Scared of moving out?

Last night I had a long conversation with Debbie -- after the two of us had a couple of her oldest friends over for dinner at her place, a delightful evening -- in which she re-iterated the importance of my moving out of the house.  Janeway, bless her heart, has been tirelessly making the same point.  So what's the hold-up?

On the surface, the hold-up is financial: I won't go into all the details, but moving out is going to be expensive.  But there are ways to be creative around that.  Debbie helped me brainstorm some of these.  And you'd think I could have figured some of them out on my own, honestly.

At a deeper level, I realize that the prospect scares me.  It will mean a huge change ... my first change of address in almost twenty years.  It will mean ... hell, I don't even know what it will mean.  But it is big and scary.

But what flitted across my mind this morning was one of my more interesting variations of the theme of self-doubt: Can I trust any major decision in the context of a new romance?  You may remember this is an idea that has occurred to me before, when I played with the hypothesis, "Hosea is ruled by his dick." 

• When I was newly in love with Wife, it seemed totally reasonable when she suggested we get married. Didn't work out so well in the long run.
• When I was newly in love with D, it seemed only rational that we should clean up the house and throw away all of Wife's old junk. Well a lot of it needed to be thrown away, that part is clear. But you can't cure hoarding that way, and in the long term I don't think it helped Wife anything like the way I rationalized it to myself at the time. It was just destructive for her, even if it did open some breathing space for the rest of us.

So now that I am newly in love with Debbie, can I trust that the suggestion to move out is a good one?  Or will it end up being destructive?

Well of course it will end up being destructive, you moron!  That's the whole point.  But "destructive" of a marriage that you've already decided to quit.  Geez, ... get a grip.

And this is how I frame it to myself rationally.  Yes, it will be big and scary.  And yes, for Wife it will mean something like the end of the world as she knows it.  Yes, in some sense of the word it will be "destructive".

But I decided to leave the marriage long ago.  My attorney will be serving Wife with the separation papers some time this week.  Things are in motion, and they are moving because I set them in motion.  Because I wanted this.  Moving out is one of the logical steps in this process.  And everyone -- everyone -- tells me that it is a necessary step in the sense that it changes everything.  Even my attorney (who has left the timetable entirely up to me) has assured me that everything changes when I move out.

Doesn't stop it from being scary.  But yes, rationally I know that I need to get a grip and just do it.

Sorry, this has been obvious to all of you for a long time, and it must be getting pretty dull watching me dither for so long.  But I'm getting there ....