The Start To Being Done Almost 22 Years Later

marty reba 2023
The last photo of Reba and I together in St. Augustine, FL April 2023

After almost 22 years together – including almost 15 years married – Reba and I are ending our relationship. The last 4-6 years have been the roughest on both of us. She made the decision recently that she doesn’t want to try anymore. She is done with us. I wanted to try more, but I somewhat understand that with my issues – both physical and mental – that I am a lot of work. While I reluctantly understand her decision, it not an easy thing to accept.

Living out “Rumours”

I posted this recently on various social media platforms – and yes even Facebook:

“We went from “The Chain” to “Go Your Own Way” and in between we lived our “Dreams” and did the “Don’t Stop” and experienced the “You Make Loving Fun” After almost 22 years, we lived parts of the album “Rumours”

4 Years of Efforts

When we first got together, the song “The Chain” was an integral part of our starting out, road trips and singing it out loud every time we put the CD in and skipped to track 7.

Now we are stopping at track 5 for “Go Your Own Way”

We took a break early on in our relationship from September 2002 to July 2003. Then in July of 2019, Reba sold her house and we moved into her daughters house and rented it. which I was already dealing with a lot of anxiety and being overwhelmed often, with the timing of everything going on not helping.

Then in October 2020, I moved into a friend’s basement as my mental state and other changes [which I have not blogged about nor mentioned it until now] got so bad that I didn’t want my degraded state to affect my step daughter, my wife and her granddaughter [which we would all be living in this same house with two cats and a dog]. That eight months helped me a lot.

Based on a suggestion from my step daughter, Reba and I moved out into a townhouse for a year before moving back to this house. Yeah, that’s a lot to go through for anyone in the course of 4 years, let alone with mental stability and related struggles.

I went back to a therapist in May 2019, but as many of you know, therapy is a long term process. I am still going today and while it has helped a good amount, it has not been enough to help extend my relationship. There will be another post where I go into more detail and of course my long term understanding of the purpose of therapy – self value.

The details of how we are ending things are still being defined, most likely staying legally married for insurance purposes for at least 3 years.

This is not how I was hoping to spend the 90 days before I turn 60.

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