About

Why This Blog

This blog is just my journal for something personal that I’m going through right now. I’m at a cross-roads in my life and will be doing some serious soul searching and introspective work on myself mentally, emotionally and physically over the next few months beginning May 1, 2008.

Some History

I’m 33 years old. I’ve been with the same woman, who I’m now married to with 3 kids, since we were both 16 years old. She is, to this day, an amazing woman and I love her dearly but when you are 16 years old, you do NOT know what you want in life, whether it’s career, significant other, personal goals, etc. In this particular case, my wife and I got together for a certain set of reasons that were deeper than our own understanding, like most teen love interests. There were childhood hang-ups and issues that we both had that drew us together in ways we didn’t understand from female abandonment, co-dependency, low self-esteem, child abuse, poverty at some level, and more. These are things that don’t show up for you to deal with until you are older and have kids and realize that there is baggage you need to deal with so that your children can be raised in a healthier environment than you were. Then do what you can to improve the state of humanity through generational crap you’ve cleaned up while raising them.

So my wife and I grind on for the last 15 years, tackling money woes, sex issues that never appear to end or fix themselves, having kids for the wrong reasons, etc. We are one of millions of couples that go through this stuff so we don’t have a corner on the ’struggling marriage’ block.

We have no regrets and our kids are awesome, stable, healthy and loved a lot by both of us and our friends and extended family. It’s just time for a change for us parents. We were teenagers stuck in adult bodies until now.

Turning Point Begins

Starting about 4 years ago I started to get so tired of these things that don’t seem to get better so I start the process of deciding that maybe we shouldn’t be together. Even after extensive marital counseling that did help us as individuals in a lot of ways, some of the core issues just would not go away. There seemed to be no end in sight. 2 years ago I hunkered down and decided to tell her I wanted a divorce. I was adamantly against it and knew the pain the kids might go through but I was so tired of being unhappy and not being able to be myself that I just couldn’t go on. Because my wife at the time was still immersed in her co-dependent way of thinking, she was crushed and would not acknowledge the reality of our relationship, how unhappy she was, and how much of the truth I was speaking. I don’t blame her at all. She was a product of her environment growing up with an extremely co-dependent mom, and a selfish, self-absorbed father that always put himself and his interests and his neuroses first. To boot neither of her parents had any self-esteem at all so she didn’t have much to work with on the front of self-worth. She was so upset that the guilt I felt was overwhelming (not rational and was a problem in itself), so I decided to back peddle on my decision and try and make it work.

The Present

So after two years of me “trying” to be happy being someone I’m not with someone who wasn’t happy that didn’t have a sense of who she was as an adult or human being, the wife came around. About a year ago she started hanging out with a great group of woman in an exercise class and started also participating in martial arts. The more she got involved with martial arts, establishing her own circle of friends at the studio, the focused she got on both, the more the real metamorphosis began.

I could actually start to see the changes but it was interesting because she was operating one way at home but was different when hanging with her new friends and at that environment. The realization acknowledgment on her part of our unhappiness with the current state of our marriage was on the horizon. I could kinda tell but I didn’t know when. She needed to come to that conclusion on her own….and she did.

Next Steps

So here we are. We love each other. We love our kids. We are great friends.

We now need to learn how to be ourselves as adults. We need to then and only then learn how to be married with the new improved versions of ourselves.

We know that in life there are no guarantees but we do know that we’d like to try and make it work with us both being happy on the inside first.

The Plan

We will be sleeping in separate locations for a month. 4 nights a week I’ll be at the temporary place, and 2 nights a week she will. Every Sunday we will have a family day with the kids and that night we will have a date where we just hang out and enjoy each other’s company at dinner or on a walk or wherever, with no pressure. We will also be getting counseling every week either individually or together.

Our goal is to make the marriage work. Regardless if we end up staying married or not, I believe we’re doing the right thing for ourselves and if we can still be together all the better.

This blog will have documented my daily progress on myself and opinions and other thoughts that come out during this process.

Thanks for reading.