Dating : Therapist as geiger counter: warning, she’s about to go nuclear

When your marriage therapist tells you, in a single person session, that you need to start looking out and taking care of yourself, it’s a bad sign. She knows that the woman that you love more than anyone in the world and have done everything to try and keep is leaving and never coming back. You knew it, but now you more really know it.

When we talk about falling out of love, what are we really talking about? If love is a series of distinct chemical processes in the brain, how do we account for the sucker punch in our gut or between our legs that we get the first time we meet “the one”, or “the one right now”? Can we really chalk up love for another person or persons that spans 5, 10, or 15 years, changing and growing very different ways over time? Does all that reside solely in the folds of the brain or does part of it reside, as the cliché goes, in the heart?

I’ve been promising to live blog the end of my 22 year relationship and 20 year marriage, but I can’t seem to keep up. I suppose that live journaling this requires time, but by the end of the day, I find my head spinning, having days both good and bad, tired and not knowing even how to put words down to encompass the waves of emotion.

It has been 15 days since I found out about my wife’s infidelity, which, if you’ve been keeping up, for a myriad of reasons in my past, is literally the worst possible betrayal she could have done to me. Now, is it because she’s figured out to not only cut your chest open and throw salt into the wound by telling you that, yes, she’s sorry she hurt you, but she has zero, no regrets about having the one-night stand 9 months ago, and still doesn’t. Or is it the putting of the steel toe boot into the fresh wound by telling you that the only reason was having sex with you in the first place is because of the sexting affair she was having this man, meaning, if you can do math, that in last year you can literally say that you’ve not been touched or kissed let alone fucked by a woman with a single shred of interest in you. That’s four incidents of intercourse, 2 with her wet from this other man, and two utter pity fucks that we pathetic in their lack of passion on any level in the last year.

But, shockingly, I already find that there are ways to get past that. Because the long term prospect of her leaving forever amazingly trumps the 20 minutes of bad action. And this is where I wonder where we get the idea of falling out of love from.

Did we have a spectacularly bad run of years of our marriage? Yes, I was in a failing business that I couldn’t get out of leading to some bad depression on my part, so both economically and emotionally, I put a terrible strain on our family. That ended in Feb of 2016 when I resurrected an earlier career and started moving forward again, with salary and benefits. Not a ton, but some. Just enough for us to almost not live on.

I also, with the depression lifted, started to think clearly again. I went to work on myself to make sure that the bad years were in the past for us, and that I wouldn’t fall prey to the same mistakes. Most of all, I was determined to make that time up to her for our future. Flash forward three and half years later, and she tells me that last August, she just started feeling different and just felt no love for me at all anymore. Hence the one-night stand in October with zero regret. Four weeks after she supposedly suddenly stopped loving me, I landed a new job with almost double the salary and, niavely, thought that we had finally made it. That we had finally put all the bad years behind us. Little did I know.

And now I wonder, is this revisionist history? Is this yet another way for her to passive aggressively twist the knife by pointing out that I missed saving our marriage, after 20 years, by a month? Is it possible that she is telling the truth and I’m both less lucky and a greater fool than one can imagine? Can fate work that much against me?

I slogged through years of that business killing me both physically and mentally with only that hope of getting a good job and being happy with this woman, with having the finances and time to actually do all the things that we had talked about. And after a decade of hard work, I reach the finish line 4 weeks too late?

And if it is, how do you survive this? How can I? I’m in more pain physically than thought a body could be and still function. How do you move forward with anything when you life is being blow up around you? How do you survive when she doesn’t love you anymore?