Last month marked one year since dday for me
(my story is here). Things have improved, somewhat, but overall, it's not that great.
My wife is still very angry with me and very sad, at the same time. We've talked a lot about what happened and continue to do so, but we've not been to MC because she has not yet agreed to do so, even for herself. I have done what I can to prove to her that I want to repair our marriage relationship, but she hasn't been able to get much past my EA than she was last year.
She feels like I gave up a long time ago and, to a degree, she's right, I did, which is why the EA happened. I gave up for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that, in hindsight, neither of us had a good set of communication skills to be able to deal with some of the conflicts that came our way.
Our marriage is pretty much destroyed and I don't really know how to put it back together as something new yet. I can't help but to want what I had before, at least the good times (way too late for that now), but how do you move forward into something "new". I don't feel very positive about the whole situation. I've tried, but I don't see a whole lot of good here. Sex has been out of the picture since last summer, we barely touch, and are basically roommates in that regard. There's not much in the way of intimate affection between us. Not just the sexual part, but the general intimacy of being in a relationship/marriage, feeling good around you partner is pretty non-existent; there's usually a lot of tension just under the surface.
I hate that she's right about my having given up on the relationship early on. It's a bad character trait from my childhood. I was never much of a "try, try again" kid and unfortunately, that lasted into my adult-hood. Of course I've had my triumphs, but I failed in one of the most important aspects of adult life and I don't have a clue about how to fix what happened. I mean, I have done a ton of things to make things better like, going NC with my AP, writing a NC email and sending it in front of my wife, she already had access to my computer and online life, and I've apologized a million times in a million different ways.
I was incredibly selfish for making the choice of the EA instead of looking for solutions to what was wrong in my marriage and now, I'm paying the price. I'm just trying to be patient with her and doing what I can to make it better, but imagining a lifetime's worth of resentment and anger does not make me feel gung-ho about fixing things.
Tonight (or last night, seeing that it's now 4:20am on the next morning), I asked her what she needed from me and she said, "I needed for you to not do what you did". I had no answer. I'm sorry, I don't have a real question, I'm just trying to get some of this out of my head.
