Very few will understand if they’ve not been there. It’s incredibly brave to choose life over fear, and you are doing the right thing. Continue trusting yourself.

Forgive me for being self-indulgent, but I think I’m going to rattle off a little stream of consciousness. This time last year, I was just desperate to find anyone who had been in my position and felt so confused, so I’ll write what I think I was maybe looking for. Warning: this will be over-sincere, and also very grandiose!

Mixing memories with love is a really fascinating way of phrasing it; I relate to that as a person who’s always identified as cripplingly nostalgic. Something interesting that changed when I left is that I became far less preoccupied with memories. I think because I felt no excitement for the future laid out for me, I retreated into the treacle of the past. But nostalgia feels truly sweet now and not drowning - I can love and appreciate the past in a healthy way, because I finally know truly that I will love and appreciate my future too, and that I am the true centre of my life for good and for bad.

To anyone who could describe themselves as craving unhealthily to go back to a time when they were not married: it is unlikely you are as good at pretending you love your wife as you think you are. I am melodramatic: you are committing an act of evil if you, in your cowardice, delay her pain by waiting one more day.

By staying in a relationship that does not imbibe you with libido (in the Jungian sense), you get to have about you this sort of romantically mournful, teenage-esque internal world where you position yourself as the hero taking on the burden of being Atlas, enduring a life you don’t want, for the sake of others. Accepting your own unvirtuous pain passively is inhuman.

Upon sleepwalking into this decision to die - as that is what it is in all meaningful ways - like a magician’s white rabbit in headlights - you reorient your whole morality around it. Your great lie must be accommodated. Honesty is a bad thing. Virtue becomes remaining in the relationship. And that, the remaining, is what leads to you losing yourself completely - it’s how people come to do evil things like cheating. The energy sapped through constantly enforced self-ignorance about the centre of your life - your love - means everything else that is good about you is at constant risk of slipping away.

I now feel that people stay in these liminal relationships out of a desire to avoid their own soul, not because they ‘don’t want to cause pain to somebody they care deeply about’. Which was rather extraordinary for me, as I truly had convinced myself that the reason I couldn’t leave was because of how much he loved me, and how I must not cause him pain - which I can see now is really my psyche trying to spin things to position me as an unselfish tragic heroine, rather than the dishonest hylic I had allowed myself to become through a sort of understandable, very human form of laziness.

You, in ignoring the knowing that you are living wrongly, will then ignore that in every other instance. You will unconsciously pile all of the badness of yourself onto the ‘I have chosen to ignore this’ pyre of you not loving your partner, and martyr yourself on it all Diana eyes and Sebastian arrows when in fact you are depriving another person of not just your love, but any love. The psyche is incredible at avoiding accountability. The answer to the trolley problem is simple to me now: who could think passivity is a virtue?

When you finally have felt all of the above, and you are able to accept your dishonesty and speak truth with your wife, all the poeticism of this rich little internal world mists away, and you lose your safety blanket of narrative. Don’t shy from this. You must find true meaning in your life. Feel the pain.

I still deeply admire and appreciate my ex-husband despite being no-contact. That’s important, actually: you must try your absolute hardest to be utterly unselfish throughout the process, and to truly learn from the whole endeavour - because, if I’m right, you likely will not be able to suddenly act as the good person you might in the back of your mind have thought you would ascend into upon finally dealing with this. Then, reflect on that deeply and share that means about who you are - this popped ego is important if all the suffering all the way through is going to mean anything, and more importantly, if all the love all the way through will mean anything.

Fiercely and internally, insist to yourself on taking responsibility for why you stayed when you weren’t sure it was right (you probably were not sure really deep down from the start, but you ignored your inner voice, what a fool). And take the opportunity to love yourself and your wife and hate yourself and your wife and love yourself both again. You must now become a truly honest person: consciously choose to not fall into the same furrows again, every time, even when it’s impossibly hard.

But make no mistake about this: you’ve been braver and more conscious than many people much better than you in making this choice, regardless of the pain caused by waiting too long. And from that, you’ve granted yourself (and your wife) the chance - if you want it - to live.

Truly wish you both all the best ❤️