Good to hear from you Ink. Glad your daughter is doing well. Please do not apologize for a lack of drama (or a lot of drama).
I’m sorry she’s continuing to prioritize her pride over your wellbeing. I’m sorry she continues to put her ego over your marriage and your family. I am really sorry that she is still lying to you. You are a good man and you really do deserve better. I’m not sure you were ready to hear it when some of us earlier in this thread when a few of us said that what she’s doing now and what she does next (rather than what happened in the past) is the biggest determinant of whether R is possible, but she appears to be proving this.
Reading your posts here, after promising not to do so was another obvious breach of trust. I mean, part of me gets it – I think if my marriage was on the line, I’d have a tough time not reading myself but that said, if I were to read here I would ONLY be doing so because I’d be so desperate for any possible insight and roadmap on what I could possibly do to save my marriage. Unfortunately, her practice seems to be to prioritize self-preservation over marriage preservation.
she just took away the advice from CT and Emergent and Bigger that lying is expected behavior and I therefore should have just calmed the hell down
I actually had to go back through my comments on this thread as well as the comments of CT and Bigger to try to find where any of us said this. That this would be anyone’s takeaway from anything any of us said (specifically Bigger!), is almost laughable to me. Of course continued lying by a group of people who have proven themselves to be liars, is common. Just because something is common, does not mean it is acceptable. Littering is common, tax evasion is common, rape is common. Common does not mean it is acceptable.
That said, Mrs. Hulk, if I have any credibility AT ALL with you based on my capacity for nuance or your interpretation of my words, please please please go back and read them again. If you really wanted to build a new, wonderful marriage with your husband, I absolutely think its possible (and I am living, breathing proof of the same). My husband cheated on me and lied about it afterwards and 6 years later we are very happily married and infidelity plays virtually no role in our day to day lives, IT IS WHAT YOU DO NEXT THAT MATTERS THE MOST. That said, the opposite of love is not hate or anger, it is indifference. Your husband is becoming indifferent to you - he is detaching. That should be far more concerning to you than his anger. YOU are the only one who can turn this around and the longer you continue to do what you're doing, the less likely it is that he'll stick around to see you do it.
It’s funny, that for all my wayward apologetics and you guys giving me all kinds of calming advice helping me to sustain in R, she reads this and concludes that SI has brainwashed me against her. It’s almost comical. It’s not really that I am upset that she knows my thoughts, I think if she read my entire transcript over the last year that she would see how damn hard I was trying to make this work.
I can’t decide if I’m in the brainwasher group or the Wayward apologist group
, but let’s be honest, no one, and I mean NO ONE has been a bigger SheHulk apologist than you. It wasn’t all that long ago that you were tying yourself into absolute knots trying to figure a way to view your wife as a victim in all of this. I don’t say this disparagingly. I cannot imagine having read your posts over the last year and seeing anything other than a man who deeply loves his wife and his family, and a man who has an incredible capacity for forgiveness. Who, despite having been deeply and grievously hurt, was willing to exercise incredible patience, kindness, and good faith, while waiting for his deeply imperfect (but deeply cherished) wife to figure out how to get out of her own way and put her marriage before her ego. InkHulk, I’m glad you do not have regrets about how you’ve handled yourself through this. You can hold your head high knowing that you have done everything you reasonably could to save your marriage.
It wont surprise anyone to know that I absolutely believe R is possible under the right circumstances. It obviously takes two people to do it properly. Certainly not everyone is cut out for it. Inkhulk, I think you have what it takes. I really hoped, for your sake, she would get to a point where she could be that person for you, too.