No one is suggesting that you "threaten" divorce, but that you make that PROMISE if she will not commit to the marriage. That is the logical outcome when a spouse refuses to meet the others needs. Unless you are saying you will stay married under ANY conditions and have absolutely no standards? Because that is the impression you are giving me.

What you are suggesting here is unconditional love, which leads to this very kind of abuse and neglect.

Dr Bill Harley: "The concept of unconditional love in marriage usually refers to a spouse�s lifelong commitment to care for the other spouse regardless of what the other spouse does. I�m in favor of a lifelong commitment to care regardless of unfavorable circumstances (health problems, financial setbacks, and other factors outside a couple�s control that can negatively impact a marriage). But I�m opposed to a lifelong commitment to care for a spouse when that spouse makes marriage-wrecking choices. It tends to give such people unrealistic expectations of entitlement�that they should be cared for, regardless of their willingness to care in return. Neglect and abuse characterize many marriages based on unconditional love."

You can already see the destructive effects of unconditional love on your marriage.

"i guess I'm torn because i don't know how to give tough love to her, i honestly believe that will drive her away faster than it will bring us closer, but I'm open to other opinions if they're well justified and backed up with evidence to the contrary."

Do you have evidence that your strategy works? I would like to see the evidence because so far you are batting a big fat goose egg, bubba! You have pushed her about as far away as one can get.

On the other hand, those of us here who are telling you to set some standards are in recovered marriages. We did not get there by fairy magic and appeasement.

Take your right hand, and stick the middle finger on your belly button.




Now... trace straight down about 10 inches.





Now squeeze hard and fast.




Did that hurt?




It should have.


If it didn't; grow a pair, dude. Quit being afraid of her, quit being afraid of "losing her." You've already lost her. Now, nut up and take back what's yours. Put your damn foot down, and make your conditions known.

Let me add one more thing. You are headed for divorce right now. As long as your wife refuses to do anything to recover your marriage, this is hopeless. So you have nothing to lose.

You don't understand that you have already lost your marriage. Once you accept that truth, you may be more inclined to take this seriously. It appears to me that you are more serious about conflict avoidance than you are about saving your marriage. Avoiding conflict will not save your marriage though.

Yep....

Okay so I've been working on this. Let me get an editor on here to help me through this so it's not a LB and that it accomplishes what is necessary.

To my wife:

I want you to know that I love you and care for you. I'm am heeding the advice I received when I was counseled to not allow the standards of my marriage slip because of our current circumstances. This is a request on my behalf that I am offering to you to make our marriage work and to create a relationship of love and happiness with the person that I am choosing to be my lover and best friend friend for life. This is what I will need from you in order to make this work, to allow me to heal and to make our family the best it can be are:

1) I need to be your top priority in life. Everything else that we're dealing with in life needs to take a backseat to US. This is imperative to me. If we're to make this marriage work and to create a loving environment I need the ambivalency to stop through your actions and it needs to stop today. We can not afford to hope and wait for feelings to change. Feelings follow actions. You can accomplish this by meeting my top emotional needs which right now are Aff, SF, AD and RC with you.

2) I need to feel safe in our relationship going forward. I need to know that this will never happen again and that you are committed to creating love in our relationship. You can accoplish this my agreeing to and following the POJA, PORH, UA of 20+ hours weekly and EP's that we determine via the POJA. This also needs to be enforced by eliminating love busters from our lives.

3) I need you to forgive me for my past injustices and allow me to offer you just compensation for my grievances against you. I also need you to forgive yourself and tear down your emotional walls and be vulnerable with me again. No more roommates. I am your spouse and expect us to behave like spouses do.

4) I need for "US" to attempt to a loving and happy marriage where we are each other's best friends. You can help me to accomplish this by ALLOWING me to meet your most important emotional needs which I suspect are Aff, RC, IC, and Adm. and to expect me to eliminate the many love busters from our relationship.

5) I need you to have faith that we can change and will change and that from this day forward we will WORK towards a loving and happy marriage each and every day for the rest of our lives so that each of us finds ourselves married to our best friend and that our children will see that their mother loves and admires their father and that their father loves and respects his wife.

6) I need you to allow me to know your conditions and requests so that I can be the best husband that you deserve and the best father for our children.

Love your husband.

Does she know what all these terms like RC, POJA, etc mean? It was my understanding that she knew nothing about MArriage Builders?


Okay so I've been working on this. Let me get an editor on here to help me through this so it's not a LB and that it accomplishes what is necessary.

To my wife:

I want you to know that I love you and care for you but I am not willing to stay in a loveless marriage. I'm am heeding the advice I received when I was counseled to not allow the standards of my marriage slip because of our current circumstances. I want to create a relationship of love and happiness with the person that I am choosing to be my lover and best friend friend for life. I am not willing to wait or settle for less.

Your affair has been the most painful thing I have endured in my life. But I am willing to give you an opportunity to earn my forgiveness under certain conditions. Here is what it will take:

1) Commit to a program of recovery now, before it is too late. We can not afford to hope and wait for feelings to change. Feelings follow actions so if the actions that serve to create love are not in place, it will never happen.

2) I need to feel safe in our relationship going forward because I cannot endure another affair. I need to know that this will never happen again and that you are committed to creating love in our relationship and protecting me in the future. You can accoplish this my agreeing to and following the POJA, PORH, UA of 20+ hours weekly and EP's that we determine via the POJA.[melody's note: extraordinary precautions are not negotiable and as such, are not subject to POJA.] This also needs to be enforced supported by eliminating love busters from our lives.

3) I need you to forgive me for my past injustices and allow me to offer you just compensation for my grievances against you. I also need you to forgive yourself and tear down your emotional walls and be vulnerable with me again. No more roommates. I am your spouse and expect us to behave like spouses do. [Melody's note: you didn't have the affair so this is inappropriate]

4) I need for "US" to attempt to a loving and happy marriage where we are each other's best friends. You can help me to accomplish this by ALLOWING me to meet your most important emotional needs which I suspect are Aff, RC, IC, and Adm. and to expect me to eliminate the many love busters from our relationship. redundant

5) I need you to have faith that we can change and will change and that from this day forward we will WORK towards a loving and happy marriage each and every day for the rest of our lives so that each of us finds ourselves married to our best friend and that our children will see that their mother loves and admires their father and that their father loves and respects his wife. Melody's note: faith is not what is needed here, ACTIONS are. Faith will come from evidence that this is going to work

6) I need you to allow me to know your conditions and requests so that I can be the best husband that you deserve and the best father for our children.

I know that I have not been the best husband in the past and I am willing to make the necessary changes to make you happy. But I cannot save our marriage alone. If this is to work, it will take a committment on both our parts. Not later, but now.

Love your husband.

HH, I think this attitude is part of the problem and explains why your wife doesn't take you seriously. It is WEIRD and patronizing for you to ask her for forgiveness when she has just assaulted you with the worst thing that can happen to a person. It is like the wife who got the crap beat out of her when she didn't have dinner ready apologizing to the wife beater for not having supper ready on time. It minimizes the assault and grossly exaggerates the "crime" of not having dinner ready on time. I agree that porn use can be viewed the same as an affair, however, the remedy is not the same and it should be not treated the same.

I didn't see anything in your email about giving her an opportunity to earn your forgiveness so I am presuming you are also giving her unconditional forgiveness. A big mistake. Here is Harley's advice in Can't We Forgive and Forget:

here

There is nothing here that tells me that the two of you have to 'get right spiritfully' separately. Did you tell her that this is a part of your healing journey TOGETHER? Because she's foggy. Ignore this. She's foggy. Ignore this.

Why are you reading that crap? Blog posts from a wayward are like drunken ramblings of an alcoholic. Why are you taking that seriously?

I love this, thank you. Lol.

I just got off the phone with her today, and she seemed a lot more upbeat and happy after a good nights rest and our twins were less stressful for her today. She admitted she was in a bad mood yesterday.

I'm still working on that letter and plan to give it to her and talk to her about. The POJA and other acronyms are something we can discuss together.

As far as asking forgiveness, I am in need of it. I have been a less than perfect husband and I am in need of forgiveness as well. I do agree she did do the 2nd worst thing to me possible, however, I have wronged her too and I do desire forgiveness from those things.

Oh, WHATEVER. She is an addicted wayward. They talk like that.

The 2nd worst thing? No, it is the very worst thing.

Your wrongs can be discussed in another context and will be addressed in recovery. It makes no sense to include it here when there has been an affair. Asking for her forgiveness when she has wronged you only serves to muddy the waters and take the focus off the key issue. It comes across as patronizing. The key issue is recovering your marriage from her affair. That remedy will certainly address and correct your wrongs but the focus needs to be on recovering from her affair.

If she is not familiar with those terms, they need to come out. Don't write a letter that your receiver can't possibly understand, lest she gets stuck trying to decipher your acronyms. She needs to hear your message, not get irritated trying figure out acronyms.

The 2nd worst thing. The worst thing would be to betray me like this AND take my kiddos away from me via a D. That's MUCH worse than this to me at least.

Will fix, thanks.

Okay went through and edited my letter today. Thanks for the help on that. I was wanting to add some ideas of what we should do together during our UA time. A couple ideas I had were to read HNHN and love busters together and to do the online course together as well as do the EN questionaire's.

Any other imperative things that should be done early on in the recovery during UA time?

Thanks.

HH, Im afraid you are putting the cart before the horse and havent killed her affair dead yet.

Has she given her guy the final "F-off" letter?

She has embarked on her personal journey to "nookie-ville" with her turd while you are doing a tap dance around her.

We are now 10 pages in to this thread and you are going lose the patience of some really good advisors on this matter until you get this woman to commit to no-freaking-contact for life.

No personal journey
No finding herself
No time off

UA time doesnt work so good while she's pining for a deviant while she's sitting with you.

no contact was established by a 3rd party

Okay here's the update:

WW and I have been in a new state living together with her folks for the past 4 weeks, she's been here for 6 weeks now.

I presented my plan to her(seen above) and she rejected it 'for now' until my exam is over(next week), but she has relented on some things like spending time talking with each other nightly. The 20+ UA is NOT in place, nor will it be in the immediate future, unfortunately. We do spend a lot of time together, it's just not undivided right now. We're currently working with our church leader and a marriage counselor(who is using a lot of MB principles, which impresses me). The counseling(which is virtually free and she's been receptive to) has seemed to help and I do see her heart softening from where it was.

No contact has remained firmly in place, I can verify this because I've been with her virtually every second of every day(if not me, then her parents).

We've been hashing out a lot of our differences. She tells me I'm a great father, been a good husband. She still won't touch me. She says she doesn't want to take the kids away, but that she contemplates divorce a lot. She doesn't 'feel' love for me.

We've talked this over a lot. I keep telling her I believe ACTIONS precede feelings, but she's firmly entrenched in the idea that she can't 'act' until she feels something for me.

I feel emotionally drained as I try to serve her and deposit love units by being an excellent father and giving her time to recharge as she handles 3 kids under the age of 4. It seems like she's often kinder and more thoughtful towards me during the day, but then when we talk at night it seems like she's 'still in the fog'.

She says if we divorce, the other guy has nothing to do with it. It's that she doesn't 'love me' and she's unsure how to get to that love. And when I say that, she means it in an eros way. She says she has philos love for me, but not eros(which is a step up from just a few weeks ago).

I caught her in a dichotomy the last night. She's tells me that she doesn't love me(the way a spouse ought to), but that she's tried so much in our marriage and questions why NOW do I 'start trying'(which isn't true, I've been a pretty darn good husband for some time, definitely not perfect, and I have mistreated her and have my fair share of sins and problems as a human being, but I've always tried to treat her well). I said to her, well which is it? Have you always tried to love me, or have you not loved me? It can't be both? Either you loved me and something changed in you, or you haven't put everything into the marriage that you're claiming you have.

Our anniversary is coming up next month and then I head of to Military ODS for 5 weeks a week later.

She talks as if she's going to move forward with me to my first duty station, and she's going to my family's reunion at the end of the month on the other side of the U.S.

So things are much improved. I just don't know how to help her 'break out of the misty-fog' she's in about her lack of feelings for me. She sometimes believes she can love me again, but it's intermingled with thoughts and feelings of divorce as well.

Do I just continue on in my plan A for the next few weeks, and allow the ODS for 5 weeks to be a plan B to give us some time away?

She says she knows shes not in ant state of mind or condition to make a life-altering decision and won't make a decision for a while either. Though we're both emotionally exhausted even though our communication and openess is at an all-time high.

My kids mean the world to me. I can't imagine my life without my wife and kids. It's the central most important thing to me, nothing else really matters. I want my wife back, and I want to raise my children with her. I need serious help.