Awesome post, Gloveoil! I found one of Dr Harley's articles on this:


Caring for Children Means Caring for Each Other

- Theodore M. Hesburgh

Wise man.

The best thing a father can do for his kids is to be happy and love them. No one ever said "by loving the mom I AM a better dad". Be true to you and only then will you be a good dad. The mother of your child has no bearing on how good a father you can be.

Wow - thanks everyone for responses

Just to clarify a couple of points. Re the child situation - my comments were written a month ago and I have since moved on in thinking regarding this. And really it doesn't matter now whether the OM is involved in her life for at least the next five years as she will be happy if her daddy loves her - full stop. Once she's around 5, if we're still together, we'll see a child psychologist re the best way to approach things in telling her etc.

On the love unit deposits, my issues I guess are that I feel that I'm doing everything possible to make him feel loved and cherished but my bank is well below zero. Despite how my posts sound I do get that I have destroyed him and it is my responsibility to rebuild but find it hard sometimes to maintain the happy smile and enthusiast facade. I will keep trying to make him a happier person and try and work on my own issues.

There are so many responses that I probably have missed some points so will go back and re-read.

Ok, then I will say that.

By loving my wife I am better dad to my children.

MelodyLane - ? on the following quote you put in a post


Quote: After the first step is completed, the second step is to create a romantic relationship between you and your husband using my 10 Basic Concepts here
as your guide. While your relationship may be improving, it won't lead to a romantic relationship because you are not being transparent toward each other. Unspoken issues in a marital relationship lead to a superficiality that ruins romance.


Do you (or anyone else) believe that if I follow these concepts myself I can help rebuild things even without my H being involved? Does anyone else have success stories when they've done it themselves?

izitrong,

MB program is about creating romantic love between 2 married people. MB program is meant to be implemented in its entirety, which means if you do it properly you will be romantically in love with each other. And if you happen to have kids while you are romantically in love, they will benefit enormously. For being happy and love your kids a person needs his major system - marriage at that point - to be properly taken care of and in tact. It is not just grown-ups who tell you how good or bad father you are. Kids will catch it quickly if you don't love their mother and it makes them very unhappy (even if you think you are just happy and love them), they assess your job as a dad as well, and their assessment can be harsh, and this can end for you being very unhappy.

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Izitrong,

What is your purpose here? Have you read MB materials? What is your marital background?

Have your read the introduction for this forum, especially:

deepsigh, the solution is to fall in love again. That won't happen by magic. Do you have any of the books from Marriage Builders? I would get Surviving an Affair and Lovebusters and follow the program in those books.

The most impactful and fastest way to fall in love again is to SCHEDULE 20+ hours of undivided attention meeting the top 4 intimate needs of affection, conversation, recreational companionship and sexual fulfillment. That means without children or TV or other people. This will make the greatest difference in your marriage. If you do this for about 3 months, you will start to feel romantic love in your marriage again.


Have you admitted the root cause is your poor boundaries? The affair would not have happened if you didn't allow the OM to meet your needs. Allowing others to meet your needs is how affairs start. The counselor needs to ask you, not him.

Your marriage won't survive another affair, so what have you done to make sure this doesn't happen again?

Is he having and affair with World Of Warcraft? Strange idea, I didn't, and still don't accept it.

However, his spending all his time playing computer games are obviously an AH to you, and possibly an IB.

The games can be just as much of an addiction as an A, and in many ways are strongly similar. In fact, certain games have been purposely designed, and done so very carefully based on actual behavior shaping psychology. The interaction with other people only adds to the design - friendships and marriages have been built through online games just as much as with email, chat, etc.

If the behavior that goes with playing the games has exhibited signs of addiction, then there is only one approach; total separation.

Read up, and try to institute Plan A vs his electronic addiction.

Or, it very may well be an opportunity. I have gamed with many couples who gamed together. It is an opportunity to try and share a RC. If you have no interest whatsoever, then this isn't really an option.

So, I am going to do some reaching here, because your situation is so very like my own (I am a gamer, I am the BS - married 10 years, together 14).

Let's examine his gaming habits. Was he always a gamer? Did it increase by a large margin in these past few years?

Let's examine the "initiation" of SF. Did he initiate BEFORE games started to take up his time? Before this, was HE the one that most often initiated?

You say that SF only happens when you initiated it - and part of this you also state that this has happened "in the past few years."

Do you have other children? Did you put your children above your relationship? Did you put your job above your relationship? Where exactly did you allow him to rank?

Consider those questions. Did he previously fight for your attention, and then at some point just stop trying? Were the "past few years" so horrible because when he wasn't trying, nobody was?

If a lot of this sounds familiar, here's something to consider; all that time he was fighting for attention versus the children, your job, the laundry, the scraps of paper on the living room floor, and every thing else you let rank above him, love units were being withdrawn from his account.

Because he may have been meeting some of your needs, your balance may have been more stable, while his slowly and steadily declined. Or, both of your accounts may have been declining.

During this time, his taker was in control, and he was in a state of conflict. He was fighting to have his needs met - and when they were not met, or not met properly, your account in his LB$ continued to lose balance.

At some point, your balance hit a certain threshold, and went in to withdrawal. Now, I'm going to go a tad outside standard MB and appeal to my own situation; this balance deficit didn't so much make him lose the feeling of being in love, but made him lose the feeling of being loved.

He withdrew into the game, and no longer allowed you to meet his ENs unless you really fought for it. You may have fought for it in many ways, but due to his state of withdrawal, most attempts to meet his ENs were met with rejection. Your LB$ began to plummet.

Now you didn't feel loved, or like you lost him, or whatever. You were miserable, but didn't communicate it, or didn't know how.

Someone else gave you some attention, he wouldn't give you the time of day. You didn't see the harm in "having a guy friend."

On and on, and the rest is history.

Now; the state of your marriage was both of your faults. This fault was due to lack of knowledge, and not due to lack of willingness or ability.

The A is your fault, based on a lack of knowledge, a lack of boundaries, and a lack of O&H. It was your decision every step of the way to carry it out, and it was your decision to lie about it and continue to lie about it. If he had any choice in it at all, I'm sure he wouldn't have chose to have you put him through the worst possible pain that a spouse can endure.

I have gone as far as to put Dr. Harley's words to the test myself - a woman I worked with had a H that cheated on her over and over. She had also been raped. When I asked her what she would rather endure again if she had to, she said she'd rather be raped. There was no prompting or leading this question.

People who have not been through marital infidelity cannot understand this. This is what you have done to your H.

He does need to get off the games if he wishes to recover his marriage. If he cannot cut them back to a reasonable and agreeable amount of time, he needs to quit altogether. Understand that they have been his emotional crutch for a long time, and he has been dealt an unimaginable emotional blow. This is no excuse for the addiction to continue. Managing this time is a step he needs to take.

Accepting total responsibility is the first step you need to take.

So don't maintain a facade, it does not good and frankly it's not radical honesty.

If you don't want to love your husband, then be honest, tell him you don't love him and don't want to hurt him any more and leave. Don't take any of his children, his money, the house or any other marital property, and just go.

It would be far better for you to be honest about not loving your husband and acting in accordance to what you've said with respect to not hurting him than it would be to put on a phony facade and pretend you love him when you really don't.

But don't take anything when you go. Just leave with a bag packed and no expectation of anything from him.

As I've said before, you may be working hard, but are you doing the things he most values, that he's indicated would build up his love bank such that he feels in love with you.

Hard work is meaningless if you are not working on the right things. If you want to paint a masterpiece painting, you don't work hard with a pneumatic drill. It's not how hard you work, but are you working on the right things.

You also have to give it time. Affairs are very damaging to the betrayed spouse, and it takes time to heal even if you are doing the right things.

It takes longer if you are doing the wrong things, as well as that hard work does not build romantic love.

Headheldhigh - thanks for your response

No not WOW but every other game. When a new one comes out he'll play as soon as he gets home to 1am. Unfortunately this is not a new behaviour - we've been together 17 years and it has always been like this. And even before I came along he played for hours on end. Just before we got married he got extremely addicted to Everquest (playing to 3 or 4am in the morning) and I put my foot down then and said that it had to stop.

I have always felt I've come second to the computer (honestly quite jealous of it) but he has many wonderful qualities and if I can get him away from the computer things are good. As you can imagine though if someone is playing computer all night well after I fall asleep SF suffers.

I've tried negotiating one computer free night a week but it doesn't always happen.

Our SF was marginally better before 1st child but never anything to write home about.

Over the years I've become increasingly resentful and in my own way tried to communicate this but probably not clearly enough. That's a big learning - need to communicate more even it is hard as I took the "easy" solution out in finding happiness elsewhere.

I can't get rid of the gaming altogether as it is so intrinsically woven into who he is but I need to put my foot down more about time spent with the computer.


Enlightened Ex
I'm pleased to report that what I have been doing has helped him somewhat (and time as well). And this is turn has made me more positive about things.

His psychologist has "discharged" him and said that he is dealing remarkably well with everything. She asked him to describe his emotive state in the context of "flying over a landscape in a helicopter". He said that he was looking at scrubland. The landscape had been carpet bombed and was desolate but now little shrubs are slowing growing in the barren landscape.
And good news is that he is open to looking at marriage builders and we can be a partnership again and work towards building our marriage.
And he put his ring back on
Oh and we are going on a "date" tomorrow - just us two, a double kayak and a beautiful river.

Anyways baby steps but in the right direction

Sigh,

I see an issue with your statement of "putting your foot down" about the computer gaming. While I understand where you are coming from, no one in any relationship is in a position to make demands of their partner, even if their partner's behavior is detrimental to the relationship. You must use the concept of POJA (Policy of Joint Agreement). Continue to talk to your husband about the gaming and both of your feelings around it and come to a joint agreement on how gaming will be handled. If you are never able to jointly agree after continued conversations, then you have to decide where to proceed from there.

Deepsigh,

I have always been a gamer as well. But the time I spent gaming grew inversely with the decline of my relationship with my wife. As she gave me less, I gamed more, until I no longer fought, and only gamed instead.

I have not spent a significant time playing any computer or console game since February 6th, 2010. This was the day I found out things were BAD. On that morning, I canceled my WoW account, and deleted all of my computer games.


FWW was in shock, as she felt as you do; "Don't do that, that's your thing, that's what you like to do."

It's true, I love games. I still do. And maybe one day I can integrate them into my life in a healthy manner. But, right now I have to concentrate on 1) My marriage, 2) My family, 3) My self 4) My education, 5) My plans for the future.

This does not mean that your H needs to do this, it was simply how I chose to react, given the fact that games had become a crutch for what I was missing in my M.

If he can't put them down completely, maybe you can use this as an RC opportunity. I did play with many couples on several different games. If not, then he does need to schedule this RC time of his so it doesn't conflict with meeting the minimum UA time of 20+ hours per week for recovery, and 15+ hours per week of maintenance after recovery.

Oh, and I would conversely integrate; rather than a "computer free" night, integrate computer nights. 1 or a maximum of 2 nights a week where he can go nuts. Each of those should be met with a "date night" with you.

Really confused today.

Things almost seemed back to normal - the status quo before the affair. My H seemed happy and he talks about the OC as his own and shows her affection.
Our wedding anniversairy is coming up soon and I planned a night away which he seemed excited about.
We haven't tackled the computer issue yet though.

However today I discovered that something I asked him to do hasn't been done. I feel really embarassed about talking about this (I haven't told my friends etc) but really need some advice. Essentially one of the other things that has really upset over the years, first discovered around 5 years ago, is that my H has a fetish with collecting women's underwear. I first found out when I found a box full of it. After the emotional upset my H explained that it wasn't reflective on me and instead something he got a thrill/excitement over. He promised to get rid of it. However over the years boxes have popped up again in hiding places and each time I get really upset and he once again promises to get rid of it. So today, after finding a box only a few weeks ago, I have just put some wine under the house (where I never go usually) and guess what - a treasure trove. It is obviously a compulsion and he finds it difficult to stop but I find it incredibly disrespectful and upsetting.

I will obviously talk to him when he gets home but I feel like a broken record on this. Am I right to get upset or should I just accept this as one of his faults that I need to accept?

It seems the only things that have changed in BH life is you stop your affair and he has an OC.

He needs to get rid of that collection. However he may not be able to stop being a collector. How about the both of you go to the Victoria Secret store once a year and buy him a piece to start a collection. You can wear it for him then he can put it away in his box. He has a collection of your "old" undies instead of who knows Who's/What's.

HAve you called the Harley's they are good at giving suggestions to use at getting the other spouse on board to do a counseling session.

Hello all.
Two years down the track and am needing to off load and get some advice. My relationship is back where it was before the affair - essentially affectionate but platonic relationship (sex 3 times last 2 years which is pretty much standard for last 10 years).
We dont talk about affair or our relationship,, I just focus on trying to keep him happy, organise things to do together to keep positive things happening.
Thing is I just dont feel that happy, but as husband seems happy with status quo I dont want to rock the boat and make him sad.