I'm not dodging the question about doing nice things for my wife. Saturday night, made her a Buffalo Mozarella Napoleon, made it look amazing, sent her a picture of it to her phone because she was upstairs. She came down looked at it, said, "what are we gonna eat with it?" Not a wow or a thank you, she just wanted crackers or bread with it. I got out some rolls and crackers and we ate it together. The reaction is what I want to point, she appears indifferent to nice things almost as if she doesn't want to give me the satisfaction of a complement or thank you. I got her a very nice bottle of wine to drink at my parents house because she loves pinot noir and my parents don't carry that. She liked the wine, but again, no reaction. I'm not looking for her to grab my hand and run upstairs to the bedroom by any means, but her body language and comments appear to me as her being either indifferent or oblivious to the attempt. I'll be doing something nice again today after work and I hope that my efforts are having an impact but that she isn't expressing herself when they do.

We also need to remain nice and communicate with our Ws. We should not LB or DJ no matter what. We should work towards giving affection to our Ws. Yes, I know you'll may say that W will not let me whatever..., but SH means the kind of affection that is under the radar. Things like notes, gestures, maybe little presents etc.. go a long way. His theory is called "rocks in a river" and it is something I hold onto EVERYDAY!

Rocks in a River: You find yourself on the bank of a wide river. It is too wide to jump across, and yet you still need to cross it. What do you do? You start picking up rocks and throwing them into the river. (These rocks are each small affectionate thing you do for your W). For the first 499 rocks, you see the rock hit the water, and then it dissapears. These rocks are sinking and landing on the bottom of the river. Eventually you get to rock #500 and it hits the water and part of it is sticking up above the surface. You now realize you are getting somewhere. You can finally see progress. For the first 499 rocks, you knew they were stacking up, but you had no proof other than common sense telling you that they were building up. We have to approach our relationships now as if every piece of affection is one of those rocks. We will not see any progress until a number of rocks have been thrown. However, just because we are not seeing these first 499 rocks does not mean they are not having an impact. Believe that they are, because they are.

As far as LB's go, none for three days, and on a few occasions when I wasn't certain I asked her and she said no. Our avoidance of LB's on both sides has much, much better because we know what to look for.