up in the previous years, how it will always be considered my biggest failure as a person, how I had the my soulmate and didn’t make sure she realized what that meant to me. I don’t throw that term around lightly. How I would so gladly give her the rest of my life to make it up to her and make sure she never feels anything remotely close to this again. How at the very least we should be able to say we’ve been on, at the minimum, 33 date nights since our son has been born, which would be about one a month or so, not 3. How I don’t care about the money anymore, only the time and the memories. (Money has been extremely important to me as I grew up poor and even still we don’t make a lot, but I think we’re mostly comfortable at least) I told her that if we had 5k sitting in a savings account and we took it and blew it on a vacation. . . . great. We’re not gonna remember that 5k, but we’re gonna remember that vacation. I seriously laid out everything. How we could start completely over and all is entirely forgiven and we need not look to the past or discuss it, only forward from this point on. To rebuild, regrow, learn how to be friends again, learn to love each other again, learn to respect each other, learn how to be an amazing couple once again. All she has to do is say OK. Two letters and everything we used to have starts its final transition of returning. We had it before, we lost it. Why can’t we find it again? As I’m telling her of my plans for her and us and how I want to court her forever and never stop dating her, she begins to cry and seemingly starts to thaw in regards to her feelings of me. I lay myself to her mercy. This is what I have to give and to offer you. My full heart, my soul, my life, in your hands either to embrace, or throw away. Then she said it. She opened up, smiled and said I’m open to it. I finally did it. I finally have my chance. I hope it’s apparent from these posts what this chance means to me.

Even though I have my chance we still have a lot of work to do.  We’re still going to counseling and will not stop. We can taper off when the time comes but we both feel it’s important to regularly go just to do a checkup and make sure nothing is there and rebuilding and to make sure we’re utilizing the skills we’re going to learn to effectively communicate with each other. We’ll still go to individual counseling because we both have work to do as individuals as well. We’re definitely not jumping back in full steam. We’re going to do it correctly. But man, how nice it was to get some sleep last night. I feel like a new man today. I’m so excited to date my wife and prove to her over and over just how important she is to me and how much I appreciate her.