Questioning...pt. 2

So I spent the last blog post all but congratulating myself on the wisdom behind "Its better to have happy parents living apart than miserable parents living together." This is something I gleaned from my own experience - and as such should be viewed with much skepticism...
Common opinion holds that this is nonsense - feel-good psycho-babble that allows shallow, selfish women such as myself to tear their families limb from limb with a minimum of guilt. If that were true, I must say it doesn't work very well.
I suspect, like most things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
My father (happily married to his fourth wife - oy) puts it this way: "Fish or cut bait." I take this to mean that, as I proposed in my last post, we have some responsibility to live our lives to their fullest potential. Get busy living or get busy dying. In other words, work to make your marriage a happy one, or get out.
Then it becomes a question of degree. How long do you work? How hard? How do you measure the results? Days without tears or Days with smiles?
I'm stuck there.
Days without tears v. Days with smiles.
I ask myself this question all the time: was it that bad? Was it bad enough to leave? People want an easy explanation. He beat me. He gambled away our life savings. He screwed the babysitter. I don't have that easy answer. My answers are hard, and vague, and subjective.
In a nutshell, for reasons I won't enumerate here out of respect for his privacy, I realized that I could not live my life to its fullest potential and remain in the marriage. I couldn't be the best Mom, the best friend, the best employee or even the best wife while devoting myself to that very unhealthy relationship.
Whether or not is was bad enough to leave, it wasn't good enough to stay.
Days without tears aren't enough.
I need Days with smiles.
Barring that, I need the possibility of Days with smiles in my future. The line, I think, may be when the end game changed. When we both admitted we were biding our time until the kids were older to divorce. When 'growing old together' was no longer a realistic goal for either of us.
I knew that marriage would be challenging - alot of hard work, lots of bad days. I knew I wouldn't always feel appreciated or intellectually stimulated or even loved. But - I never expected to feel so utterly, completely alone. (This is no accusation, it may very well be entirely my fault that my marriage made me feel that way.)
I thought that marriage was about putting someone else before yourself. Wishing & working for their happiness - and all the while they're putting you first, wishing & working for yours. I was so unbelievably naive.
Maybe those partnerships exist, outside of chick-lit and rom-coms. I'm sure I don't know. In my limited experience...people just aren't wired that way. And by people I mean men.
No no - I'm kidding there. Really, as much as I'd like to throw in the towel and give up on the entire gender...I'm just not wired that way.
It may be, though, that I'm not wired for marriage. That I'm too selfish. That the idea that "happy parents" are better for kids than "married parents" really is just a piss-poor excuse for me to go out and seek more Days with smiles.
We put 5 years into marriage counselling, and what we got out of it was the ability to co-habitate and co-parent with a minimum of raised voices. Is it selfish to want more than that out of life? Or is it just selfish to act on that desire? Would it really be...kinder, i guess...to stay, wanting more but knowing you won't have it?
Just what I need. More questions...