The relationship finally fell apart completely. Like I said before, if you totally ignore a woman, she's going to notice and she's not going to like it. Eventually, she had enough of the emotional distance between us and started having an affair, with a married guy nonetheless (another result of not having boundaries; see a trend emerging?) Of course, she is completely incapable of any self-reflection and always has been. So, she's not intelligent enough to realize that if I despise you and don't trust you, then there's not going to be any emotional connection between us. The very emotional connection she longed for and I deprived her of, she destroyed over years with a pattern of behavior. She's like a person who likes eggs, but then kills every chicken on the farm...and then blames the farmer because there are no eggs. I don't blame her for wanting out of the marriage. Hell, like I said, I wanted out long before she did. But I was torn between what I felt was my moral obligation to the marriage covenant and God, and the fact that I really came to despise her deep down. The truth is that had I divorced her long before when I should have, I would have been painted as "the bad guy". Well, I was sort of painted as that anyhow...at least she attempted to do that. But, at the end she was the unfaithful spouse, not me. And that will have it's own repercussions if it hasn't already. So, wanting out is one thing. Cheating is another thing entirely. It's a gutless move and only weak people without morals do shit like that. I could have cheated on her a thousand times over. I had plenty of opportunities. But I never even entertained the idea, much less followed through with such a thing. I learned through this that if you can't trust people with small things, you damn sure don't trust them with big ones. And of course, she proved to be untrustworthy at the end by doing the worst thing you can possibly do in a marriage. So if nothing else, it just validated to me that I was right along: she's not trustworthy and never was. All that to say, the entire collapse brought me to rock bottom. Even though I despised her, I didn't fully realize it at the point of separation and ensuing divorce. Her shitty patterns of behavior and my emotional distance from her became the norm over a long period of time. And so when it's considered "normal", it's easy not to realize how you really feel and what the problems really are. And then of course, if you're painting over everything with alcohol and pot, it's even more difficult to discern. I don't blame her entirely for the relationship going sour, though I will not take responsibility for the infidelity aspect. Like I said, it is possible to just get a divorce and not be a cheater. One of her complaints initially when we separated was that I drank and smoked too much. Although she never had a problem with the smoking for 7 years prior. She knew I did it before we were married. I later figured out that she needed "reasons" for wanting a divorce, and those reasons certainly couldn't include that she was unfaithful. She didn't want anyone to know about that..afterall, she had a paper mache reputation to uphold as being a "moral, Christian woman"..but I figured it out anyway. So, she found other "reasons" which conveniently enough for her, had nothing to do with her own actions over the previous years or their results. So, there was a fairly aggressive blameshifting and gaslighting campaign that occurred, but once I figured out she was cheating that shit became rather ineffective. Now, the truth was that she was right, I was drinking too much and smoking pot. Even though she made me miserable and that was the real reason I was doing it, it still wasn't good for me. And even though it was the reason she gave for wanting out and it wasn't even the truth (or at best it was only partially the reason), it didn't change the fact that I was doing it and shouldn't have been. It didn't affect me at my job or anything, so because I was a functional it made it easy for me to dismiss the notion that I had any problem. So, I quit cold turkey. That was two years ago and I haven't smoked pot since. I don't even have the desire. As for alcohol, I laid off completely for about 8 months. I did blame it exclusively for the relationship coming apart at the beginning, which made it very easy to quit. It wasn't until many months later and a lot of counseling that I realized how much she had truly sucked as a wife and that it wasn't so much that I was addicted to alcohol or pot as I was just choosing those substances as my way of escaping a miserable relationship while still being physically present. The first drink I had after that was with the woman who I am now with, and will marry in two months. She didn't pressure me or anything. We were on vacation and I decided to have a good time with her. So, I do drink some, but it's nothing like it used to be. I certainly don't feel like I need to in order to be happy. And that's the big difference between then and now. I am glad that I took the long hiatus from the bottle. My road to recovery from that awful relationship would have been much tougher - if not impossible - had I continued to drink during the separation and divorce. Anyhow, back to my original point: if you can figure out *why* you feel compelled to abuse alcohol or do drugs, that's half the battle at least. Because then you can attack the root of the problem. Granted, some people have a legitimate addiction, so that may be the "reason" they do it, I guess. Though I still think that below the surface, there is likely another reason or reasons that compel them to want to be drunk or high all the time. In my case, dealing with the "why" would have taken the form of confronting my ex-wife and basically giving her an ultimatum: "stop being a shitty person or I'm filing for divorce." Which, I did confront her about the behavior issues many times before. But then there's nothing that she could have done to be "less stupid" or to have common sense. That's just who she is. So ultimately, I should have never married her to begin with. Barring that, I should have left early on in the marriage once I started figuring out that there was no way I could feign being emotionally close to her and once I had lost respect for her. Because all I did was prolong the inevitable by thinking that I could fulfill my moral obligation by being there physically and not being there emotionally. I would say that counseling could have been another option to fix the "why", but we had already done that. It became apparent that she went in to counseling assuming that the counselor would put all of the onus on me and basically reinforce what she already believed: that she was a perfect wife and any problems we had were because of me. Well, that's not how it went. But of course, she just ignored any unflattering things that were said about her. If anything, the counseling only made her angrier because it didn't go the way she wanted it to. So, I already knew that counseling would be useless because for it to work, requires that the people attending the session actually listen to the counselor.. and she was either unwilling or incapable of doing that. I think what REALLY got her goat was that they had us take a personality test.. on this particular test, there are basically four personality extremes, represented as quadrants. So, four squares within a big square. Ideally, you wouldn't want to be too extreme in any particular direction because that would indicate an extreme personality type that isn't very balanced. A little offset from the center is OK, but if you're way up in the corner in any of the four quadrants, it means you probably have mental and/or emotional issues. I was right smack dab in the middle. She was skewed off in one of the corners. But did it make any difference to know that? Naaaa, not really. Because she was never attending the counseling to improve anything about herself in the first place.