Not withdrawal from OW.
A state of withdrawal as in: intimacy, conflict, withdrawal.

I thought about the post this quote was taken from, and especially scenarios 1, 2, and 3 quite a bit over the weekend. If you were choosing scenario 1 (talk to OW and lie to your BW about contact) then you *would* be stoned in these forums and I and many others wouldn't have responded more than once, if at all. I think the fact that you can't find it within you to choose option 1 is one of the things that makes me think you and your BW could have a fantastic marriage. You (both) just need to learn some tools and behaviors. I think the love and basic integrity are there. I think you've lost your ways.

And the fact that you can't honestly go with scenario 3 doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you a normal, flawed human, with room for improvement. Just like every single person on the planet.

I see brwmb's reality thusly:
I would like to have a spectacular, legendary M with my BW.
I understand that there is no room for a third party in a *real* M.
I know I need to give up OW and I'm working on that goal, but I'm not ready to go "cold turkey". I've reduced the quantity of contact greatly, and the content is now empty and humdrum. I'm getting there. In fact, having reduced contact with OW to this quantity and quality, I'm not real clear on why everyone still harps so much on me about ceasing contact altogether.

I see brw's BW's reality thusly:
I am dying the death of a thousand cuts. He says he hardly talks to her but every time he's on the computer I wonder if he's chatting or emailing with her. Whenever he's away from me and has his cellphone with him, I wonder if they're talking. I wonder what they really say. I second guess myself constantly. Am I not smart enough? Not pretty enough? Too fat? Too thin? Should I keep the house cleaner? Do I spend too much time cleaning house at the expense of "playtime" with my WH? Is it my breath, does it stink?

I submit for your consideration a third reality:
Mr. and Mrs. brwmb put the protection and nurturing of their M above everything else.
They realize how precious a truly great marriage is, and they value their happy marriage beyond measure.
They recognize how fragile a marriage can be if not properly tended.
Neither of them would consider having an opposite sex friend that is not also a friend of their spouse. They would never spend time alone with an opposite gender person, no matter how platonic, because to do so could invite temptation, or rumor. Either of those could be potentially hurtful to their spouse, so they simply do not go there.

There is a lot more to that third reality, obviously, but that's the most critical bit as I see things now.

How do you get to the third reality?
You give up OW. To keep her, and to wean yourself from her, does more damage to your M than anyone could ever possibly explain to you. You may wake up in a few months and think "Wow, I haven't talked to OW in over a month, and I didn't even realize it! I think I'm finally over her!" but by then your BW will be too filled with hurt and too drained to invest in the M. You will have lost everything.

I'm not exaggerating; I went through this in my own M and we almost lost it all. Neither of us were sure we even WANTED the M, but we figured we'd give it a go. He's now my best buddy, confidant, and playmate. I respect and admire him, and I trust him like no other.

I know that giving up OW is going to be really hard, and I respect your ability to recognize that fact and be honest about it. I suggest the following course of action ASAP while your BW still has some interest in your M:

1. You write a NC email to OW and let your BW read it; you incorporate any suggestions she has that you and she can both enthusiastically agree on, and you let her press "send"
2. You turn to your wife to help you through this separation from OW. You do this in multiple ways:
- put a rule on your email that automatically deletes any messages from her.
- delete any secret email or chat accounts
- share all your passwords with your wife
- allow your wife to install a key logger on the computer
- give your wife your cellphone and you get another one with a different number.
- you ensure your new cellphone account can be monitored freely by your wife (records are online, for example)

Many people see these types of actions as allowing their wife to invade their privacy, or letting their wife "police" them. But your wife is NOT out to get you! Her prime objective, like yours, is care and nurturing of your marriage. She'll pass on any messages from folks that call your old cell number. She'll be an accountability partner and help you adjust to the loss of OW and to the formation of appropriate boundaries in opposite gender friendships. She's not there to judge you or to punish you - if that were her objective, she'd have split by now. She's there to understand and support you. She's got your six.

Hi turtlehead, you are amazing, really. Are you a professional psychologist, or a marriage counselor? If not, you absolutely should be. Textual communication is not always easy. You can't see my facial expressions, body language, hand gestures, you can't hear vocal intonations, and yet you seem to be able to cut right to the heart of the matter. I really appreciate the time you take to think about this problem. I'm sure it's frustrating for someone like you to deal with someone like me; like trying to grab a fistful of sand or water, nothing firm to leverage against. I hope there are others who are maybe wrestling with similar problems who are reading this and possibly getting something out of it.

Your assessments of our realities are pretty close. Your 2nd and 3rd statements regarding the way you see MY reality are right on -- no room for a 3rd party, and why the fuss over no contact. Your 1st statement, that I would like a great marriage, is true, but I would add that I feel it's almost hopeless to achieve. As far as my wife's reality, I think she initially felt the hurt and mistrust and questions of self-esteem you wrote about, but recently she has come to realize that it's not about her, that I'm the one who has to decide what I want, and that she's better off just working on herself. She's being patient with me but has said that she can't guarantee her patience will last forever; she has not placed any kind of timetable on things.

Your description of the third reality is where things get difficult. It's hard to know if we're just lazy people by nature, if we don't value our marriage as much as we should, or what. This is our 4th time in counseling in the last 12-13 years, and everytime, what happens is that the counselors give us things to do to get us to spend more time together and figure out how we can interact better, .... and we never do them. We feel better immediately after going to counseling sessions and learning about why things are the way they are, but then we get home and go back to our busy lives and never do anything. We read His Needs, Her Needs, took the emotional needs questionnaire, said "that's really good to know," and then nothing. Same with the Five Love Languages book. Same with other marriage books. I can feel the same thing happening with our current counseling. We don't place a high enough priority on our marriage to work on it. We're both guilty of this. It's like we want a good marriage, but we don't want to work hard for it. We're either lazy, or we don't care enough, or maybe we've just been deluding ourselves that a good marriage shouldn't require much work. I don't really know why, but it's a pattern I've seen in us for years. Your comment about your own marriage, that neither of you were sure you even wanted the marriage, that's true of us at times. It's almost like neither of us wants to be the first to leave, but we'd both be relieved if the other left. Right now, it's really the thought of the alternatives that are preventing us from taking any action to end it. We're too lazy to work on it and too lazy to end it. Pretty apathetic, I know, but that's kind of where we are.

The part of your post about ending contact with the other woman. First of all, I have no problem doing ALL of what you wrote. I could do all of that, and it still wouldn't guarantee no contact. With the way things are in this world, there's always a way, and my wife knows and has said exactly that. And even if I did stop contacting the other woman, there's still a couple billion more women on the planet. Should I write a NC letter to all of them? If it's not THIS other woman, it could be another, and another, and so on. I haven't filled you in on all of the details of my married life, but I have violated trust with my wife many times. I've been through situations involving drugs, porn, etc., and I've learned that I'm a repeat trust-offender. If you flip a penny 100 times and it comes up heads everytime, what do you think's going to happen on the 101st time? I've pretty much given up hope that I can earn her trust back. It's part of the reason I've reached the state of indifference that I'm in. Eventually, you realize the penny has two heads and it doesn't matter anymore.

Why does my wife keep hanging around? Why doesn't she leave me? I think in the beginning because she had hopes that I would change. I had hopes too that I would change. Now, I think she realizes she'll never be able to fully trust me. (John Edwards didn't help.) I wouldn't trust me either if I were her. I think she doesn't want to leave me now because, ... the #1 reason is she doesn't want to start over and possibly grow old alone, and #2, the kids.

Sometimes I feel like I'm doing her a disservice by not leaving HER. I sometimes think I should just put us both through the discomfort of a divorce, get past this apathetic relationship we have, and hope for the best. She's an attractive woman, has a good paying job, and I have no doubt she could find a man who would give her the kind of relationship she deserves. My reasons for not doing so are, ... #1 the kids, and #2, it would hurt her in the short term, and might not help in the long term.

So here we sit, in stalemate. Our counselor, who is very pro-marriage, especially in the case where kids are involved, has helped some couples avoid divorce by helping them work out the details of a parallel marriage; once they come to terms with that and understand what it means, they can be relatively happy. The marriage won't be the truly great marriage they had hoped for, but at least they come to a workable agreement about how to live out the rest of their lives without traumatizing each other, ... for the sake of the kids. Maybe that's what'll happen to us. It's not a very attractive option, but maybe it's the best considering we're not very motivated to change things one way or another.

Over the weekend, I decided to read some other threads on this forum, something which I hadn't done before. I'm thinking that I put the wrong title on this thread, because I really DO think it is not about the affair, but about the apathy that exists in our marriage. The affair is just one of many symptoms of our apathy. End the affair, and the apathy still exists. End the affair, and something else will come up to replace it. "End the affair," those words sound so unlike what I'm going through compared to the other posts I read over the weekend. It isn't an affair anymore. The other threads I read involve a spouse actually leaving home for another person and the other spouse trying to get them back. The wandering spouse felt angry when the affair was exposed; they tried to deny it, and cover it up. The affair seems so central to the thought processes of both spouses. The advice given by the experts on this forum seems designed to shock the wandering spouse back to reality, to make the affair a truly costly and uncomfortable experience. I couldn't help but think that if my wife received that kind of advice and tried it, it wouldn't have the shock factor for me. I feel like I'm past the point of shockability. I even tried to imagine my wife having an affair; what would I do? I think I'd just say "fine, whatever." Shrug my shoulders and say, "ok, where do we go from here?" I don't think I'd be all that upset. I'd be surprised, yes, but I don't think I'd be that hurt, and I'm almost positive I wouldn't be angry. I'm sure some may say that's part of the "fog" I'm in, but I've examined myself, and I truly believe that. And after what I'VE done, even if I DID think I'd be upset, I'd have no right to, really.

I also thought over the weekend about the topic question, "why am I not that sorry about the affair?" I AM sorry for the pain it has caused my wife (and me too, but since I did it, I can't feel too sorry for myself), but I'm not sorry about it from the point of view of doing something intrinsically wrong. I've struggled with that for a long time, wondering how could I not think it was wrong? I mean, c'mon, who am I kidding? Adultery IS wrong! Even though mine was not physical and only via the internet, it was wrong. Why don't I feel that it was wrong? Is my conscience that bad? I think it has something to do with the invisible divorce we've been in that I described earlier in this thread. From a legalistic point of view, we ARE still married because there's a piece of paper on file somewhere. But from a practical point of view, we are divorced. We've drifted so far apart that we're just two friends who happen to live under the same roof. That's what an invisible divorce is. In a state of divorce, having relationships with other women isn't an affair, and maybe that's why I don't feel sorry about it. I don't have definite conclusions about that though. It could be just an attempt to rationalize my behavior; it could be, I really don't know. I know some people think not feeling sorry indicates I'm a heartless, uncaring person, but I really DO care about my wife. I don't want to hurt her, and I want her to be happy. It's just that I'm becoming more and more convinced that I'm not the person that can do that for her.

I guess what I'm wondering now is, what have people done in the situation where their marriage seems dead, the many half-hearted attempts to improve the marriage in the past haven't had results, the will to work hard is gone, the prospects of divorce aren't that attractive, and it looks like a parallel marriage is the best available option. Do you just resign yourself to that? Is there some way out of the apathy? Is it better to swallow the bitter pill of divorce and try to move on?

I'm sure many here will insist that the first step to a better marriage is the no contact. I think there has to be a step that occurs before that. Like Peggy Vaughan quotes George Carlin in her book Making Love Stay, "ya gotta wanna." I gotta wanna better marriage, and in the last few years I haven't wanted it badly enough to do anything about it. In fact, in the last few years, I haven't wanted it at all; I've been invisibly divorced. It's only because of the recent events that I'm even thinking about all of this, thinking of resurrecting our marriage.

Geez, I've re-read this several times before posting, and every time I think of something else. Somewhere, in a list of reasons that people have affairs, I read one reason is they want a divorce but they don't want to be the ones to initiate it. They want to give their partner a reason to divorce so that they don't feel bad about initiating it. I wonder if THAT's the real reason I feel the no contact issue is no big deal. That if I stay in contact with the other woman, even though I don't fantasize about a long term relationship with her, my wife will eventually give up and leave me. Do you think that's possible? I hope not -- that sounds cowardly to me. God, I hope that's not what's going on inside me. If I knew that, I would want my wife to know right away.............
.......Mmmm, that thought gets scarier the more I think of it. This invisible divorce thing, maybe I'm just looking for a way to make it official, an easy way out. I've already described being lazy about relationships; maybe this is a way for me to do nothing and make something happen. Any thoughts about that?

Of course you have control over your own actions. You can guarantee anything. You can stop contacting the OW and you can stop having inappropriate relationships with other women in the future. [if not, you should probably be institutionalized in a mental institution]

But I do agree with you that the affair is not the main problem. Of course it has to be stopped in order to ever effect recovery. But it sounds like that your cheating is more of a character issue than an aberration of character. This IS your character as you indicated above you have terrible boundaries and are vulnerable to other women. That CAN be resolved, though, with hard work.

Does your wife accept that you are a committed cheater and abuser who has no intention of ending his affair? Does she have acceptance on that issue and will she agree to stay married to you?

I ask because adultery is as traumatic psychogically as rape or the death of a child. Women have nervous breakdowns and suffer years of post traumatic stress disorder from this. Once mentally healthy people commit suicide over this sort of abuse.


Actually, she is not better off "working on herself." She is better off PROTECTING HERSELF from this emotional abuse. If you have misled her into believing this nonsense, then you have done this woman a serious injustice and have compounded your crime. Your wife would be better off if you left than if you stayed and pursued your adultery right under her nose. Her having a nervous breakdown would not be in her best interest or your childrens best interest.

How about sending her here so we can help her protect herself from your abuse?

Also brwn, your endless rationalizations are not even interesting or compelling. We have heard it all before from every other falling down drunk [WS] who stumbles in here. Fog is not unique to folks here.

My main concern is your victim, your wife. I would be most appreciative if you would do something productive and send your wife here. Thanks..

Well I know this one. And the answer is "yes" you are rationalizing and justifying your behavior so you won't feel guilty about something that is WITHOUT QUESTION wrong. You're hurting someone you once loved. The mother of your children, your life's partner.

The term "invisible divorce" and "dead marriage" are VERY common and typical terms used by active WSes here. We've heard it a million times. There is no specialness about cheating, regardless of who it is.

Being married is like being pregnant, brwmb. You either are, or you aren't. You, my friend, are STILL married until you're divorced.

The resentment you're carrying from your wife's EA is eating your marriage alive. IMHO, if you deal with that poison first you may be able to start seeing things more clearly.

I wish you peace and much needed clarity.
Jo

Asked and answered.

If you have NC with OP nd withdraw from her, it makes it possible for you to re-attach to your wife.

NC means you will wanna again.

brwmd --

Your post has intrigued me, and I've finally figured out why. You have a similar attitude to my husband who was willing, at least once, to talk to Dr. Harley and told him the same thing he told me: "I'm not sure our marriage is worth my effort."

The faulty assumption you seem to be making is that your wife can keep this up. Some women will stick with their marriage no matter how badly their husband treats them. They will fall apart, though, sooner or later. If you are honest with your wife about how little you care about her and are open about continued contact with someone who is an OW in her eyes, what will it do to her?

Think about it. Sooner or later, she may break down. She may not have a nervous breakdown, as I nearly did on D-day. She may not gain weight, as I did -- nearly 60 pounds. She may not lose her job, as I did. She may still keep her children safe, although I left two children at a grocery store once and one child at a park once.

I think there is a difference between men and women here. Men can live in a marriage of indifference. For women, it is dreadful, and the impact on them will be evident. Look up books on Sonya and Leo Tolstoy. Dreadful. Leo Tolstoy, perhaps the greatest novelist of all time. Do you know how he died? He got so sick of his wife that he got up before dawn one morning and left the house, taking a train to see his sister. When his wife followed, he escaped. He got on another train, caught pneumonia, and was taken off the train to be put in the house of a trainmaster. His wife followed him there, and she was not allowed in the trainstation until he was unconscious. There is a picture of her outside the trainstation peering in the window. How poignant. The trainstation is now called "Leo Tolstoy Station" in honor of the great man who died in an out of the way trainstation with papers like The New York Times reporting on the bizarre ending to a great man. He brought this on himself, by disregarding his wife and his wife acting in an increasingly erratic way.

Your wife may stay married to you despite how indifferently you treat her, but you are making an assumption that she can continue as she is today with how you treat her today. I doubt it. It will destroy her.

Someday, you may get back on this forum and read this post again, and see it with regret. There are women who commit suicide, there are women who have nervous breakdowns, there are women who get in dreadful car accidents -- and why? They try to bear the indifference of their husbands, giving him time to change or to respond to what they are doing, and they don't realize until it is too late that they are not able to bear the indifference and sometimes even the contempt.

Use the search function to look up posts by mulan. She stayed in Plan A. She kept trying, and now she is silent. Why? In a recent post, she said she had been hospitalized, and she was heavily sedated.

Is this what you want in your future? The future may hold people been sympathetic towards you because of your wife's nervous breakdown. You may even be sympathetic towards yourself.

The truth may well be hidden, but the truth will be that your wife tried Plan A until she crumbled.

Cherished



PS. I decided to post one of mulan's last posts so that you could see what might be in your future. It's from April. Here it is:


"he is leaving

says he is moving out in "early May"

didn't seem to realize that's only two weeks

please do not send congrats or tell me it's for the best or tell me to get happy

it's horrible

i will lose everything and so will my son

he did not show any signs of doing this until about six weeks ago, when i finally did what i should have done years ago

told him i would not go anywhere at all with him, even to the garbage can, unless and until he got rid of those girls

he immediately countered with "I should have manned up and thrown YOU out years ago for bitching about those girls"

and now he's walking out on us

admitted to my son's face that it's 100percent his idea

is this some kind of "somebody doesn't like plan b" on steroids?

He never showed any sign of leaving until i finally "plan b'd" him

and he was furious

angry

nasty

started packing

i broke down screaming

spent five days in a mental ward

now i'm on abilify and ativan

now that i'm drugged, he's using that to move out at his leisure

he is ordering me to go live with my daughter, in order to ease his conscience

he is pure evil"

Why wouldn't you at least try the basic concepts?

You have nothing to lose if you truly are where you say you are.

FROM this site:


3 states of mind in a marriage

In order for you to repair your marriage you must move from withdrawl - work through conflict - and only this way to do have a chance to restore love & intimacy.


Conflict avoiders would rather remain emotionally withdrawn and non-intimate with their spouse than deal with their emotions brought up by conflict.

If a person is a chronic conflict avoider - their chances of keeping ANY intimate relationship healthy is quite remote.

Tell your wife about all your adultery - because conflict will jolt both of you out of the marriage doldrums Harley refers to as The State of Withdrawl.

Pep

You guys are making me depressed. My wife and I have both read the quote you posted, Pepperband, and reading it again makes me feel hopeless. That's where we are. I couldn't help but pick up on the description of emotional divorce. We usually do sleep together, but occasionally not. We travel separately more times than together. We rarely eat breakfast together, never lunch, and about half the dinners. Only problem in our case, is that for me at least, the state of withdrawal has lasted a long time - it's become the norm for me. I can't seem to shake myself out of it.

And then your assessment about conflict avoiders and remote chances of a healthy relationship. My wife and I are both conflict avoiders in a major way. I've aready told her about everything. She knows it all.

And Cherished's account of nervous breakdowns or suicidal women in indifferent relationships. This is all very depressing. I think I need to take a break from this forum for a while. I just don't feel like dealing with all of this right now. Conflict aviodance -- see what I mean. No need to bump, bump me for a while. I'm going to try to stay away for the rest of the week.

Please understand that it is not only Cherished who warns about nervous breakdowns, BUT DR. HARLEY, a clinical psychologist with 35 years experience specializing in adultery. What you are doing to your wife is plain and simply ABUSE. Your abuse of her can very well lead to a NERVOUS BREAKDOWN AND/OR YEARS OF POST TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. People commit suicide from being subjected to this kind of abuse.

That is what you are doing to your wife while you are focusing on the peeling paint in the girls bathroom on the sinking Titantic. You are causing SEVERE psychological damage to your wife with your abuse.


And how long does he recommend a woman stay in "Plan A?' THREE TO FOUR WEEKS.

Yeap ML, three to four weeks.

Thats what Steve told me when I counseled with him after I had already been in Plan A for >8+ months. He was worried for my sanity, as was I.

Jo

STOP

I take zero responsibility for your mood - good-bad-otherwise.






Yes. It's where you are because of conflict avoiding. Yours and hers.
Are you saying you wife is reading MB and now knows about your adultery?



Finding intimacy through conflict resolution a risk you are not willing to take.


I don't believe you - but , no matter.
I am not easily manipulated - so I am certain you will not find me an easy person to "get along" with.

Have a nice conflict-free MB vacation

Hey Pep. brwbm's wife knows all about his cheating cause brwmb is very HONEST about all of it, but won't stop despite her protests.



As far as his wife reading here, last I asked he said he didn't think so. But he keeps eluding that she is in his posts.

I see -

I still don't believe him

PS to add: I had his story a little mixed up with Hu's doozy.

brw,

So you are indifferent and apathetic towards the marriage.

I call BS to that. You are here, looking for answers. Folks who are indifferent and apathetic don't look for answers. They don't even ask questions, bro.

That argument doesn't wash.


Then, your feeble attempts at justification of the affair which you continue to throw out there make me want to puke and laugh at the same time.

"Invisible divorce" indeed. That's a new turn of phrase and I gotta give you some credit for it, but please, don't go there again, because call it whatever you want but it is what it is - failure to appropriately maintain your relationship. Plain and simple - you and your wife allowed yourselves to become complacent about your marriage, and allowed yourselves to drift apart.

That isn't really news around MB.

Typical, and not anything new.



You did talk about stopping contact and seeing yourself not in much better shape in the marriage, because things wouldn't change.


I gave that some thought. You talked of not wanting to work, and passing this off as laziness.

I read your post and saw thoughts of "wanting to change" running throughout, but nowhere did I see the idea that YOU had any control in your own life. In reading what you wrote, it is as if the complacency toward the marriage just "happened", and the things you predict for the future are not within your control.

You pass off the fact that you are just lazy, and won't work, and so there is no possible way to change this. So why bother?


Your "logic" is that you know you won't work at it, so you're not going to succeed.

I guess you're right. If your grand plan in this is that you are planning not to work at your relationship, planning to stay in contact with other women, planning to continue to treat your wife the same way you have been, planning to focus on yourself, planning to live as roommates instead of husband and wife, planning to just read the books and not apply any of the ideas.......etc..............

Then you will get exactly what you predict you will get.


But you cannot possibly blame the outcome on anything or anyone but yourself.


You will get what you put into the relationship.


Your investment into anything goes a very long way into determining the outcome.


So instead of "trying" counseling like you have in the past, this time, why don't you actually quit wasting your money?

Why don't you quit relying on SOMEBODY ELSE TO DO THE WORK?

Why don't you do the actual work in this relationship, and see if the results are different this time??????????

If you want something done right, you HAVE TO DO IT YOURSELF.

Get up off your lazy a$$ and work. You might just rescue yourself in the process. And you may very well actually give a damn.

SB

Actually, I think it would be better for all of us here if you stayed away forever. The only flavor you add here is negative self empathy and narcissism to this entire forum.

Good folks here actually waste their efforts on you, because they cannot help but unlease their heart.

What a travesty.

Why don't you go spend your your favorite leisure time where you love the most, in front of your mirror.

And goodness, yes, take a break from all this introspection. It's very tiring. You may become exhauseted.

What a joke!!

Jerry

You say you feel hopeless. The excerpts Pepperband posted here explain WHY you feel hopeless. They also say that there is a way out, and you can lead your spouse to the state of intimacy. Now THAT is power!

You say you are too lazy or unmotivated to get started. I don't buy it. Like others posting to you, I think that your reading here and your willingness to look inward suggest that you have hope - or at least you wish there were hope to have

How hard is it, really, to take these first steps? The only hard thing about it is making up your mind to do it. Then you just tell your wife (this part is easy - this is going to be GOOD news for her), and go down the checklist. Look at it closely. How difficult are each of those items?

How would it feel to look at yourself in the mirror and say "Hey, I did it! I took the first step!" There will be many more steps, but they get easier and easier. Eventually investing in the marriage actually becomes FUN because the marriage is so rewarding.

But you have to take that first step. How hard is it, REALLY?

1. You write a NC email to OW and let your BW read it; you incorporate any suggestions she has that you and she can both enthusiastically agree on, and you let her press "send"
2. You turn to your wife to help you through this separation from OW. You do this in multiple ways:
- put a rule on your email that automatically deletes any messages from her.
- delete any secret email or chat accounts
- share all your passwords with your wife
- allow your wife to install a key logger on the computer
- give your wife your cellphone and you get another one with a different number.
- you ensure your new cellphone account can be monitored freely by your wife (records are online, for example)

brwmb --

Of course, not all women persist until they crumble. Some get so fed up that they are done, and they will never ever consider reconciliation with their husband. I know two women like that. One actually changed her name back to her maiden name even though she and her ex-husband have children.

It's something to consider as you wait and consider trying to figure out if giving up the OW is worth it for you. Someday, the only woman interested in you may be the OW -- and what a prize she is, a woman willing to go after a married man, a woman who apparently does not believe in the paramount importance of marriage vows.

Who knows? Maybe you'll have then what you want -- a divorce without the guilt of having initiated it. Only you'll know the truth -- you'll know you pushed her to it by your open disregard for her feelings.

Honesty is a wonderful virtue. Face the truth. If you want out, get out. If you don't want out, make an effort before there is no longer an opportunity.

Cherished