Doing the Limbo

So I am feeling stuck in limbo now. My divorce stuff is taking forever, I guess since I am a very low priority for the lawyer (I am basically a pro bono case for her). I just want to get this whole thing over with as soon as possible. My marriage didn't work out - okay, let me move on then. Divorce is a terrible thing, very painful and drawn out, but it doesn't kill you. It's like torture in that way.

All the while, I am effectively homeless, living in my parents' computer room, sleeping on an inflatable mattress, spending my days working and coming home for a brief respite each night before heading back to work. The commute is 90 minutes each way, so 11 hours of my day are essentially consumed by work. Every other weekend (or thereabouts) I visit my kids (Aidan, 6, and Jalen, 3). It's the biweekly highlight of my life. I stay in a hotel and they stay with me. We hang out and have fun. Sometimes we go out to eat, and my ex-wife (I'm just going to start calling her that, I think, even if it's not official just yet) often comes along.

She and I are getting along okay now, making the awkward transition from marriage to friendship. I suppose it can never simply be friendship. We've shared too much and continue to share the responsibility of the children. But it is no longer a marriage, no longer a romantic relationship. Do I still care about her? Yes. Do I still enjoy time spent with her? These days, most of the time, yes. Do I still think she's attractive? Yes. Do I want to be with her anymore? No. I do not.

I am almost ashamed to type that. My parents have been together for nearly forty years. I always thought of marriage as permanent. You get married and you stay with that person. But my ex-wife comes from a much different background. Her parents were young and unmarried, and both of them abandoned her. She was raised by her grandmother, who had two failed marriages. I should have seen it coming, I guess.

It seemed to me, throughout the marriage, that whenever the going got rough and we were at odds on something (as all couples occasionally are), she would think about leaving. In 2005 it came to a head and she told me she didn't want to be with me anymore. We reconciled over a period of months, and even had another child. I thought things were better. But when we moved back to New York after five years in Providence, it came again. And again. And again. She would bring up the idea of leaving me time and time again. I would fight as hard as I could, trying to be things I could never be and do things I could never do in order to keep her with me. Finally, she wore me down. The anguish of constant and repeated rejection was too much for me. When she asked for a divorce, I said okay.

The basics of it, from my end: we simply didn't match up in some key areas, and I don't think we realized it early on. Where we were different, we figured it would be complementary.

Really, I could spend pages and pages of a book writing about our differences, to the point where one might ask what in the world we saw in each other to begin with. My love of dark humor vs. her love of sappy romantic comedies. Her spirituality vs. my rationality. Her outgoing, extroverted personality vs. my shy, reserved introversion. And many more. We were the very definition of "irreconcilable differences".

But, somehow, through all those differences, there was love. Maybe it was doomed to fail right from the start, but I have no regrets about having been married. I regret only that we could not resolve our differences for the sake of the children, who stand as the happiest, brightest results of our time together. I cannot imagine life without my sons in it, and it was the love my ex-wife and I shared that made their very existence possible.

Even now, I wish her the best. I don't like to see her sad. I want her to succeed and do well. Not just for the children, but for her. While we may have been incompatible as husband and wife, I care deeply about her as a friend.

That said, I'm still stuck in limbo with this whole thing. Just the other day, for the first time in a very long time, I met a woman and thought, "I'd like to go out with her". She was attractive and smart and seemed very cool, with a good sense of humor. It's funny; I'd met her once before, in similar circumstances, while married, and did not experience the same thing, at least not consciously. I'm an unusually monogamous guy who is not tempted much by the idea of cheating or even of dating multiple people at the same time.

But what can I do with such feelings now? What do I have to offer, a guy going through a divorce who sleeps on the floor in his parents' house, that wouldn't scare women away? I mean, I do have a lot to offer, but I know that anyone looking rationally at my situation would certainly see red warning signs telling them to stay away.

Often in life, we find ourselves in situations in which our emotions have not caught up to our situation. A relationship ends, and we need time to adjust before dating again. A loved one dies, we need to adjust to not having them around.

I have the opposite problem: I need my situation to catch up to my emotions. My marriage ended nearly a year ago now. It took a lot, but I am over it. I feel single - not single in the same way I was before being married, but single. I am finding myself interested in other women again.

I need to move on. I need to get my own place, find someone more suited to me, and continue living. Being with in my parents' house makes me feel like a kid, and I know it's a strain on them to have me there. But I can't. Too much of my money is going to my ex-wife while she tries to find herself a job in a terrible economy. I'm giving her more than double what I'm obligated to give so that they will be okay. Until she can stand on her own two feet and, to a lesser degree, until the marriage is officially dissolved, I will continue to linger in limbo.