Day 3

Day 3 was the hardest day for a couple of reasons: 1) It was my first day back to work since he left. Over the weekend, I could lounge around with my friends and let them distract me between tears. On Monday, however, I had to put myself together like a normal person and try to be productive. 2) I was seeing hubby for our counseling appointment in the evening.

Because of the 2nd reason, I was completely distracted all day and was highly UNproductive at work for the entire day. Plus, because I tend to over-share things about my personal life and had told a few of the people I work with that I was going through a rough time, everyone wanted to know how I was doing. Considering that things had gone so much further "wrong" than I had anticipated the week before, I had to (well, didn't HAVE to) tell them that he'd actually walked out.

When I finally left work and came home, all I could think about was going to see him at the appointment. We had planned to meet half an hour before the appointment at a coffee shop to see each other before the session. I couldn't figure out what to do with myself in the hours until I had to leave, so I crawled into bed and took a nap. Maybe not the healthiest way to approach things, but it gave me 2 hours reprieve from obsessing about what I was going to say, what he was going to say, etc.

I got up and put on some make up and did my hair... I'm not sure why looking so put together was important to me, but I had been thinking about it all day. If he was fine, I didn't want to walk in and look like a mess. I met him at the coffee shop, 15 minutes late, and so began our most awkward encounter in the 8 years that I've known him. We hugged and he held on tightly for a moment, but all I could do what give him a frigid hug-pat thing to keep myself together.
"I don't think you handled things very well." I told him after we tried to make small talk for a few minutes. He didn't think there was a good way to handle things.
"True. But you could have waited until after my birthday, after this session with the counselor, and you didn't have to tell all my friends before you told me."
He conceded that he could have waited the extra 2 days, but wouldn't agree about the friends piece. "I had to find a place to live." Agree to disagree then.

The session with the counselor was awful. It was 10+ minutes of him saying why our relationship was so bad, why he left and how he basically didn't think things would ever get better. I sat there quietly, getting more and more angry at all the half-truths and things that he had clearly "misremembered".
My husband is, I explained to the counselor, a malcontent. Nothing is ever good enough and nothing is ever satisfying or fulfilling. He looks to external things for happiness and, not surprisingly, never finds it. It was only my own naivety that stopped me from realizing that it was only a matter of time until I was the thing that wasn't good enough and that was stopping him from being happy.
It went back and forth like that for a while before the counselor said that he needed to be honest, with himself and with me, about whether or not he wanted things to work or he was weaning himself off the relationship with this "separation".
He said both.
The counselor told him he couldn't do both, so he said that he did want to try to work things about BUT that things would need to change if we were ever going to work out. "Things" in this case meant me; I had to change if we were going to stay together. I had to be tidier and I had to lose weight. Period. He wasn't going to change anything, wasn't going to put any effort in.
Eventually, the counselor convinced him that effort had to be both ways and that efforts had to be acknowledged when they did happen.
She also gave me some weight loss tips. And at the same time acknowledged that because of a health issue (PCOS), it would be really, really difficult for me to do that. She also suggested living separately permanently, like in half a duplex or in suites in a house. She also said we had to decide what we were willing to live with/without...
Okay, so: Is the goal that I lose weight, get tidy, we live apart, we never have a sex life, we never have kids? If that's the case, I am not on board. That wasn't part of our vows and not what I signed up for.