My mom's best friend was a world-class champion bridge player. When I was a newborn, she told my mom that my head smelled "like a new deck of cards." She also nicknamed me "Chocolate Eyes."
To this day, I love chocolate -- AND playing cards!
Thanks for the kind words; I too feel like "I fought the good fight." This one's always been a toughie since you had two very separate dynamics going on -- a long-term SSM and a short-term AFFAIR. Entertwined, but separate issues, and my lack of patience for the second thing was very much attributable to my unhappiness over the long-term existence of the first thing.
Respect and trust are the most important elements of a marriage and if she's not giving you either of those, well, there's not much else you can do.
You are SO right. I told NOP this last week; that, if I had to rank the unacceptability of each of these things -- to me -- they would be:
1. Her disrespect of me;
2. Her deceit to me and our immediate familiy;
3. The actual affair itself.
When you first find out, #3 is all you can think about. But as you go thru it, the disrespect and the deceit/lack of trust move to the top. Marriage is hard enough when you DO trust someone, but you just have issues to work on. When you don't trust them, don't love them anymore, and rarely even like them, it really is time to move on.
Taking care of my boys -- and continuing to be the best dad I can be to D20 and D18 -- has been, and will continue to be, my priority. Followed by being the best "Choc" I can be.
NOP told me something very early on in this, on a night when I was feeling totally overwhelmed by how LONG this was going to take, and in one of my self-pitying, "I can't do this" moods. He said "if you do what God is asking you to do in any given situation, on any given day, and in any given decision, and push thru it, one at a time, then that's all you can do and you will have done the right thing."
That was awesome advice. I used to operate from a standpoint of "How will Mrs. Choc. react to this? How pissed off will she be, and then how miserable will that make ME feel?"
Now, I go by "What is the RIGHT thing to do here?"
"Bittersweet" is a great way to describe how I'm feeling about the end of my marriage. There are parts of me that are very sad, and other parts of me that are very excited, both by the growth I've achieved and by my future prospects.
One thing's for sure, I sure feel "ALIVE." And it'd been a long time since I had felt that way.
I do feel very bad for my kids, especially the boys (S14, S10). I felt they deserved the same "intact" family that D20 and D18 had until age 18, and they are the major reason I'd forgiven and been working so hard for over two months despite my wife's infidelity and obstinance. But I finally reached a point where I felt that for me to stick around any longer would be to condone the behavior, and I would also have no integrity knowing that my wife had fallen out of love with me awhile ago and knowing that she was continuing to cheat.
They will at least grow up learning about character traits such as fighting for what you believe in, working at what you've committed to, and being loyal to whom you have pledged yourself, not to mentioning honoring your vows to God.
