Looking back at all my posts recently, I had to laugh. One of the first was called "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" That could be the title for all my posts, for my entire blog, and indeed for my life!

In my early posts, I waffled, now and then seemingly determined to pursue one course of action, only to change my mind a week later. But mostly I described my relationship with Rob as something damaged. The question was, and remains: Is it irrevocably so?

Today as a warm breeze drifts through my study window and my thoughts flow easily through my head and onto the page, I feel more comfortable in my apartment with Rob, indeed in my own skin, than I've felt in a while.

Some fellow FWW bloggers and readers say don't make a move until you're certain, and when you're certain, you'll know it. Others say I owe it to myself to leave. The latter is not unwarranted or unhelpful advice, but I don't know anything for certain, and I think I'm going to stay put for now. Feels right.

Where staying put with no big-picture plan seemed torturous just weeks ago, it doesn't seem so hard to bear at the moment. Why is this so? Couples therapy? Recent time apart from Rob as I traveled with a friend? Rob's continued evolution through therapeutic work? Maybe all?

One thing I've learned: being gentle with each other, allowing space for independent growth, and not giving in to fear when our directions diverge or seem unwieldy brings a bit of relief.

When the pressure of work, family drama, and troubled marriage overwhelm, I fantasize about leaving town, changing my name, and dropping off the grid for a small but self-sufficient life in the southwestern desert. I don't have much money of my own, but then I don't imagine needing much.

A beat up truck, a dog as companion, and a cozy adobe cottage — that's all I'll need. A pressure-free job at a local dive would pay the bills. I'll be perfectly content writing, exploring desert canyons, and kicking back with a few new friends over beer on rusty porch chairs. No father with Alzheimer's disease to worry about, no student loans to pay, no ambitious career or lifestyle plans in a fast-paced, high-priced northeastern city to frustrate the calm.

Such is my escape fantasy. Do we all have one? Do some people act on them? Are they the brave or crazy among us? I suppose that depends on how troubled their lives were, on how likely they could heal or remain safe, staying put.

This week I depart for a short Mexican vacation. A dear friend who lives on the opposite coast is meeting me for an escape to the beach. We'll sleep in a cabana on the jungle's edge, read in hammocks, and practice yoga on the shore. I anticipate warm air, fresh seafood, and easy conversation.

The temptation to relinquish obligations back home will tug hard. I'll relish the thought of staying behind in a paradise marvelous not so much for its sand and sea as for its lack of strings attached. But no person is an island. I'll be back.

Rob's and my couple's therapist suggested the choice I face isn't between our current relationships on the one hand, and separate futures on the other, but between a new relationship together on the one hand, and separate futures on the other.

Oh, right. I don't have to settle for our relationship status quo; if I choose to stay, it should be for a better, healthier relationship. While this is not earth shattering, it felt new, and gave me pause. I guess I had been in a rut thinking the relationship was unchangeable and therefore doomed. Not so?

After this suggestion, I spent a good day thinking, nah — there's no way Rob can change. And the trauma between us is irrevocable and can't be healed.

But then I thought of all the good changes Rob has already made and decided he would be capable of it. That lasted through a second day. But something still irked me. Even if change for the better were possible between us, I still had misgivings. What were they?

They were my dreams. My dreams of independence, the freedom of living on my own terms — without the guilt and the fighting and the worry — and the pride that would come of humble self-sufficiency.

These dreams of mine are set in the near future; I imagine enjoying this independence while I can still pass for the kind of young that gets away with putting up visitors on a futon rather than in a well-appointed guest room, that travels from hostel to hostel and is not decades older than the other guests.

This is it — I feel I'm in a race against time. Sure, independence at any age will be wonderful, but my particular dreams I want to live out, well, now.

This reminds me of Harry Burns's loving tirade at the end of When Harry Met Sally: "When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."

Soul searching and self-knowledge are good things, right? But if you can't get too much of a good thing, why am I tired of the pursuit of my true feelings, ready to give up on couple's therapy?

I'm going crazy from broken-record thinking, and pretty sure my best confidants are ready to flee at my next mention of these problems. I need answers. A divorce article I recently read pointed out that while contemplating separation over an extended period of time, you put yourself in a state of prolonged heightened awareness.

Heightened awareness. Helpful, right? It went further: indecision is an opportunity to contemplate every side of the issue. Great! But then it switched gears: at this time one does not think clearly or logically, and might not employ sound judgment. Beware of your thoughts. So which is it?

Well, of course it's both. I'm aware. And this awareness feels heightened — if, by "heightened" one means ever-present, obsessive, and anxiety-provoking. What am I aware about? That I'm not able to make a clear judgment about my situation. Circles again. All in all, I'd kind of like a break from thinking at all.

As any sometime-reader here knows, I feel guilty and ungrateful for wanting to leave Rob after he has been such a great comfort and support when I've needed it.

Recently a reader asked when Maya was going to start loving Maya. Indeed! As I pine over the hurt I might cause this nice man, and reconsider leaving him, I'm in danger of sacrificing my worth, potential, and dreams to protect his feelings. Not much self-love in evidence here.

And the fact is, I have done just as much for Rob as he has for me. Why don't I give myself that credit? While he helped me through depression, showed me how to get on track with money, and supported me through my parents' divorce and father's illness, I helped him leave an anxiety-provoking job and make a very successful career change. I refused to allow him to continue neglecting his health and made him start visiting a doctor and dentist regularly. I strongly encouraged him to find hobbies (he is now well into Tai Chi) after many of his friends relocated out-of-state and he was drinking alone and heavily. Most importantly, I started him on his pursuit of therapy, from which he is reaping benefits. That's not nothing!

But rather than growing together through our mutual support during life trials, we seem to have become two new people who don't need the other the way we did when we first married. It's a terrible irony that we helped each other grow and change, and now our new personalities don't seem to need what the other can offer.

Is it time to accept we've changed, say thank you, and move on? One thing is clear, I will continue this investigation with a healthy dose of self love. Maya comes first.

Regarding the decision to separate, a fellow FWW blogger told me that for her "It's a matter of discomfort having to surpass fear." Very wise. On the days I am certain leaving is the right thing to do though I can't quite do it, the underlying message here is my only comfort: the fear that keeps me stuck is not strange or unusual, and not something only I struggle with.

In an early job interview, an influential editor asked me how I felt about self-help books. This was more than a decade ago, and trying to impress her with an erudite reply, I told her I wasn't into them. She responded that the genre was poised to be the fastest growing in the English language market. Oops.

While that job didn't pan out, her prediction did. The number of titles purporting to help fix everything from low self-esteem to relationships skyrocketed, and people continue to buy them in droves. Apparently, millions of us feel stuck in some way. I am not alone. 

"You aren't on anybody's schedule but your own," another supportive blogger wrote. Indeed, there are people out there who seem to know exactly how "stuck" feels. And more than any book I've read, the kind voices in this community lift me up when I'm uncertain even about my own uncertainty. This brings me more patience. And more time. Thank you.

I avoided couples therapy for years, worried I'd be found the villain in the story. After all, I am the one who feels dissatisfied. The recent dearth of sex is due to my disinterest. And while I can no sooner fathom sticking my tongue in his mouth than licking a tiger's butt, Rob says he'd love to make it with me. Ew!

I quietly toyed with the idea leaving, and I brought up the idea of trial separation. I'm the one who dreams of being single and exploring the world anew, with no ring.

I imagine simple luxuries will be more meaningful because I will be affording them (if barely) on my own. My apartment will be humble, but it will be mine — no husband in sight to subsidize fancy meals out, fundraising dinners, or even hardcover paperbacks from the bookstore! (Back to waiting for the paperback releases.)

The way therapy played out, however, I saw how we've equally damaged "us." Petty, but this realization saves me a bit of guilt and stress. And, my care for Rob ever-present despite our troubles, I was relieved to tell him the hurtful details of my side of the story in a safe place where he was supported by a listener who had the protection of his ego in mind perhaps more than I.

We've had only one session, but it was promising. Not because it set our relationship on the road to recovery, but because it revealed a path toward a better us — separate or apart.

If any of you fellow contemplators are similarly avoiding "the couch," I challenge you to reconsider.

An old friend living far away in my home state just wrote: "Word on the street is you and Rob are separating." Readers of this blog know there's no one more ambivalent about such a proposition than I. "Waver" might as well be my middle name. So where did this definitive "word" about my separation come from?

Perhaps it started out as truth -Rob and I talk about a trial separation — and then got twisted into something more spectacularly conclusive. Remember the child's game "telephone," where we would laugh at the unintentionally skewed outcome of a simple statement whispered from one person to the next? Not so funny now.

It's curious, too, that "word" could have spread so far. I've shared my story with only a few confidants (none of whom have a connection to that old friend) and you readers (who know me only by my pseudonym).

I once read about a theory purporting the ability to gossip was once an evolutionary advantage. In primitive social structures, gossip was a helpful tool in understanding and navigating social hierarchies, and social status determined access to resources in lean times (which in turn affected health and ability to pass on genes).

Seems to me a community in upstate New York inherited some pretty hardy gossip genes. However, when applied today to the marriage status of a native daughter now hundreds of miles away, their skill seems wasted. I'm pretty sure their ability to thrive doesn't depend on my marriage status. Sheesh. 


Like Salon.com's Broadsheet blogger Sarah Hepola, I was jazzed to learn there's a word for the alternating bouts of malaise and anxiety that have wreaked havoc on my life lately. It seems I'm having a thrisis. That is, a midlife crisis for those of us in our thirties.

A state of mind worthy of a catchy buzzword must be a common and — hopefully — survivable, right?

Cut to surgeon sweating in scrubs, pulling mask aside: "I'm sorry, the thrisis was too pervasive. There was nothing I could do to save her."

Nah, it's not terminal. Worse. It's interminable. This protracted self-doubt (if I may speak from experience) is coupled with the suspicion that your funk will last forever unless you make a major, corrective life change. And if it isn't stopped? Well then, maybe it's mid-life crisis, early-onset variety. Eek!

According to wikipedia.com, the mid-life crisis is characterized by the "search of an undefined dream or goal," a "deep sense of remorse for goals not accomplished," and a "desire to achieve a feeling of youthfulness."

Check. Check, check.

So maybe the thrisis is a midlife crisis for early starters. If that's so, then there's a silver lining: the thrisis is a window of opportunity to correct things before they get too far out of whack, before we are irrevocably entrenched in an unsuitable life, forever plagued by existential doubt. (Or before we are forty-five, shopping for expensive red sports cars and mistresses. Oh wait, that's what the men do.)

Unfortunately, all this musing leaves me no further along. I'm pretty sure leaving Rob is the correction I need to make, but I'm still too scared to do it. And so the thrisis continues.

My preference for independence over even a slightly flawed relationship is part of a well-established pattern.

My parents always were busy elsewhere, so from a young age I found my own way and learned to do without connection. I scrounged for coins to buy school lunch or candy bars to keep me going during long summer days spent bicycling around my little town.

One summer I made a hideout in the woods beyond the schoolyard-I would climb up a tree and hide in it for hours, sheltered from the sun or rain by its leaves. It wasn't so bad. After all, back home there might be a tempest raging. By high school I understood I took better care of myself than my parents could.

From camp to college, I planned my life, just getting their attention long enough to fill in forms and sign checks. They had expectations, to be sure, but didn't help me achieve them. I managed that.

I'm proud of my survivor spirit — clearly, it served me well — but I'm also suspicious about how helpful it is today. Are things so bad with Rob that I should leave? Or am I just too good at being on my own and prefer independence because it's easier and less stressful to me than doing the work our relationship requires?

I love the feisty little girl inside me, but I might need to tell her to come back down the tree and help me. Maybe we should give this relationship thing a shot for a while. At least until we're certain we would be better off alone.