Because W's wishes are uncalled for. W feeling uncomfortable with H having lunch with coworker is HER problem. She needs to deal with her trust issues.

If the person was just an acquaintence of mine I would probably explain to them my wife was a little possessive and respectfully no longer have lunch with the woman. But if I was having lunch with her every single day then it's quite unlikely that I would stop having lunch with her because she is more than an acquaintence.(which is perfectly fine mind you) A more likely scenario with me would be to not stop having lunch at all and to discuss with W what her trust issue is and try to help her.


I understand what you're saying because I used to share the same ideas. The only thing I would be worried about with the coworker is that he is going to rape W. But I would hope I have enough faith in W to trust her judgement of who to have lunch with.

Instead of destroying my ability to have relationships with people I would much rather develop and grow to the point where I don't need to wear diapers to keep from getting s*** on the floor.

^ That's not meant to be disrespectful, it's just illustrating my point.

***So perhaps in the process of W saying H was hurting her by HAVING LUNCH with a coworker the risk of an EA has increased because H now feels W lacks trust in him.(could easily be considered a LB)***

So, let's get this straight -- you are saying that the W *forced* her WH to have secret lunches with a female coworker, because W didn't trust WH because he was having secret lunches with a female coworker, and that if W would just close her eyes and trust WH and stop asking questions the secret lunches with a female coworker would stop?

My WH reacted the same way. He is furious at ME because, after YEARS of things like "secret lunches with female coworkers," I no longer trust him. If I would just trust him, everything would be fine.

News Flash: People who lie and are delibertely deceptive and secretive cannot and should not be trusted. But you are saying this is the BS's fault? That she is "love busting" her WH by putting up boundaries to protect herself and refusing to trust a known liar?

***Private lunches etc. with opposite sex workers should be kept to the minimum. Rather invite the spouse with and/or include other workers.***

This sounds fine to a normal person, but I just wanted to point out that my WH did sometimes follow the rule of "include other coworkers."

Unfortunately, he would do this one of two ways:

1. He would invite two or three other flirtatious young female coworkers and they'd all go together with him.
2. He would invite another married couple who works in his office and are old friends of his to go out to lunch. But instead of inviting me -- I worked *in the building* for many years and even after I quit I was only five minutes away -- WH would invite his favorite bimbo and the four of them would sit there in the restaurant like two happy couples.

Yeah, this all met the rule of "don't go alone," but to me it was all just as massively disrespectful and hurtful as when WH and his bimbo would go alone.
Mulan

Shadpoo,

What Suzet is trying to show you is that affairs are not started only by evil people who willingly go forth to cheat on their spouses. If you read here long enough, and read the articles, etc here on MB you will find that most affairs are started by good people who have a lapse of judgment.

"it just happened" "We talked about our problems and had so much in common" "We had a connection" "We were wrestling with the same problem and just fell in love...we are soulmates" You will find these and similar comments as a common theme.

So the answer is, you set appropriate boundaries for yourself and engage in self examination periodically. Are you being honest with your spouse? Are you forming an inappropriate attachment to a coworker or friend? If you feel the need to keep it secret and wouldn't talk about the same things in the same way with that perosn in front of your spouse, you are in the danger zone.

Suzet is exactly right. Her "trust" issues are not going to be resolved if her H continues to aggravate them with thoughtless behaviors. That is not love. He should do things to BUILD TRUST, not further erode it.

His refusal to stop the lunches when he clearly understands how troubling they are to his spouse sends the message that he does not care about her feelings and places these lunches over her well being. That is very destructive and harmful to the marriage. And his refusal to place her feelings over these supposedly meaningless, innocent lunches is a huge red flag that he probably shouldn't be trusted.

A loving spouse would not go out of his way to annoy and aggravate his spouse if she felt uncomfortable with these lunches. Such a person will not be married for long if he is that thoughtless about his spouses feelings. To continue to do so is profoundly thoughtless and very much against Marriage Builders principles.

shadpoo, I realize you have been here for a whopping 8 days, but have you considered READING about Marriage Builders principles? You feel very free to give advice here, but don't seem to understand the first thing about MB. That is what we are here for, after all.

***Because W's wishes are uncalled for. W feeling uncomfortable with H having lunch with coworker is HER problem. She needs to deal with her trust issues.***

Shad, if you meant this seriously, then you can look forward to terrible problems in your marriage and extreme unhappiness in your spouse.

The fact that you would be willing to disregard your wife's pain and humilation so that you can take some other woman out to lunch speaks volumes about who you are as a husband and as a man.

My WH feels the same way you do. He is a selfish, arrogant man who has brought tremendous suffering and public humilation to his own family. But the girls at work all think he's fabulous.
Mulan

Shadpoo,

Since you haven’t experience infidelity in your own life (I suppose), you won’t understand and therefore I’m not going to argue with you any longer about this. I suppose you’re a young guy who are still very innocent and naieve. You still have a LOT to learn my friend. (And I don’t mean it disrespectfully). Just keep reading these boards and hopefully you will begin to understand...

Suzet

When you put those "relationships" above the well being of your spouse, you will not be married for long. That kind of thoughtlessness is the kiss of death in marriage.

noone was forced to do anything.

They weren't secret until H decided that W's request was disrespectful. We really need to know more information though. There's nothing wrong with him having lunch with the lady. There's no need for them to stop.

perhaps your WH should have been open about the lunches in the first place. Or maybe WH knew you had no trust in him and decided it wasn't worth the effort to fight over having friends. What a pleasant experience for WH.
Asking your spouse to stop having lunch with your friend is not putting up a boundary to protect yourself because there is nothing to protect yourself from.


I'm sorry you had to experience that. It looks like you happened to be one of the unfortunate 25%. Or perhaps even less if you were taking measures to prevent it. But even so, a person's decision to have an affair: you can distract them and cut them off from anything that could possibly tempt them. Or you can help them learn and grow to become a person who doesn't need extra insurance past his own self-control.

identify and resolve the individual issues that cause the problem then, if you see your finger is infected, don't cut your arm off, heal the finger.

I completely agree, but setting a boundary for yourself such as "don't have lunch with a good friend". When all it really needs to be is "don't drink alcohol around your female friends because you tend to drink one too many" or perhaps an instruction on basic relationship psychology would halt any doubts.

There's far far far more and better solutions to problems than lopping off the whole arm.

***Or maybe WH knew you had no trust in him and decided it wasn't worth the effort to fight over having friends. What a pleasant experience for WH.***

Like most people who know little or nothing about the dynamics of infidelity, you've got your cause and effect exactly backward.

He didn't start sneaking around because I didn't trust him.

I don't trust him because I found out he was sneaking around.

Got it?

You also sound like one of those people who honestly believes that it's not cheating unless they are having full-blown sex. And if you promise you're not going to have sex with some other woman, then that is ALL your wife should be concerned about, and therefore she has nothing at all to be worried about. When you go out to have a nice lunch with some other woman, your wife should "trust" you not to have sex with that woman and just go have a peanut butter sandwich by herself and wait for you two to get back.

Another news flash: Dating is for single people. Married people only date their spouses. A married person who dates other people - and that's what you are doing, the fact that a woman is a coworker makes NO difference, that's what my husband hid behind for years and my head is exploding right now -- a married person who dates other people is hurting, ignoring, and publicly humiliating his/her spouse.

But that's okay, Shad. Just keep on doing what you're doing. Nobody here will be able to talk you out of it. But one day your wife is going to wonder what the h*ll she's doing wasting her time trying to be "married" to a guy who only needs an excuse ("We work together! Shut up! Get off my back! You drove me to it! Just trust me!") to ignore her and date other women.

Go ahead. We'll still be here. And please direct your wife to this site. She's going to need all the support she can get.
Mulan

this is actually quite incorrect. Someone with trust issues has some hurt or pain from their past they have not resolved yet. Usually abandonment problems(divorced parents <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />). The solution to this problem, a permanent solution, is to suck the blood out, [censored] the wound, the more the person has to face the issue, the more emotional trauma is vented and released. Of course they have to be open to this and willing to do grief work and heal those past wounds. It won't work if they always just run and hide from the pain.
If I could cause you ten hours of excruciating pain for one day, and at the end of those ten hours, you would get ten million dollars for you and your family, I would do it. But the catch is, you don't know you're getting the ten million til after it's over. Do you understand?

Keeping someone happy has nothing to do with whether or not you care for them. What is best for someone with trust issues well being is not at all to eliminate everything that triggers those issues, but eliminate the issue in the person so they no longer have to deal with it every time someone has lunch with a coworker.

to the marriage yes, but i would much rather grow as a person and reconcile my marriage when i am fully able to trust my spouse than go through life missing an arm because i can't handle the pain from my infected finger.

I promise you I most definately love my spouse and if she had trust issues(i have had them personally, i understand her feelings quite well) I would pretend to be having lunch with women just to try and get her emotional trauma out of her system so she can live a happier life.


as you can see from my statements, if i were H, my actions would not be thoughtless at all.

Another interesting thing about this is, relationships are setup this way for a reason, to help the people in it grow. Growth takes pain.

MB is great for couples who love each other but who are not in love with each other. I will give MB advice to those couples. But couples with deeper and more complicated issues, I will give the best advice I can.

having outside relationships does not harm the well-being of my spouse. her trust in me to have those relationships shows her trust in me and to betray that would be quite a horrible thing to do. The reason some people can say this and do it and some people can say this and can't is because some people have issues that they need to resolve. Past trauma that is directing their emotions and controlling their actions.

I'm sorry you're upset, I didn't mean anything personal by what I said. <3

I'm quite serious though. You don't need to cut off your arm to heal the finger.

I really do understand the MB concepts, but there's more than one way to do things, but it doesn't appear right now that anyone is willing to give them a chance

That is quite the hypothetical scenario you have manufactured, however, it doesn't address the problem. The solution to the problem is NOT to continue to disrespect your spouse's feelings by continuing with the lunches. Many spouses feel uncomfortable with their spouse having opposite sex friends and there is nothing wrong with that. That feeling should be respected.

Further, if a spouse INSISTS on pursuing lunches at the expense of the well being of his marriage, then there probably is good reason to NOT trust the spouse. Either that spouse is profoundly thoughtless or really is having an affair.


Then you should not be trusted if you do this. Your W would be RIGHT to not trust you since you do not value her feelings enough to protect them. Instead, you would harm her and damage your marriage. That ain't the behavior of a loving spouse.



Not at all. Your statements indicate that you are profoundly thoughtless and immature. You don't value or respect your W's feelings and can't be trusted.


unfortunately, you are giving BAD ADVICE that directly contradicts Marriage Builders principles. Folks come here to learn about MARRIAGE BUILDERS, not about the opinion of some unqualified guy on the internet that doesn't understand the very basics of a healthy marriage.

Because your ideas are silly and immature. Marriage Builders principles are tried and true, yours are tried and failed.

A person who is so thoughtless that they would suggest pretending to have lunches with other women in order to "cure" their spouse of mistrust, SHOULD NOT BE TRUSTED. To use deceit to aggravate your spouse's fears is untrustworthy behavior. In a healthy marriage, you would do what it took to REASSURE your spouse, not aggravate the problem by cramming your "friendships" down her throat.

As I said before, such a person will not be married for long with such flagrant, profound thoughtlessness.

OK, I have to jump in here. My FWH always had loads of friends, both male and female. I never questioned him once on his friendships because over time, I had met all of his friends and didn't feel threatened by any of them.

He had been friends with OW for years, in fact, I met her back in the early days of our relationship. It was clear even then that she had a thing for FWH. It didn't bother me in the least because she was fat, dumpy and unattractive.

Fast forward more than a decade during which FWH and OW stayed in touch from afar (as friends).

OW moves back to the US from abroad with her H and 2 DS's and FWH hires her to do freelance work for him. Mind you, I was aware of all of this but again didn't worry because I knew her and she lived 3000 miles away.

Well, about a year after she started working for FWH, she divorces her H. Funny, FWH, although he still talked about her from time to time, never mentioned that she was no longer married. It is pretty clear now, that at that point they were already engaging in an EA. Nine months later they were in a full blown PA, meeting during every business trip FWH took.

Heck, I even knew that he visited her on one trip and took her oldest son hicking.

Shadpoo, I, just like you never thought that there was anything was wrong with having outside relationships.

There isn't in a perfect world, but we don't live in a perfect world. I learned this lesson the hard way. It's not my fault that my FWH didn't establish good solid boundaries. He had an affair with a friend and it has forever changed me, him, our marriage and our lives.

Do not underestimate the danger, or someday you will be like me wondering why you didn't better protect yourself.

Who

I will keep an eye out Who. Thanks

ML:Sometimes spouse's feelings are secondary to spouse's well-being

i didn't mean everything i said literally, no i would not pretend to be seeing a woman if my wife had trust issues. but I wouldn't give up friendships with women if she had trust issues either. I would take her to a clinical psychologist and I would help her work through her irrational fears.

The idea that pain induces growth, and relationships are catalysts for personal growth, are not immature ideas. If you will observe several other sources of relationship dynamics, you will find MB is actually atypical.

I'm not saying MB doesn't work to keep marriages together. It's fine. But right now my value system tells me that the individuals personal growth is worth more than keeping a peaceful marriage. Exception: When there's kids involved.