5 month update.
What what a journey it was!
In essence, things went from bad to great then turned bad again.
The first few months were fantastic. Her new apartment, though overpriced (paid from her salary), was nice and the neighborhood was great for kids too. I would be there every other day taking advantage of long train commute to read a ton. Sex went from 2x/week while in relationship to 4x/week while separated. The excitement of setting up a new space gave her and me a new wave of energy. The therapy was going great with the therapist asking all sort of thought-provoking probing questions. I would spend more and more time at her place and started getting the uneasy feeling that things are becoming too calm as if we were going back to old patterns of behavior.
Then something happened 3 weeks ago and everything crumbled back to nothing.
We had a small fight. She would try to control the frequency of how often to change the shirt on my 3 year old. Me: "The shirt looks clean so he can still wear it today"; Her: "In my house you do as i tell you."
Of course it wasn't about the shirt but fundamental lack of trust we have for one another. I saw it as yet another sign of disrespect where she doesn't pay attention to the big picture: me helping with house chores like a good husband/father and again she started accusing me that i don't do anything around the house... She clearly was seeing her own version of reality where nothing i do can make her happy. And, in turn, i didn't want the responsibility of being in charge of he happiness anymore.
Something snapped in her and in me that day.
If you bothered reading previous posts, you might know that i started to draw her during the past few months (
https://www.instagram.com/touchofyes/ ). The more i looked at her body - though it's quite good - it wouldn't turn me on with the uncontrollable desire as it used to. That made me, after all those years of incredible sex, quite sexually indifferent. I would look at her, and feel nothing in my pants or my heart.
The fundamental problem is that we both married our fantasies and not the real person. When the glasses come off you start being bitter at your partner for not living up to the expectations we place in them but, instead, we should be angry at self for not seeing the signs clearly laid out in front of us all those years. The other is who the other is - there is no changing that and you can only accept it and learn how to live with those "problematic" qualities.