I read this passage last night. It touched me and thought it may help you.

"The manner in which we speak is exceedingly important. An ancient sage once said, "A soft answer turns away anger." When your spouse is angry and upset and lashing out words of heat, if you choose to be loving you will not reciprocate with additional heat but with a soft voice. You will receive what he is saying as information about his emotional feelings. You will let him tell you of his hurt, anger, and perception of events. You will seek to put yourself in his shoes and see the event through his eyes and then express softly and kindly your understanding of why he feels that way. If you have wronged him, you will be willing to confess the wrong and ask forgiveness. If your motivation is different from what he is reading, you will be able to explain your motivation kindly. You will seek understanding and reconcilliation, and not to prove your own perception as the only logical way to interpret what has happened. That is mature love-love to which we aspire if we seek a growing marriage.

Love doesn't keep score of wrongs. Love doesn't bring up past failures. None of us is perfect. In marriage we do not always do the best or right thing. We have sometimes done and said hurtful things to our spouses. We cannot erase the past. We can only confess it and agree that it was wrong. We can ask forgiveness and try to act differently in the future. Having confessed my failure and asked for forgiveness, I can do nothing more to mitigate the hurt it may have caused my spouse and she has painfully confessed it and requested forgiveness, I have the option of justice of forgiveness. If I choose justice and seek to pay her back or make her pay for her wrongdoing, I am making myself the judge and her the felon. Intimacy becomes impossible. If, however, I choose to forgive, intimacy can be restored. Forgiveness is the way of love.

I am amazed by how many individuals mess up every new day with yesterday. They insist on bringing into today the failures of yesterday and is so doing pollute a potentially wonderful day...."

Chapter 4: "The Five Love Languages" by Gary Chapman.

This works both ways.

Prayers for you,
R

This is wonderful.

I am a WH in the process of starting Plan A and wanting to rebuild my M...while my BW/WW continues her A with her OM.

She has yelled and ranted and threatened to run to him countless times, but then has also held me close and told me she loves me. She says things about how devastated she is and unsure that she can rebuild, but then says loving things and also drops hints that make me believe she eventually wants to try and work it out once she "doesn't feel destroyed" (her words).

And through it all I have exercised 95% patience and quietude (5% of the time I've lost my cool just enough to get in a sideways jab) and it has worked wonders.

I have admitted the full range of my betrayal honestly and openly even though I feared she would run the other way. And she screamed, but then she calmed down, and the last few days since I opened up have been the best in 2 months.

I am only a number of weeks into Plan A and I'm already seeing benefits of it, and of the moral of the above story.

Anyone who thinks otherwise should know, from someone who is still in the thick of the pain, it works wonders.

Great words of wisdom. The hard part for me is remembering all that while having a conversation with my W.

NCW,
I'm sorry for the harshness of my post on the other thread. I was out of line.

Onlywords