How to handle conflicting emotions from sad to relieved to angry
Recently separated, married almost 25 years, kids are grown, 53M. She asked me to move out , but honestly there are no plans to "work on our relationship" as the things she needs from me and the things I need from her are too far apart and have gone on for too long that even if we both put in the work, we are not to each other, the partners that we want or need anymore, in my opinion.
From her side: I haven't taken care of myself as well as I should, but I'm very active, just not ripped. Yes I've struggled with alcohol, anger and porn, and am in recovery groups for those things. She doesn't trust me because she wants full accountability every time I drink or look at porn, and I honestly have accountability partners for that and don't feel that she's a safe person to be confiding in.
From my side: she's an angry, perfectionistic person who doesn't seem to like me anymore and doesn't even know who I am at my core, or does know but doesn't care. She was a stay-at-home mom since 2004 and she was ready to go back to work when the kids were old enough to not really need her anymore, instead of getting a (real) job which is what I wanted for her (so she would get more life skills and have to be around other people and finally learn some better communication skills), instead she learned about real estate investing, being a property manager, doing furnished rentals etc, and used our equity and savings to start buying houses and renting them out. She thinks those things have been a success, I think they've over-extended us and brought nothing but drama and conflict into our lives. I think she's busy with tenants who trash her properties regularly and brings her drama and trauma from being mistreated by contractors, cleaners, and tenants home to me and our finances. Every time I've encouraged her to change course and do a less impactful, less stressful, more cash flowing job, it's been a blowout fight and argument.
I've never met someone who is so unable to take constructive advice about how to better measure and manage her business. I do this for a living btw, I do analytics and data for a living and my job is to help companies measure where they're spending time and money and measure ROI/revenue so they can pay attention to the bad stuff and do the things that bring more value and joy. She will NOT listen to anything I have to say about this, says she's too busy to measure her time and that she tracks all expenses and if I want to see them then "there's the excel spreadsheets", like that's the full amount of transparency and accountability that she has to provide. Note: in the 8 or so years she's been doing real estate, she's never taken disbursements or contributed cash to our family finances. Everything stays in the business. So, nothing she is doing is helping us now, which we've needed (I've needed) because my job and industry is immensely stressful and I've been wanting to slow down, possibly retrain, or god forbid hope to retire someday, but anytime I bring this up it's a blow out fight and I'm the bad guy.
Yes, I hid my porn use from her and lied about it later on, but honestly she's choosing to feel "traumatized" by a husband who has supported her for 20+ years, does all the cooking and cleaning, acts as her unpaid handy man for her business, and has a few weaknesses. Yes I know lying is a big deal , I'm not trying to minimize that.
From therapy and recovery groups over the last 1.5 years, I've learned that acting out or soothing with alcohol or porn were just soothing mechanism to manage life stressors, and I've been working on identifying those stressors and everything comes back to her her her.
So , re: the title of this post. this separation has been a mix of conflicting emotions, at first it was a gut punch, a "omg I've put 30 years of my life into this relationship, 25 years married, I've got kids with her, what am I now?" to also a relief that I'm not walking on eggshells in the same house with her, to freak out mode about how this will impact finances. Usually with a separation, you're working towards reconciliation right? We haven't talked about that yet, and honestly I don't think there is anything we can do that's going to "clear the slate" and get us back to people who want to hang out together.
Sorry for the wall of text, I'm struggling here, truly deeply struggling