Black raven, the only issue I have with your post is that I am not sure that I do love him any more and I certainly don't miss him. I did love him, very much and I still care enough to feel bad about him suffering. But I think that my feelings have evolved so much throughout this trauma that I don't want to be too dogmatic too soon. Maybe, just maybe if he becomes truely remorseful and understands the pain of what he has inflicted on me then maybe the love might come back. (what do you think?) For the sake of the children, I'd like to think it might but my feeling is that he has destroyed our relationship and now we need to build a whole new one from scratch.

"Right now he is trying to negotiate my return so he can have OW and me both. I won't entertain any conversation or manipulation with him until she is out of the picture and I would appreciate you not doing the manipulating for him."

Or simply...

"Until he has taken steps to remove OW from his life, I will not come back. He has not done that and does not plan to do that or else I would be hearing from him directly, not from you."

Sugarcane

Oh, sugarcane, no!!!!!! I in no way meant to misrepresent what you said about Tully's situation. Please believe me.
..........

Sugarcane, I am so sorry that my words gave you even a moment of concern. You are one of Tully's greatest supports and I have nothing but admiration for your words to her.

Blessings,
WH2LE

Anyway, my friend asked for WH's number so that her husband arrange a time and I took the opportunity to ask my friend to pass on 3 messages to WH.
- that I know he is lying about being with OW the weekend before last and that it is pointless to continue lying.
- that I have taken note of his request to reconstruct with me and to have NC with OW but that I would like him to produce a written proposition on how he will achieve this including career, house or country changes if necessary.
- that he should pass this through our mediator or another one he may wish to propose.

She rang me back to say that he said very little, just that he will take time to think about the proposition and send it to me on Wednesday. (I'm curious to see if he includes an apology in it. I'll post it here when i get it.)
......................................................

Sugar, I just wanted to refer to an earlier post and say that my fear is not that he will move on and learn to live without me but that I will. Life here is coming together. Friends are rallying round and life is not too bad at all. It's not always perfect from a logistical point of view but well, logistics aren't everything. I can feel that as time moves on I am less inclined to go back and I feel that going to him is a far riskier life-strategy, not that I'm terribly risk-averse. (by the way thanks for all those complimentary adjectives even if none are verifiable)

Do you think that any of them have given him the reality check and severe bashing that he deserves?

Tully,

This is going to be a very hard email for me to write because I don't know if I am going to say what you want to hear. I don't really know either where to start from. I suppose it is best to start from the event that pushes me to write this email as opposed to talking to you directly. So, you took the girls and left three weeks ago. I understand from your note and from GF the reasons why you did this. You obviously felt that there was no other solution. However, there are always several ways of doing things and this is just the one you chose. It made me very angry because I think that by doing this, you de facto involved the girls in our problems. I would have dearly loved to avoid this as I think it could and should have been avoided. Anyway, I understand that, as you told me before, you needed to go 'where you feel loved'. You also said once that minding the girls was not exactly an advantage these days. So, it made me first wonder why you took them to Ireland with you. Why not leave them here where they could have continued with school and their friends? Do you think I could not have minded them myself? So, I could be wrong, but I presume that either you need them, or you do not want me to have them. The first reason is slightly contradictory with you feeling that they added a bit of a struggle to your situation. The second reason would be wrong, I think, and I don't believe you would do that. However, the bottom line is that I have been without them for 3 weeks and I miss them dearly.

In fact, the problem linked to you escaping to Ireland with the girls and cutting direct contact with me, is that this has completely focused my attention on my fear to lose my children. This in turn makes me feel that I would do everything to get them back and you can imagine my frustration when every night, they ask me when I will come to bring them back home. In fact, it is even worse because it has diverted my attention from our relationship and my frustration pushes me to be angry at you. I have been telling Isa this very fact from day one insisting that the longer you are away the worse things are getting. Last week-end was a dreadfully hard blow. I had hoped to see you by coming unexpectedly in order to restore some sort of contact and also to beg you to come home. You found out (presumably seeing that I booked air france tickets on the net…) and asked your brother to prevent me from getting into his house. My attempt failed and I spent the rest of the evening thinking of my poor situation. Well, our poor situation I should say. I slept 3 hours that night and I had lots of time to be very frustrated with the way things are. The following day was, in a sense, even worse. Although it was great to have the girls in the morning, their questions were a killer. For the first few minutes, they asked me if I was there to take them back home. Then DD8 asked: 'Papa, why are you in love with OW?'. This destroyed a lot of things in me. Since the beginning, I have been thinking that by acting like you did, you involved the girls in what should have remained our 'big people' problems. By telling them that, you put them in the first line of that battle. I felt that this was so so wrong and I have to say that I was immensely annoyed with you for that. I refrained from reacting, or doing anything for a few days, just so that I would calm down a little. The problem is that again, I feel terrorised at the idea of losing the girls and I am not trying to rebuild our relationship in my head. Worse even, I have now to fight against my feeling of anger and annoyance at you. This is so destructive.

I am sure all this seems really unfair to you as I am the one originally at fault. All this is because of what I did. Yes, this is true, but nevertheless, how is this possible that I now find myself in this state of mind whereas I had decided weeks ago to rebuild our relationship? I understand that you felt I was not making enough efforts in rebuilding. You are a very motivated, involved and passionate person lovey, but I don't work the same way as you do. Although my attitude did not show the motivation you expected, I was making progress in my head. I don't function like you Tully, how come you don't know this by now? Why did you not let me deal with my big mistake my own way? Well, I do not reproach you anything as we are two different people who react differently and who have to find compromises to live together. I believe this maybe the crucial point in our recent problems. During my long solitary night in the hotel last Saturday, I tried to address this very thing and tried to understand what had gone wrong in our relationship. My analysis is the following. Of course, I can be wrong, but this is what I feel anyway: what went wrong is that one of your big qualities slowly became a fault in my eyes. You do everything 200%. You are very 'entière' as we know and that can be great. However, this slowly became a problem because I felt that if I did not agree with you, I was getting involved into big long, very long (often at night) arguments. These little by little were draining me and I found myself trying to run away from them. I ended refraining away from talking about anything interesting. I should have talked about this problem, but I am not sure I fully understood it myself. I am not sure I realised that the drift I felt was happening had a simple cause. Do not mislead yourself on that point: OW had nothing to do with it. No, it was a problem between you and me, and I am at fault not to have tried to analyse what was wrong. It could have sorted itself I am sure, but then, life put OW in the picture. And everything went down the slope. This was my analysis last Saturday night, but I think this is not far off the track.

In the last weeks, your 200% involvement in things has pushed you to demand the same involvement from me. Again, you are of course more than justified to have reacted the way you did. I am not here trying to put the blame on you. I feel blame is irrelevant if we split up. Splitting means that we failed, we, as a couple. I am conscious that it is mainly my fault if we have reached this point, and I can take the bulk of the blame but this is meaningless I think.

At present, I am faced with a problem that is getting bigger and bigger: I focus all my attention (and suffering) on the girls. The complete loss of contact with you makes me forget about our relationship and it is even worse because I have a tendency to blame you for the pain I suffer these days. I am also trying to cope with the present situation by adapting to my new life. I am becoming used to being alone and seeing the girls at week-ends. No, in fact I am not adapting to seeing them only at week-ends, but I am slowly getting into the mind of a divorced man. How can you expect our relashionship to improve when you put me in a situation where I tend to blame you for what I suffer? Why cut all contacts? I don't understand that at all. I don't know how it preserves you from losing the rest of your love for me. What I am sure of, is that on my side, this situation is slowly destroying my love for you. I have known this would happen since the very day that you left. I have told GF every time we had contacts. I wrote it to you by email but you did not want to read it. I have been telling everybody who rings or call in. I am desperate to pass the message to you, but I have been feeling completely helpless in getting it across. Tully, I have reached an extremely dangerous state. If you don't come home urgently, there will be nothing we can do to make our relationship work again. This is what I think at this very moment.

I know you think that the basis for everything is the two of us, but personally, I cannot disassociate our children to our relationship. I know they would be happiest in a normal family life with both of their parents. They ask me every evening to come and get them back home. This breaks my heart and every time I hear this, I feel it is very detrimental to our relationship as I get angry with you for imposing that on them and me. I hope you understand how I feel. Whatever the exact matching of our feelings for each other is, I feel the present situation is not good for the girls and this is hard to accept. Please, come back home or let me bring the girls back home if you feel you would prefer not to come back yet. I would understand if you still don't want to see me.

Concerning the future, I am reaching a stage where I ask all relevant people how to deal with kids in case of a separation. I am now imagining my life away from you and how I would deal with seeing the girls much less. In fact, last week-end, I though separating would be a much better option that what I am going through now. This is because if I was clearly separated, I could organise something much more structured, much better to see the girls. This would surely prevent us from having breakfast on the bench in the shopping center after searching for a decent place early on a Sunday morning. It would surely prevent me from relying on jumping jacks to get a bit of fun with my girls. I don't know what I want anymore. Before you left, I knew I wanted to rebuild. Now, I am completely lost with what I feel. In fact, I go from one extreme to the other 10 times a day. People who ring me probably think I am a looney because depending on exactly when they catch me, I am a completely different person. So much so that it is difficult to estimate where my average mood is… This is the reason why I did not want to write to you straight after last week-end. I have been delaying sending this email since Monday because I would really like to have a clear vision of the way I see things. But I don't. I do have to send you something before things go completely out of hands though. This is why I am sending you this now. Just because this is reflecting my feelings, knowing that I am not offering anything clear. I feel that it is most important that you all come back home urgently. I could move out and rent a small apartment for a while, or stay in the house if you can bear my presence. In any case, we have to talk directly and calmly about the future. I cannot do that through somebody else. I cannot do anything through somebody else actually. So please, I beg you for the girls sake, please come home now.


WH


PS: I have read this mail again and find it rather scattered. This is because I have been changing and adding things every day. Sorry about that, but it somehow reflects my frame of mind.