Goodbye Letter

For a long time, I wanted my wife back... or more accurately, I wanted back the woman with whom I fell in love. I don’t know who you are. It seems I am marginalized and relegated to the point of insignificance in your life. For you it seems there is always something more important than being my lover and my wife. This has been going on for a long time. I always hoped that ‘someday’ things would be different. Your priorities have been everywhere and nowhere: Your accounting work, your flower classes, your horse clinics... The list goes on and on. All of these are noble causes, but it leaves you with having nothing left over for me.

I do have needs and have told you this numerous times. Your response is typically that you don’t care, because you don’t feel I’ve done enough to deserve, or be worthy of, your attention, affection and appreciation. You look at me like I am some cold, selfish, unreasonable, irrational jerk — how dare I ask for something from you! Then you get angry, and justify your aloofness and frigidity by bringing up all manner of ‘indiscretions’ or ‘mistakes’ on my part, real or perceived. You just want to be angry at me, and then act like you are the victim… thus validating your own self-centered behavior in your mind, and to your friends, as well.

You can read this with as much righteous indignation as you choose; you are certainly free to be angry, hurt, infuriated, wrathful. You can read this and think what a coward I am for taking this way out… that I am a loser and a jerk and so on and so forth. You can easily and conveniently dismiss me, and my feelings, because you have had years’ worth of practice.

How can you have expected to stay married (or indeed, in a relationship) considering your hostile, dismissive, marginalizing and undermining attitude and actions toward your husband? Were you surprised to discover that your husband might have a limit on how much he would take before tuning you out or just turning away? I think what’s more surprising is that this insensitivity to your husbands’ needs and feelings goes hand-in-hand with a hypersensitivity about a reaction – any reaction – from him… reactions that are usually more than reasonable.

You wonder, “How can I get him to stop walking around angry and pouting?” That you treat me as an afterthought is easily dismissed by the double-standard you seem to have about what you do and what I do: If you change your mind, I must take it. When I change my mind, I’m an idiot. If you want affection, attention or praise from me, it’s because you’ve earned it; if I want affection, attention or praise from you, I haven’t earned it yet.

The double-standard is frustrating because it takes into account only your immediate needs or desires; the perception from my side is that everything you feel or need is legitimate and very important – while anything related to me is both unimportant and selfish.

What causes this double-standard mentality? Self-centeredness.

Whatever the cause, it seems as though you spent most of the time thinking largely about what your marriage – and your man – could do for you, and never on what you could do for your man. And when there is so little emphasis on the giving… the nitpicking and pettiness chews up and spits out what could have been a good, or even great, marriage.

This is not intended to be a last stab at you, a last nasty act in what you see as a series of them. This is the plaintive cry of a lonely man who lost hope. It isn’t a midlife crisis that will send him into the arms of a woman who behaves excited to see him and appreciative of his company — it is too many years of emotionally devastating neglect, coupled with your utter ambivalence and even hostility. The loneliest situation in life is not actually being alone — it is being married to somebody to whom you appear to be invisible, or have the importance of a wilted house plant. Being ignored, marginalized, disrespected, and then belittled for expressing your pain is a level of torture that is unbearable. So I have chosen not to bear it any longer.