Free Spirit:<P>Where to begin? In a nutshell, my W and I had been together for almost 7 years, 5 living together and 2 married. We were best friends and were almost inseparable during this time. We rarely had fights and never went to bed angry. To the whole world, we were ‘the perfect couple.’ Around the beginning of June she started to seem a little distant and was spending more time with her friends from work. On father’s day, after a very strained day with her family, I asked her what was wrong. It was at this point that she informed me that she was not happy with our marriage and hadn’t been for quite some time. Within 2 weeks she had her own apartment and she was talking divorce.<P>Since then, she has filed the divorce papers and we had what I would consider to be our first major fight in 7 years. The fight passed and we are once again trying to maintain our friendship. I signed our divorce agreement on our wedding anniversary and now we are just waiting on a court date for this to become final. <P>I love my wife and divorcing her is the last thing that I want. I have tried to do everything in my power to save our marriage, but when only one person is willing to work on a relationship, the relationship is not going to work. As hard as it has been, I have finally just had to give up on the marriage. I am still trying to salvage our friendship as I don’t want to lose her entirely, but even that has been hard. I have a very difficult time being around her or spending any amount of time with her and being able to keep my feelings and emotions limited to what is appropriate for ‘friendship.’ I’m also beginning to have difficulties wanting to maintain a friendship with a person who has hurt me as deeply as she has. I really don’t know where we went wrong. I know we weren’t the perfect couple, but I think we were pretty close. We had so many good things in our relationship, it just kills me that she is willing to throw all of this away without a fight or without even talking to a third party about it. She has not allowed the two of us to even sit down and talk to anyone from either family or any of our friends since all of this began. I don’t know if she is just afraid of being ganged up on or what, but it’s obvious that she has made up her mind and doesn’t want anyone trying to convince her of anything else. <P>Nobody who knows the two of us can really understand what is happening here either. Another man seems logical, but many of us don’t think that’s the case. If it is, she just has a good way of hiding it. If she was with OM, I wish she would have said something just so that I could have an answer. She was young when we met and has never been able to do things for herself, including living alone. Maybe this is just a growing up time for her to see what the real world is really like. If that is the case, it would have been nice for her to discover this before we got married.<P>The only thing left for me to do is to worry about myself and try to get along as best as I can without her. I am just trying to give her the space and independence that she said she wanted and can only hope for the best. I’m not expecting her to come back and I am not putting my life on hold for her, but I’m not ready to give up yet either. It’s a really rough spot that I’m in right now. As you will see by some of my other posts, it is evident that I am in the midst of an ever changing emotional roller coaster. Like many on this site, some days are better than others, but the questions always remain.<P>I have always been a believer in fate. I believe it was fate that brought us together and for whatever reason, it is fate that is pulling us apart. Like it or not, this is happening to me for a reason right now and it’s completely out of my control. I have always believed in fate and I’m not going to turn my back on it now just because I don’t like what is happening. I think you had stated in your post that divorce was just a piece of paper. I kind of feel that way myself, but I can’t live my life in limbo and I’ll have to move on a some point. Going through a divorce is something that I never thought I would experience personally. I keep wondering what I could have done wrong in my life to deserve this.<P>Write back and I will try to help if I can.<P>------------------<BR>JH93
