You mention in your letter that you need time to reset your priorities, and I applaud you for your wisdom. But I want to be sure that you understand what your priorities are. From my perspective, your highest priority should be to meet each other's emotional needs. If you fail to meet each other's needs, your marriage, which is your source of strength in achieving all your other objectives, will weaken. And if your marriage suffers, everything else you value will suffer along with it.

Meeting each other's needs is more important than meeting the needs of your children; more important than going to work; more important than paying bills; more important than cleaning the house, cooking meals or visiting friends and family. It's the most important responsibility you will ever have in life.

This was part of what I did in Plan A that I think so many (especially men) seem to miss the boat on. I didn't spend all of my time trying to convince my wife to stay. I didn't browbeat her about the affair and I didn't work at educating her about what a dolt OM was. Instead I made a nice dinner, finished her laundry for her, washed the dishes after she went to bed, took our granddaughter on walks in the park and invited my wife to join us.

Yeah, I was dying inside, wanting to scream at her, beat the hell out of her and go find OM and ensure that his death was slow and agonizing. But I didn't do any of those things; well, after I figured out that I was defeating my own objective by doing those kind of things my actions changed. That was after I found MB and began to read, got SAA from the library and read it in one night...Before then, I was convinced that I should find a way to explain to her why staying married was better than leaving me for some dirt bag who had just had his wife leave him because he was a serial adulterer. I was sure that if I could show her how wrong she was that she would fix herself.

When I started to make our time together the most enjoyable part of her day, even more enjoyable than talking on the phone to OM, that was when she began to consider me as being a better choice. The time she was with me became something she didn't want to be without because being with me was something that made her happy and feel good about herself. (It also allowed me to monopolize her time giving her less and less time to communicate with OM.)

...

... It lets both get specific ENs met consistently and soon the time spent together becomes the most enjoyable time in their lives. My wife and I would rather go shopping together than do almost anything alone these days, but not because I enjoy shopping so much, it is because we enjoy being together more than we enjoy being apart.

It didn't happen overnight though. We began, remember, with her wanting to get away from me to be with OM. At first she wanted to be almost anywhere but by my side. And to be honest, spending time with her made me feel sick most of the time. I fought guilt at first because I wanted to smash her face in a few times. Our life genuinely sucked at that point.

But as we started doing things that we both found enjoyable, at first maybe a half hour walk with our granddaughter or the dog, and added additional activities like taking our cameras along, and then added working on the pictures on the PC when we got home and printing them, matting them and hanging them on the wall...Before long we were both ready to takes a walk the minute we were both home. We talked, we held hands when she'd allow it, I held the car door for her if we drove somewhere to walk, I packed a picnic lunch and that would let us stay out longer...It was all pretty calculated and yet as we did it more and more and began to include more activities than just walking around the block, we both began to enjoy our time enough that spending time together was effortless.

Some people think that if important emotional needs are not met naturally, a couple is not right for each other. Do you feel that way? Can you see how that way of thinking could prevent you from becoming experts at meeting each other's most important emotional needs?

Without restoring romantic love in a marriage, POJA quickly turns into Disrespectful Judgements accompanied by Angry Outbursts and Selfish Demands.

...

Until Romantic Love is acheived in a marriage, there is typically NO CARE and NO PROTECTION of one anothers feelings during POJA.
And until this love is restored, POJA can often end up becoming no more than a power struggle that creates more resentment.