Backstory continued...

I think I may have sounded like it was all my wife's fault in my last post.  As far as the willing to try and rescue our marriage or resolve our differences that probably is true or seems true to me.  But getting ourselves to the point where our marriage was so stressed that ripping it apart, making our daughters have to try to survive a divorce and so on.  Well I was a part of that. 
I lied to myself, I told myself that we were strong enough to be countercultural.  I believed that although it wasn't ideal it was our situation and we were making the best of it while we had to for the best of our family.  You see my wife made twice as much money as I did.  I had a job, at points I had two.  I made a decent living, yet nothing compared to her's.  
True it made me feel poor, like less of a man, and I see now that my wife felt the same way...that I was less of a man.  She didn't say it out loud, she said it other ways.  I can count the dates we had in the last 8 years on two fingers I can count the other "things" we did together on the same fingers.  You may think I am throwing a pity party.  Nope I am saying that I was blind to what my choices were doing to me wife.  How in the world could these things, these huge red flags, be ongoing and I miss them?  Or be able to excuse them?
Because of the choices that we made buying bigger and nicer houses, etc. we both continued to feel trapped...then we began drifting apart.  I thought we were on the same team, I thought we were running a very difficult marathon getting to appoint where our girls were both in school and then I could find a different career that fit me...yet what it turns out we were doing was existing and slipping.  We both made choices to perpetuate this downward slide.
I think it starts, well at least it did for me, as a little voice.  It's so small and deep inside that you dismiss it.  Then it persists.  "You don't deserve this."  "You work so hard...."  "Look over there, their marriage/relationship/life if so much better than yours."  "She shouldn't treat you like that."  And the voice goes on and on and on.  Pretty soon it is hard to dismiss.  Then it starts to crack your defenses.

I ashamed to say that it cracked mine.  By the time I found out she felt the same way, it was too late.  Even though I was certain, I still am, that even with all the crap we had in our past we could have overcome, she was too far gone.  The little voice had convinced her that we were finished, that we were fatal. 

So....yes is there blame enough to go around yep.   But...the heart break is still palpable, no matter who is to blame or which percent of blame they are responsible for.