Thanks for the replies folks, I do appreciate them.

No children fortunately... well, two cats, but they came with her and will go with her... so that makes them my step children? I'm taking care of them right now since she is living at a friends... not sure how long things will take, there is not much communication from her in the past two weeks. I told her a week ago that if she cares for me, and wants to reduce the pain, she'll find a new place to live as quickly as possible so we can arrange for her stuff (and cats) to not be here anymore so we can both move out of this awkward phase of everything she owns being here and staring me in the face (literally, those cats just stare at me sometimes...)

This is like band aid removal... they say it's best to remove it quickly. But band aids usually have two sticky sides on either end of the gauze. What I have here is a situation where she was fast with pulling the relationship side off, but now we're standing here w/ the other half of the band aid still stuck, pulling the arm hair, and it remains to be seen whether removal will be fast or slow...

BTW, one other thing I want to say is that I want to apologize for comparing my situation to actual divorce, my situation is not even close to as bad as an actual divorce... esp. since we have no kids... but I figured if there was a place to post about ending a relationship this was it :) ... What I've got is really more of a broken heart and some bad financial decisions :)