First Night Apart

Last night was our first night apart and I'm feeling heartbroken. We are both very much in love with each other and have fought tooth and nail to keep our family together. When we first decided to separate, we both felt immediate relief. Now all the other feelings are emerging. We've been in a crisis for a long time. All relationships have to deal with stress... and we're awesome at coping under duress... but our stress is BIG STRESS. Most of it is not of our making and beyond our control which makes finding solutions very difficult! I like to group our stress in the following buckets: mine, his, and ours. Each bucket contains the usually stressors and a few extraordinary ones. We've tried dumping what we can out of the buckets, balancing the loads, yet the buckets are running over in a big way. The only remaining choice was to remove each other's buckets. We came into the relationship aware of each other's full buckets. We're both intelligent, hardworking, determined people - if we couldn't manage, no one could! Yet, five years later, we are barely functioning and feeling like maybe no one (including us) could manage in these circumstances. I know we're coping way better than the average couple, but this is damage control. The alternative involves huge losses, resentment, and not liking each other. Separating is surreal to me. I'm action-oriented and not sure what to do next. We worked so hard to build this family... now we need to take it apart, while still keeping the contents in tact.

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