If all I can feel right now is love for my children, is that enough to get started on getting back? Is it enough?

Is it enough to get STARTED? Yes. Is it enough to change things? No. It takes effort and commitment to follow the steps necessary to rebuild love, trust and intimacy in your relationship. If you REALLY love your children, consider what you've taught them over the past 11 years. Do you really think people don't talk in a small town? Do you really think they don't know? That's HELL on kids. It's embarassing. They wind up defending you, when they KNOW you don't deserve defending! And...they inevitably end up repeating your mistakes. That's the MOST tragic. Ask my secretarys husband. He bawled as he begged his son to go back and work on his marriage. He had found a new 'friend' at work and was going to leave his wife and children for her. History always repeats itself. You are the model for your children...whether you think they see or not.

If, in addition, you commit to (and execute) completely giving up the other person, then your childrens' well-being is a very good starting reason to try.

Just don't sit there in a fog or on the fence or whatever they say, with two women, feeling sorry for yourself while being a hero for your kids.

With partners and affairs, my experience is that the progression ought to be to go from 2 partners to 1, and then maybe none. And start all over after that point, having learned many good lessons. But the trick is to start by whittling down the number of relationships.

Oh gosh YES YES YES - it is enough.

It is exactly where my H was for two years - really - two years before he was able to truly fall back in love with me. It was work - counselling, time together - I changed my behaviour, he changed his...it was work for both of us. He struggled with not feeling in love with me and I struggled with not hearing him tell me he loved me.

It was all worth it and this morning we were laying in bed and both boys jumped in to say good morning and man, that says it all.

This will make you cry, no matter who you are in the triangle, and no matter how you got here.


When a Family Man Thinks Twice
Joshua Coleman, Ph.D.
San Francisco Chronicle
June 18, 2000 (Father's Day)

You get married. And at some point you don't know if the marriage is going to work. And since it's your first marriage, you feel discouraged and hopeless and start believing that your marriage looks nothing like the ones on TV or in US magazine. And you think how nice it would be to have a marriage like that, built on friendship, hiking, and an active sex life.
And since it's a marriage with children, you don't know what it feels like to be divorced with children, and figure it might not be that bad. It's a tradeoff. And people say everything in life is a tradeoff, so there must be something worthwhile about tradeoffs.

And you start thinking about it after you leave the movie theater because your marriage once looked like the movie marriage, at least when you were first dating. Or, maybe the movie is realistic, with lots of alienated, confused adults, but, even those movies feature somebody who's falling in love, like the two teenagers in American Beauty. And so you compare your marriage to the teenagers in American Beauty and wonder how you got as far off the track as Kevin Spacey, and do you need to get a GTO and start
smoking pot again to find yourself, even if you're smart enough to date somebody your own age instead of your daughter's friend?

And maybe you realize that the same actors you're comparing your marriage to on the screen, are having as much trouble in their marriages off the screen as you are having in yours, at home. And so you stop comparing yourself to
their happy on screen marriages, and compare yourself to them as happy divorced actors who have their kids part-time and live in LA or New York or on their ranches in Montana.

And at the playground, watching your kids go down the slide with your wife, you end up sitting by a divorced father. And if you've never been divorced, you won't see his loneliness as he stretches his legs and watches and waves at his children because he looks like you, when you wave and smile at yours playing on the swings, or that circular spinning thing that makes you nauseous when you have the poor judgment to get on it. And you don't see that this very same child on the swing set saying look at me look at me will have to be returned to her mother's house like a videotape by six because that was the time agreed to in the agreement. And you may not know the sadness he feels returning that child to her mother as she closes the door to him like a vault while his kid waves, sad, bewildered or worse, happy to
be back with her mom and now oblivious of him, her father.

And you, who walk in and out of your home every day with your wife and kids, can't know what it's like to sit in your car and watch the place you lived in as family, knowing your child is in there, laughing, talking loudly, or waving briefly at you from the window like she does when her uncle leaves. And since you are married, and wake up every day to your child's loud laughter and endless questions and requests and frustrations and hurts, you can't contemplate the deadwood barrenness of a house deprived of that sound. And you wouldn't know that going home to that silence, a silence you craved many times while married, is a silence found more often on hillsides, after a large-scale fire.

And being married, you and your wife may have just put your child to bed with Harry Potter or the Little Engine That Could or other magical
children's stories that teach the value of never giving up and struggling against the odds. And as the evening goes on, you end up in one of those god awful fights with her that leave you feeling alone and why should you have to put up with this as hard as you work and try. And it's hard to feel like nobody else has it as bad or understands what you feel except perhaps the
woman you've begun to have an affair with who always says the right thing and makes you feel good about yourself, which, of course, you deserve. And the sex with the woman you're having an affair with is unbelievable because
sex is always unbelievable in affairs or else why would anybody bother?

And since you're a married father, who goes on vacations with his kids and helps them with their soccer, homework or playground politics, you may underestimate the feelings of seeing your child walk out of the house you once lived in as family, holding the hand of your ex-wife's new husband. Perhaps you're surprised by the stab of betrayal when you hear your child refer to your ex-wife's new husband as "my other daddy." And even though you've had enough psychotherapy to start a clinic on both coasts, you watch yourself get mad and hurt and state that she Does not, Can not and Will not have another daddy because that is a position only you can fill and if she ever brings up that phrase again, something really bad is going to happen to somebody, you're just not sure who.

And you begin to wonder if anything is worth this kind of pain. Is anything worth having your baby, your child, your self, handed to you and ripped back out like an assembly line robot on a killing spree, week after week after week after week? And friends and family and professionals say it will get better over time and it does get better because you eventually get better at
finding new and improved ways to blind and numb yourself. And people will tell you this change is called growth. And you know that must mean growth is highly overrated.

And you always swore you would be a great dad and you have been but you better set your sorry [censored] down with divorce and give thanks for every other weekend or summer visitation or some other version of fatherhood that has nothing to do with family and everything to do with an arrangement so dubious only a court can invent it. And maybe when your kids grow up and go
off to college or move out you'll feel better. But then maybe you won't. Maybe their new independence will just free them up to see your limitations even more clearly.

And though you would never do it, you come to understand those lost fathers, marginalized through their own mistakes or a lousy arrangement, moving miles away and rarely calling, leaving their kids bobbing and drifting like toys thrown from the back of a moving boat. And how these fathers get struck
dead and dumb years later when there's an angry and betrayed call from a child who's now a teenager or an adult. And how these dads stumble out an excuse that tries to be an apology but ends up blaming the child and the ex-wife, and leaves the kid glad the father wasn't around in the first place no wonder mom wanted out.

And maybe you'd never let it get to that point and you do need to leave your marriage. Maybe the smoking stacked years of hurt and resentment are sooting the air you and your family breathe and no priest or rabbi or therapist can ever reverse it because you already tried all that. And you end up falling in love with someone new because she reminds you of all the qualities you
love best; those of your children, your closest friends and you hate to admit it but - yeah, those of your ex-wife.

And then, whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing, better or worse, you look back. And at some point, your kids ask when you and mom are going to live together again. And though they eventually stop asking, they won't stop hoping. And they carry that hope the way you carry your love for them - soft, constant, and close to the surface. And no matter how awful it
was to be married and how grateful you are to be out, and how much getting out was the right decision, some part of you may always wonder, was there something else I could have done? Something?

Copyright Joshua Coleman.
Dr. Coleman's book "Imperfect Harmony: How to Stay Married for the Sake of Your Children and Still Be Happy," (St. Martin's Press), is now available in bookstores everywhere.

Website: www.drjoshuacoleman.com
Office and voicemail: (415) 567-2741 (PST)
Email: coleman.dnai@rcn.com

Order the book at amazon for only $16.77 at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031228974X/smartmarriages

Finally!!! I am amazed.

This is the first book I have ever seen that supports the viewpoint (from Dr. Laura, who a lot of people don't like): "Your kids don't care if you're not getting any".

There is another book, "The Divorce Culture" that talks about people divorcing and re-marrying for the sake of having a "better" partner, and how damaging that is to kids (regardless of amicability of the divorce and all those other factors that people cite). The resarch did show that kids who grew up in "lukewarm" marriages were no worse off.

It begins to look as I suspected--that people say that kids are damaged by growing up in a not-so-great marriage in order to justify getting divorced.

hope 4 future - very good insight in this letter by Joshua. Yes, there is so much pain that both partners are seeing. Or at least the ones that have emotional feelings. The kids are the ones that do hurt the worst. I know, I have older kids from 15-25. The pain they are experiencing everyday is monumental. I basically have been to myself, and not talking to xhusband hardly at all, which is better. I don't want to hear his voice anymore, I don't want to see him anymore. He didn't give me the pleasure to disconnect, as he disconnected when he met his pleasurable other woman, and never came back. I need to disconnect and it is hard seeing him and hearing him on a daily basis. He doesn't know how hard this is, when he didn't have to really do it, cause the other woman provided him with euphoria pleasure.

One of the things that I have been reading when parents divorce, is that the kids no longer have a unit that they can call family. This is very hard for them to face, and the chances of them having a committment to marriage is not very good. They look at marriage as doomed, they look at marriage as a thing to do, cause society wants you to make a committment. Which in reality, they don't look at marriage the way parents who have stayed together do.

Many parents do actually end up like the story above. They wished for their mates, and that is all they really want in life. To have a happy marriage with their 1st mate. But it takes two to want this marriage to work, and therefore it is usually the wayward spouse who doesn't want to work on the marriage. There will always be a pain that will never go away. Through counseling, I have finally realized this, and they said the pain will last forever. Your kids, may not want to go to a parents house for x-mas as they grow older, and that parent may feel left out. The other parent might provide them with more gifts, more money spent on going out to dinner, or etc. And the other parent may be just trying to survive. There are many people today that are into selfish acts.

I know that my kids do more things with my x-husband than I. I provide a roof over their head, and clothing and washer/drying, toilet, etc. But dad can take them all out to dinner and movie, and not even think twice about the bill. I haven't been able to do this with my kids since probably over a year. He went on vacation with 2 of the kids this summer, and I haven't been on a vacation with my kids, since we flew out to where my husabnd had his sexual affair during our visit, visiting his 'sick' father. But does my x see this as painful to me. Nope, never well. Does he see taking the kids out to dinner and movie as painful to me. Nope, never well.

I would love to see marriages stay, and work on their marriages, through the thickest of deep emotional mess. Marriages can make a go of their marriage, if they both try, concentrate on meeting each other needs, and providing a unit for the kids. I believed in this, but my husband didn't, and therefore, after the physical abuse, I had no choice but to file. But as he posts here, he said I filed and he followed my wants. He knows deep inside that I didn't want the divorce, and it was even stated to both lawyers.

Please, anyone and everyone, stay for your kids. They go through so much hell, and afterwards, these kids are the ones who will be messed up. The studies are there, to show that these kids do have emotional battle scars from divorce. I already see them, and my xhusband thinks he is fixing everything. No. Not one of the kids want to go to church with me. I found a great church, and not one of them will go. So sad, cause we used to go as a family, maybe more of my wanting to attend church than my x. He really didn't like church, and didn't attend church per say, just the bible study classes.

Please stay for the kids, and work together. Why is it that you fell in love, wanted each other those many years ago, looked in each others eyes and saw love, and now you can't even look into each others eyes. It hurts to look in my x's eyes, knowing all the lies, deceit and the pain he continues. He wouldn't even file the papers for me to get alimony and childsupport until 2 days ago. I have been asking and asking. We were divorced since June 6 of this year. And I have been living on busting my butt off, selling things, and begging from agencies for food and assistance. Does he see the pain and suffering I have endured. Nope.

Stay for your children, the story above is all so true. The family is destroyed by divorce, and the kids will be messed up emotionally forever.