Exactly. You've understood the concept perfectly. Good job!

Met some of my girlfriends friends today, who hugged me & do not understand what is happening & share the opinion my gf is gonna crash BIG TIME & needs help!

She cheated, I draw a boundary, it was exposed to relatives within the week. Now she is rollercoastering between guilt & the thought of fleeing to Australia with her new guy to justify the cheating. (She gets homesick after 2 weeks abroad)
And I am not getting on the rollercoaster. One up & down & up was enough for me. Got sick.

How can you possibly get carried away by instant-feelings.
It's like changing your life because you saw a blockbuster movie. I feel sorry for her but feel guily myself because I cannot help her & most probably enabled her behaviour subconsiously.

There must be a way to help her stop the fleeing & face the facts?

And NO, we are not getting back together; but I want to help.

The best way to help is to step away and heal yourself and let her face the consequences of her choices.

That is the best way to help her.

Yeah thought so.

Asked her friends to be there when she crashes.

STOP trying to change people

Thank you all for replying & to help out a heartbroken man willing to learn.

Alis, I think that is an interessting discussion:
I believe it is impossible to CHANGE people especially the ones you love. Always have. I believe people can only willingly change their own BEHAVIOUR (and they hardly ever do, incl. myself)

Thinking about it: the Joint Agreement Policy + marriage is actually a powerfull way to FORCE people to change their own behaviour subconsiously and to grow closer to each other until the point of becoming enmeshed. If I read the stories of people who get divorced after 20 years of marriage here, some have to start searching what happened to the other 50% of their personality.

This is a very important and powerful distinction it took me a long time to learn. You CANNOT change someone else; you can however change yourself. People do change for the better but lasting, honest change is self motivated, not externally forced.

Right and what we are actually changing is our habits.


POJA is the most powerful tool we have for preventing independent behaviour. IB slides into disrespect in a heartbeat. It needs to be combined with radical honesty or it does not work. Yes, becoming enmeshed is the idea. Marriage is about co-dependency where there is not 'mine' and 'yours' but only 'ours'. This is not just about things, it is about time too.

It is also important to clarify that MB has never actually been about "changing" a person, in regards to dealing with affairs/infidelity. The betrayed person sets their BOUNDARIES and the wayward spouse is given the choice to either accept and meet those boundaries/commitments or the betrayed spouse will separate/divorce. These are guidelines even by those who have long-term marriages and children, let alone a situation that can be easily walked away from (such as a dating relationship without children).

Gerold (Salut!), your consistent habit is to take on girls with issues and try and fix them. This has never worked! As you browse the surviving an affair section, you may find many of those long-term marriages to START like your relationship with these girls. People who should not have married/bothered in the first place, did it anyways, and suffer the consequences, 1,5,20+ years down the line.

This is the only thing you can control & change - and that is to make better choices.

wow, that is really really scary for someone who has been in an abusive-relationship and was completely enmeshed with it. I needed to learn to "owe" my own feelings again!!!

I begin to understand how fragile a relationship actually is & how robust it should be if it is to survive changing environments and the test of time. Enmeshment seems like the only option.

That means choosing a partner that is very much like you and likes the same things you like, hates the things you hate and is STABLE too. You have to have compatible jobs because sacrifice is a terrible start for a marriage...

That means the gene-pool got awfully small!!!

I cannot possibly keep up this high-paced carreer if I am ever going to be enmeshed with somebody again... Impossible, it absorbes me too much.

???

You do not have to find a partner like you. You must have similar cultural values and energy levels, in other words be compatible. POJA takes care of the rest and in any case the things we like and dislike change over the years.

For instance I hate to cook and get really resentful if I am stuck in the kitchen. But I would hate even more to be married to someone that enjoys cooking because I am not fundamentally interested in food. On the other hand, everyone has to eat. Our solution is for both of us to be in the kitchen at the same time happily chatting away and doing stuff together.

My girlfriend really did not like to many vegetables & I love to cook. =) We had a lot of discussions and were forced to make agreements. She cut the veggies & I prepared the dinner while we talked & planned the rest of the evening. Even vegetable choices had to be discussed. It was realy realy hard.

Someone I know once mentioned she could never be together with someone who did not like food as much. I found that a strange statement back then.

Now I start to see why: because it is a daily trade-off that should lead to a healthy dinner and a fantastic evening and could be a potential minefield for a relation.

Yes, in hindsight the cooking/agreement thing was a huge test for our relationship...but it eroded.
I cannot possibly grap how one can have a courtship, not shack up and actually find out it is quite impossible to maintain agreements on stuff that seems incompatible?

???

Dating! That's how you explore compatibility. MB also includes ways to learn how to become compatible.

Gerold, I lived with my H before marriage. I was pregnant when we got married. Not everyone here has done things the "traditional" way, but after implementing MB, we have found how it would have been more positive the other way.

I did the same as alis (pregnancy included), and like her I see no benefit to having done that. In fact, I strongly regret not having had my H make a declaration that he wanted to marry me and go all in, without my settling for less-than-best by living with him first. When I got pregnant he seemed delighted and we mutually agreed that it would be best to marry before the baby arrived, but that isn't the kind of marriage I want for that baby, my now 23 year-old daughter. If a man wants to hedge his bets and see if she's good enough first, and wants to live with her and get free milk without the commitment of buying the cow, I hope I'd be able to persuade her that she's better than that. She's a very special and beautiful cow and any man who doesn't want to go all in and endow her with all of himself would not be good enough for her.

You find out BEFORE you live together. All you need to do is marry someone who agrees with the policy of joint agreement. Shacking up breeds a renters mentality that poisons the marriage. It is like the difference between renting a house and buying a house. Which one would you treat with care? A buyer does what it takes to fix the house, a renter abandons the house when there is trouble.

When shacking up, when one partner messes up, the TEST is over. When married, when one partner messes up, they both focus on fixing the problem.

Freeloader is unwilling to put much effort into the care of his or her partner in a romantic relationship. He or she does only what comes naturally and expects only what comes naturally. It's like a person who tries to live in a house without paying rent or doing anything to improve it unless the person is in the mood to do so.

Renter is willing to provide limited care as long as it's in his or her best interest. The romantic relationship is considered tentative, so the care is viewed as short-term. It's like a person who rents a house and is willing to stay as long as the conditions seem fair, or until he or she finds something better. The person is willing to pay reasonable rent and keep the house clean but is not willing to make repairs or improvements. It's the landlord's job to keep the place attractive enough for the renter to stay and continue paying rent.

Buyer is willing to demonstrate an extraordinary sense of care by making permanent changes in his or her own behavior and lifestyle to make the romantic relationship mutually fulfilling. Solutions to problems are long-term solutions and must work well for both partners because the romantic relationship is viewed as exclusive and permanent. It's like a person who buys a house for life with a willingness to make repairs that accommodate changing needs, painting the walls, installing new carper, replacing the roof, and even doing some remodeling so that it can be comfortable and useful.

A MUST READ for any person who shacks:


Living Together Before Marriage: Compatibility Test or Curse?
by Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D.

I wish we had an awesome childfree (and child-Worry-free, since even if you leave them behind, you worry) honeymoon in Mexico like my friends. We had a Seattle dinner 1-night cruise Wouldn't do it the same again, lol. We need to wait quite some time before a nice childfree "proper" honeymoon.

We had a day-trip to France using a coupon out of the newspaper! And in fact, it took place before the wedding! We had to change the wedding date because our witnesses couldn't make the original, but we'd already booked the ferry crossing, so that took place the weekend before the wedding.

It was great fun. I enjoyed my "honeymoon" and my wedding day was my happiest day ever, but I wish I'd made myself special enough for my H to want me with total commitment and no strings. You can image how I felt when the affair broke and would not die, and how I felt then that he'd married me because I was pregnant. He was quite shocked when I told him I felt that he had never wanted the kids and he insists it wasn't so, but I can never believe now that that he wanted me with all his heart, no matter what he says now in recovery.

I know that lots if people on this site were actually virgins on the wedding night and that this did not stop an affair, but that does not mean I can brush off the bad start that we got off to by living together. It contributed to a mindset that our marriage wasn't special, in my view. At least, it was special to me, but clearly it wasn't to my H.

I don't think about this much now, because recovery is going well. I just want to warn the thread starter that attitude before marriage undoubtedly persist into the marriage. Living together is a wholly bad practice.

I know exactly what you mean. We had never lived together before marriage and I CLUNG to that when I found out about the A. I just kept remembering how keen he was to get married, that we had no ties on the day, that he could have called it off but that he was dying to marry me.

I never cared at all about our living status before marriage before finding out about the A. In fact we had planned to live together before the wedding, but the house deal fell through.

I think if the engagement ring shows up after a baby, or even after a joint account or after a couple of shared bills it isnt as special. You wonder, either then or later, do they really want you, or do they just not want to bother moving out.

Glad you enjoyed it! Although I would enjoy France more than Seattle I wish I could have had the champagne, but I had a rather big bump at the time. Eek! How classy :P