Thank you everyone. I hope to attend an actual physical w/ human beings group therapy meeting with Ivan and others from SSN later this month. Hang with me. I'll get better. Its been worse.

Ellexoh,
   I don't think those of us who counsel people to "get out now" think it's easy to do so. In fact, many of us took a very long time--decades, in some cases--to do so ourselves.  When we counsel people to leave we're doing so from our own experience; we ourselves agonized over the decision to leave, went through all the stages of grief and bargaining and our own form of denial.  We would love to be able to save others the pain and keep them from the same kind of time lost that we dealt ourselves.  
    I agree, however, that that's not always possible.  Some people are not able to act on advice or others' experience and spare themselves the agonizing over time (none of us in any circumstance are spared grief).  Some of us have to go through the decision making process or the time it takes to align our actions with our intuitions or decisions--someone's tag line is something like "Horribly, the only way through it is through it," which applies both to those who have to get to a decision on their own time and to those who have made a decision to leave.  None of this is easy--or simple.  I have told several people that making the decision--as well as arriving at the decision--to leave my marriage is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.  Having made that decision, however, I'm finding that the "getting out" part is less fraught--it's more the "mechanics" of separating "things."
   It seems to me that I spent years of time getting to a place I was always going to get to, all the while saying I had to do it on my own terms and in my own time.  For me, that "I have to do it in my own time" was temporizing, an attempt not to have to do the thing I knew but couldn't yet accept that I was going to have to do.  
   But then, when I got there to the place when I finally stopped spending my time and energy trying to figure him out, started seeing more clearly instead of through wishful eyes, and realized he was never going to change because he didn't want to change and couldn't change, and realized I wasn't willing to sacrifice my own sexuality to his--when I finally accepted the situation as it was instead of how I wished it was or could be, I realized it would have been far better for me in the long run to have gotten out sooner.  
    I knew from the beginning that the odds were against our staying together; from the beginning there were signs I saw in myself that told me that I didn't really want to accommodate myself to my husband's newly expressed sexual orientation. (I could not see him as a woman or a lesbian, and I knew that I was not a lesbian; I also knew that what he was thinking of as "lesbian sex" was a figment of his imagination.) I feared, and maybe knew, from the beginning I was going to end up having to end my marriage.  I certainly knew this when I contacted the straight spouse network.  My earliest posts said something like "I have been trying to figure out whether this can work."  Very soon, however, I voiced objection after objection, humiliation after humiliation, selfish act after selfish act on my husband's part, and finally I said: I know I want to leave.  Even then, I wasn't ready to act on my own desire to leave; it took a long time after that to do the thing that would not allow me to turn back (in my case, telling my mother). But all this is why I wrote, somewhere, that I have decided sometimes the right thing to do is not to believe one has to get there on one's own time but to act and let the emotions catch up.  
  I would like as much as I can to shorten someone else's time agonizing, so they can grieve and then get on to living their own happy lives, the ones chronicled in Phoenix's new thread.

Last edited by OutofHisCloset (October 5, 2017 4:55 pm)