Noone and nothing can really prepare you for the burning pain you feel when your spouse leaves you after 8 years of marriage. From one day to another, all your dreams, hopes and plans are shattered.
I still have so many questions which will remain unanswered in eternity.
The thread I made a few weeks ago, is part of this story.
After learning about TTATT my plans involved to wake up my wife as well and exit the truth. My wife was fighting against TTATT and warned me to not get too involved. I still spoke to my parents about TTATT occassionally and my wife was probably listening.
Instead of waking up, my wife wanted us to become more active in the truth, she wanted us to become like the couples in our congregation who are pioneering together and seemed to be happy in the congregation. What she didn't understand was, to others we seemed to be the perfect happy couple.
My plans originally were to wake her up and for us to fade together, move do a different part of the city, change congregations and continue to fade so we can still continue to associate to our parents. I really wanted a slow fade.
I can not pinpoint the exact moment she woke up. We always had problems communicating to each other. While often I tried to talk to her about things, plans and feelings, not about TTATT but in general, she always kept to herself. All I know is, 6 months ago we had an amazing holiday where she still seemed to genuinely love me, just 6 months later, without a fight or anything, she left me.
It was a point after our holiday where she started to keep more to herself than she did before. She started a personal hobby of hers where she spent most of her time. While at the beginning she still let me be part of her life and we still did things together, that changed later when we seemed to have separate lifes. When I came back from work she sometimes acknowledged me with a "hi" sometimes not. When things were still good with us, her usual behaviour would be that she would message me while I was still at work to ask me when I would be home because she missed me and she wanted to prepare a meal for us to eat together, later she would instead be dissapointed seeing me at home because that meant, that I wanted to hang out with her and she couldn't engange in her hobby. Also I would have to cook for myself if I wanted to eat something. At some point in this process she started developing an exit strategy. Exit strategy from the truth, exit strategy from her marriage that means me and from all the other people which love her but happen to be in the truth.
In the last couple of weeks I saw that her whole personality changed. She became "worldly". She started to swear and she started to smoke. She had absolutely no respect for anyone or anything anymore and she acted rude against me and wanted to hurt me. Of course I wanted to talk to her and get an understanding of what is happaning and why I lost little girl that I still loved so much. She revealed that she was mad at me, because I woke her up. She lost the meaning to her life. She lost her earthly reward to live on a paradise earth and she lost the resurrection hope. All because I could not shut up to talk about TTATT. I was speechless, did I destroy our marriage because of my TTATT talk? I thought at this point that maybe I can still save my marriage, but all my actions had little to no effect. It was too late already, I didn't know it at that point, but she had already cheated on me and she already had made plans in secret to leave me.
So couple of days ago, last Friday, when I came back from work she made the big reveal that weeks ago she cheated on me out of revenge because I destroyed her dreams and that now she needs to leave. She didn't give me an oppurtunity to forgive her. She just wanted to leave. Apparently she had already found a place to stay and a place to work in a different city. She told me that originally she wanted to leave me in two months in secret but her mother caught wind that her spirituality had weakened in an alarming rate and started calling the elders to help her. This had the opposite effect and just made her want to escape.
She already sent a letter to the elders to disassociate herself from the watchtower and also mentioned that she was unfaithful. She also texted a few of our friends that she left me, which of course lead to them asking me what happaned.
What an irony, isn't it? I thought with TTATT my wife and I can wake up together and escape. Instead, she woke up and made plans to escape without me. And now I am still left in the truth hurting without a plan to escape. I have people in the truth inviting me to their homes for a coffee and asking how they can help me no. I have a feeling that I lost a big gamble. I not only lost my life, my wife I also lost my way out of this religion. Now I can only count on my friends in the truth to cheer me up.
In the end, I don't accept that I am responsible for all this. My wife was never really in the truth and always wanted to do worldy things. She mentioned to me a few times that she married too young and that she didn't live her singleness long enough. Also she started saying that we are not fit for each other never had and we shouldn't have had married. The funny thing is, that some 6 months ago she said the exact opposite.
Smoking was always a weak point through all our marriage, she smoked for a little bit before we met (she was baptised) and stopped but it remained a weak point and a few years ago I had caught her again flirting with another guy on facebook. So she probably already thought back then about ending our marriage the one or the other way. TTATT was just a convient way to give me the blame.
When I think back about my marriage, not all of the 8 years were happy years. We had many problems at the beginning and very often we were on the verge to give up. During our marriage, whenever I thought about us breaking up, I tried to think about the very next day. How I would feel. So a lot of times I was already preparing myself for the worst. But the last 3 years of our marriage, we seemed to finally have settled. We stopped having big fights we had finally grown into our marriage, finally I could say I am happily married. At one point we were even thinging about kids. Matter of fact, until 6 months ago we tried to become pregnant.
I will probably get the blame that I am a coward for not leaving the truth alone when I woke up. I can say I am guilty for that point, but I am also guilty for loving my wife more than the truth or more than TTATT. I always wanted for us to do the things together and accomplish things together, finally I wanted to grow old with my wife one way or another.