Anita~

I’m not sure where to start.  I went through a horrible divorce and there was a lot of pain and suffering.  What I see is that you are suffering before the suffering.  You need to make decisions that do not cause you so much pain.  It’s called taking care of you.  If you were to leave this man you would still suffer but you just might be on your way to healing your life.  I’m not sure if I read this correctly but it seems as though you don’t have the mental energy to change things (your life) or the financial means to be without him.  This may mean making the decision to down size your life.  You might not want to do this but the turmoil has to end sometime.  My thoughts are about the children (you can’t always get what you want) Mick Jagger in the raw.  You talk about how compatible they think you and your husband are but really are not.  Happiness has to be brought back into you and your children’s life again.  You surely can’t be walking around the house full of joy.  They can see it trust me!  To be together in a situation like this is only faking it and prolonging the pain.  Your therapist is really missing the mark in letting you talk about this over and over this only emphasizes the whole situation and it gets embedded deeper and deeper into your soul.  There has to be some airy light feeling when your with someone this person is only causing sickness to your soul.  Get out no matter how hard it is and stop fooling yourself that the two of you are still so compatible.  Maybe making a mature adult decision will turn his head.  But honestly after what he has done to you I wouldn’t want him back and I wouldn’t care how much it hurt.  I don’t mean any of this to be harsh or cold I’m a very compassionate person however I will draw the line and honestly you did ask for advise.

Dear Oonagh:

To reach a state of mind where you live with your husband and no longer be bothered by him dating another woman, to give his dating a  neutral value, detaching completely from what is “tribal or dualistic”, that is, detaching from your past monogamous sentiment regarding your marriage, is easy to do in theory, but in real-life, it is very difficult because we are emotional beings, like other animals.

We are not robots who operate by logic alone. What motivates us is emotions. If we manage to mix in enough logic in our lives, that is wonderful. But we are primarily emotional, not logical.

When we feel something intensely, it is impossible to change how we feel simply by thinking this way or that way. It can work for a moment, feeling better or worse, thinking this way or that way, but an ongoing basis, an emotion that we felt consistently for a long time, that emotion persists.

anita

Dear Oonagh:

As I started to read your recent post, I knew I need my fresh, morning brain to thoroughly read it and reply. Therefore I will be back to your thread tomorrow morning my time, about 14 hours from now.

anita

Dear Oonagh:

I just lost over two hours of study of your three posts and a reply I put together, including quotes from what you shared, all organized and thoroughly put together, and then, I lost the internet connection and it is all gone.

So now, I will write to you what I remember in that reply, not equipped with quotes from what you shared.

First a short summary: you married this man in about 2001, 18 years ago. At first he was your best friend, your confidant, your lover, but as time went on, your marriage suffered from his parents bullying you as a not-good-enough wife to their son, you suffered a dangerous miscarriage, two of your close friends committed suicide, and then, the economic recession. Fourteen years into the marriage, with three children, the two of you attended marriage counseling and decided on a separation that meant that the two of you remain in the same home and lead normal lives. He then encouraged you to date, massively encouraged you, is the adjective you used. You finally dated a younger man for a few weeks. He dated as well, but no relationship materialized until November this year when he told you about the new woman in his life, introduced her to his sister and a mate, and is currently dating, staying overnight at her place. You fell apart, experiencing great distress, fearing you will end up like a friend of yours who developed cancer as a result of her trauma and stress in the context of her troubled marriage, and you mentioned driving 100 kph, violently crying. As things stand, your estranged husband wants to keep sharing and living in the home where the two of you live, he doesn’t want a divorce, and he wants to keep dating, spending overnight with his girlfriend and weekends at times, coming home to his children and the mother of his children whom he will never love romantically, so he said. You suffer when you smell her perfume on him, and her laundry detergent in his clothes, and when he gets all excited about receiving a text of a phone call from her, and so on.

And now, my points:

1. You wrote that your three children are your husband’s whole life and that he is passionate about them. Then you shared that your eldest child wrote a letter to Santa, wishing (not in these particular words) that his parents love each other again and expressing his fear that his parents divorce. As you read the letter you burst out in tears. As their father read the letter, he shrugged.

My point is, crying uncontrollably, yes, that’s passion. A shrug is not passion, it is indifference.

And his children are not his whole life. He is dating his new girlfriend, she is clearly a part of his life.

2. You wrote that back in time a woman was afraid of being replaced by another woman because it meant her physical demise as well as her childrens’, and that in our contemporary western society, women should not be afraid anymore because that danger no longer exists. Having read and studied your posts I want to point to one of your fears: you are afraid of your estranged husband’s anger. You called his anger at you a fury, this is strong anger. You mentioned that four years ago, in marriage counseling, he intensely criticized you session after session. Intensely is a strong adjective. Later on you wrote that if you break up the living arrangement (because of him dating another woman), he will blame you for it. You mentioned that you are afraid of an angry or acrimonious divorce, such as you read about.

3. Your estranged husband’s selfishness and convenient thinking is clear to me, he wants what he wants regardless of how it affects his children and the mother of his children, then he conveniently blames the mother of his children. But there is something else in his behavior toward you: disrespect.

4. You figure that if you achieve a state of neutrality, being a neutral, calm observer of your thoughts, responding to him instead of reacting, operating from the here-and-now calm observer vs an emotional, dualistic (primitive/ unevolved) state of mind,  then you will be okay with him dating, and because dating makes him happy, he brings this happiness home, and so, everyone benefits, and you will have an intact, harmonious family. You see this as a way better solution to physical separation and divorce.

You understand the difficulty in taking on this solution, but you read a lot about it, have a mantra that you repeat and you experienced partial success with it, perhaps. I imagine you will continue to invest in this possible solution. Problem is, you expressed intense suffering since you realized that he is seriously dating another woman. You have a whole lot of suffering to .. neutralize. Also, your eldest child, and maybe the others, are already aware that something is wrong, that their parents are not in a loving relationship. I imagine they are also aware of your husband’s anger at you, aware of your suffering, of his blaming of you, of you feeling guilty as a result… so all is not well.

Basically what you are trying to achieve is that you and this man live harmoniously in an open-marriage-with-children, an alternative lifestyle. A legally married man and woman who are not romantically or sexually involved with each other, each dating other people, staying overnight/ whole weekends sometimes with the other people,  away from the shared home, coming and going. The children, now and in the next eight years (when they start college) aware of this lifestyle.

Is this what you aim for?

anita

Dear Oonagh:

Let’s look at what you wrote in your most recent post about this man’s anger and your fear of it: “I am afraid of his anger and I have always avoided conflict like the plague… I am afraid of prolonged anger.. he told me he is so angry.. he says it will be a very difficult conversation.. I’m to blame for everything.. his current angry outbursts”.

About open marriage, you wrote that the idea piqued your interest because it “would be least abrasive to all five of us with the least consequences.. without the dramatic elements of legal intervention/ custody.. and potential estrangement from the bitterness that can ensue.. how does one enter into that mindset? How do you cultivate an open marriage arrangement..?”

My answer:

-you wrote that an open marriage arrangement will be “least abrasive to all five of us”, as if you are not already in an open marriage arrangement, and as if it hasn’t been already very abrasive to your physical and mental health, and your eldest son already expressed his significant distress over the situation.

-you wrote that an open marriage will be one without “potential estrangement from the bitterness that can ensue” as if you are not aware that there already is estrangement and bitterness. Look at your own words regarding his anger, that I quoted in the beginning of this post.

I am supposing you are afraid that in the future, there will be more estrangement, more bitterness; more anger.

“How to cultivate an open marriage arrangement”, you asked. Well, you already have an open marriage arrangement. I will answer then the following question:

How to cultivate a lasting open marriage arrangement with this man that you are living with?

My answer: by doing as he says. By agreeing to all the significant things that he wants. By cooperating with what he wants and how he wants it.

It will not be a good arrangement, not for you and not for your children, but it will be a lasting arrangement. Your children will have the opportunity to learn that aggression works, one of your children may learn to be aggressive to others, two of your children perhaps may learn to submit to others aggression), but the arrangement will last for as long as it is financially beneficial to him.

anita

You are welcome, Oonagh. Post again anytime.

anita