Suzet and LO,

I completely agree that it is possible and happens probably more than MB likes to admit..that people do not always love passionately the person that they marry.. Using the paradigm that if you once had chemistry..it can be retrieved is all well and good..but what if it was NEVER there?

My question would have to be..how honest was the nonpassionate spouse about this issue prior to marriage?

Did they have a sit down and say..you know..I really like you..I even love you in an affectionate way..but you really don't do it for me sexually, no chemistry..I'm not passionate about you..I don't have the butterflies and tingles..but let's give it a go anyway and commit for life.. what do you say?

I can't imagine that there would be TOO many marriages resulting from these talks..although I'm sure that there are people more idealistic than I who believe that this can change with time and effort.

The only area that I disagree with you Lo..is in failure to disclose [once again]..it is confronting the FACT that the passion isn't there that is painfull..not being honest about it.

Do you think that your wife would have been willing to spend any amount of her life trying to recover a ship that never sailed?

I wonder [pure speculation] how much of her abandonment of EN/MB as priority in her life had to do with intuition or something similar that your feelings for other women [and perhaps her feelings for you] just didn't compare? Do you think she decided it wasn't worth it?

LO,

I appreciate the fact that you disagree with some of these statements, but I think you are going too far with this comment:


I don't care whether a Phd wrote it or not either, but I do listen closely when someone with 27 years of experience in counseling makes a statement about human nature.

Incidentally, nowhere did I write that anybody's passion was dead.

Lake,

That is happening to me too. I tried just about everything to get my wife to stop the affair short of threatening or killing the OM. But she won't stop and even though I am doing the best Plan A I can muster, the fact is I am getting more and more resentful everyday (just as Dr. Harley predicts). There are days when I wish I never had to see or hear from her again, but that will never happen because we have a four year old son.

My Plan B will be the divorce itself, because she won't leave the house and if I leave, I jeopardize my chances for custody.

Hiker...I love this thread. Thank you. And for your perspective.

Wondering about your "I tried just about everything to get my WW (sic) to stop her (sic) affair." In appreciation of your thread, I thought I would share some more ideas...

You put a large sign, homemade, on your roof that says,

"My wife is having an affair and she won't leave."

Each morning, you brightly say, "Honey? You've chosen OM over your family. Leave."

Each evening you say, "Another day, stabbed in my heart by your presence. Ouch."

Calmly, directly.

You invite all her relatives over to stay with you, bunk them down, everywhere, and ask each time she leaves, "Are you going to your AP?" in front of them. Soon, they'll join in, take bets...and whenever she's on the phone, they can ask, "Is that the homewrecker?" over and over again.

Unfortunately, you'll have to feed them. This is more costly than the sign, I promise.

You can have a car magnet made (you'll need fifty, so you'll meet the volume discount requirement) that says, "Hi! I'm cheating on my family!" in red, white and blue colors...and each morning, before she leaves for work, put it on her bumper.

You could make a flyer and put it on your neighbors' doors...similar to your sign...be sure to match font styles.

Hope you find this humorous, if not enjoyable...

<img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

LA

LA,

Thanks for those suggestions. Yes, they were funny and I need some humor in my life right now.

Two weeks ago my mother-in-law came into the house and ranted and raved that I was badmouthing her daughter all over town and ruining her reputation. I should have ignored her but instead we got into it for about an hour.

The gist of it is that the MIL believes her daughter is doing the right thing by following her heart with the OM. The purpose of her visit, to my way of thinking, was to try to demonize me so that the coming divorce looks like my fault, or least is not happening because of the affair. This is my wife's line of thinking too: "My relationship with B*** has nothing to do with our problems."

Yeah, right.

Hiker,

You seem to have given this much thought, so let me ask: why do you think your wife doesn't wish to reconsider a relationship with you? I mean, really, why do you think that she has chosen to chuck a really good marriage for a chancy relationship with some dude she barely knows? Do you think she is insane? Do you think she is brainwashed and knows not what she does? Is she lost in the "fog"? What do you think the affair is giving her that the relationship with you doesn't? Pittman's level 1?

I think I'm getting a bit cynical in my old age and the more time I spend here reading the more cynical I become. I think that Harley's techniques may work to entice a WS that is wavering to reconsider a marriage. I do not think, and there are too many examples to count on this site that buck-up this observation, that they will work with a WS that has truly checked out of the marriage. Sometimes people are just done. They don't want to deal with you anymore . . . especially at an intimate level that defines marriage.

I think Pittman's theories are generally fine in the aggregate, but obviously there are exceptions to what he postulates. There are usually outliers in any dataset.

CN,

Well, first let me say that I agree with you that some spouses check out of the marriage and never check back in, and you could Plan A and Plan B til doomsday and not see any progress. As you say, there are always exceptions to the various theories about affairs.

Now to answer your other question as to why my wife doesn't wish to reconsider a relationship with me: I'm not entirely sure she doesn't.

Let me explain. Since our separation back in the first weekend in June she has continually said she wants a divorce. She is not interested in reconciliation or counseling or anything of the sort. She's said it flat out; no ifs, ands, or buts. Sounds pretty dismal, eh? Hopeless.

Today she was particularly mean and nasty and I finally cornered her and asked why. I explained that we have 4 1/2 months left of separation before we can file for divorce and I wanted to know why we can't get along better during that time. She said she felt like I was controlling her, but she couldn't explain why she felt that way. I told her she seemed miserable and she confessed that she was.

"What is it you want?"

"I want to be valued."

Well, I do value her. She is the glue that holds our family together.

She started crying and said her life was a terrible mess. She ruined everything. She wanted to know how I knew about quick divorces and why I was looking into them. I explained I was only looking at the possibilities because she was so determined to get a divorce.

We couldn't continue the conversation because she had to go to work.

I think my best course of action is to explain that she needs to figure out what she wants and make a plan to get there, and if individual counseling will help I'll be glad to pay for it.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that what happened today was an isolated incident; that she still wants a divorce and won't be dissuade by anything.

Why would this be? Well, maybe one clue would be in her previous long term relationships: two marriages and one live-in partner. She dumped them all. Her best friend says she is looking for a knight in shining armor to sweep her off her feet. Well, six years ago I was the knight. But maybe my armor is a bit tarnished now, and like Pittman says, some people are in love with being in love.

My wife is a very intelligent woman, but she is also very emotional, and although everyone is driven by combinations of emotion and reason, some folks are driven a lot more by one than the other. My wife's behavior isn't driven by what she knows to be right, but by what she feels is right.

What she feels right now is an overwhelming infatuation for the OM. Anyone or anything that threatens that relationship is the enemy.

Do I think the affair will burn out? Heck, yes. Her past history and the pathology of affairs almost guarantee it. The question is, will she come back to me, and if so, will I still want her a year or two or three down the road?

Hiker,

If your wife feel that you are controlling then that is true for her (they are her feeling you know). You trying to get her to explain it to you is controlling. She said she feels controlled by you . . . it is how she feels . . . and feeling just are. An objective observer might disagree that you are controlling, but that doesn't matter. The fact is that she feels controlled, and people that feel that way tend to run if they can (in my limited data set).

It sounds like your wife doesn't really know what she wants. I'd bet she feels that she has ruined the marriage . . . and if she returns to the marriage this will be held over her to the end of time. She may have some notion that it would simply be easier . . . and emotionally more exciting, just want to start over without an affair dangling over her head for years to come. I certainly don't know.

If she has a history of serial monogamy (sort of anyway), and she is the one that always runs from the relationship this may just be another repeat of a tired pattern.

My only advice would be to stop asking her to justify/explain her feelings. Feelings aren’t always rational and logic is a poor tool for communicating something that is fundamentally illogical. I could try to explain all day why I am afraid of spiders (if I were) and you could produce a very logical and reasoned dissertation as to why my feelings were “wrong” or irrational . . . it wouldn’t change the fact that I would feel afraid when I saw spiders.

When people feel things and they don't understand why they feel them, the only way I know of to try to get to the meaning of their feelings is by talking about it. I asked her in the most polite and sincere way I could to tell me why she feels that I am trying to control her. If there is something I am doing that makes her feel that way then I need to take a close look at my own actions. Without her help, I may have no clue as to what would make her feel that way.

There's a big difference in trying to understand why someone feels the way they do and telling them they shouldn't feel the way they do. I never told her she shouldn't feel what she's feeling.

A further discussion about this matter later in the day led to the conclusion that she feels I am checking up on her by asking things like "When will you be home for supper?" etc.

Two things are happening here. First, I probably am asking more questions about where she's going and when she will be home ever since I discovered the affair. Second, she probably resents it because she still wants to keep the part of her life with the OM hidden from me, and there's probably a bit of guilt in there too.

The spider analogy doesn't quite apply here, because the fear of spiders, however irrational, is something almost universally understood. On the other hand, if your wife came up to you and said, "I feel like you don't love me," would you want to just leave it at that and give her the impression that her feelings are fully justified, when you know for a fact that you do love her?

You wouldn't say, "Well, your feelings are not valid." You would ask her why she feels that way so you could see what behaviors you have that might be causing those feelings.

This is very possible. Within a few days after I discovered the affair she told me that she felt I would never trust her again. I tried to assure her that over time I could learn to trust her again. Was the comment a legitimate concern about reconciliation, or just an excuse not to try working out our problems so that she could continue the affair? I don't know.

For a person having an affair, I think it looks a lot easier to leave the marriage. They can easily imagine the hardship in trying to make things work with their spouse after all the damage done. They wonder if they can ever be trusted again. They wonder if they will have to hear about their past mistakes everytime there's a squabble with their spouse. They have someone to run to, the OP, who is the last person to tell them that what they've done is wrong. And, of course, there are the powerful emotions that drive them to the OM.

When you think about it in those terms, it's a wonder that so many WSs actually do return to their spouses.

Hiker,

That's exactly why I feel WH will never come back to our M.

He takes the easy way out, and I bet he thinks it's much easier just to leave and cut his losses, then to stay and try to deal with what he did.

He knows me, and I would probably hang it over his head for awhile...something I would need to work on, and he knows the trust wouldn't be there for awhile, and he just figures why go through all that crap. He has an OW that wants him without having to work at anything.

Much easier life in his mind.

Hiker,

Sometimes this is a poor media to express thoughts.

Let's take a look at the controlling thing. Your wife said she feels like you try to control her; you asked her to explain why she feels that way. I tried to explain why someone who feels controlled would have issues with this . . . you are, even if you don't think of it this way, asking her to justify her feeling. This just doesn't work. What is being subtlety said is that you think her feelings are flawed . . . that is why you are asking for an explanation.




First off, her feelings, whatever they are, are fully justified. You are entitled to feel anyway that you do. Feeling just are.

In the case you presented, I would tell my wife that I'm sorry that she feels that way. I would tell her that it must be unpleasant to live with some who you think doesn’t love her. I would tell her that I do love her and that it troubles me that she can't feel the love that I have for her. I would probably ask her what things make her feel loved . . . the whole EN thing . . . and I would start trying to do the things that she interprets as love. I certainly wouldn’t argue with her . . . or give her a long list of things that I do that I think shows I love her, or ask her to justify her feelings. If she doesn't feel I love her, well, the she doesn't feel it.

About the WS walking away, yes, it happens all the time. The reasons very. One consistent feature apparent to me is that when a WS leaves they seldom leave to be alone. They usually have someone waiting for them.

You said "For a person having an affair, I think it looks a lot easier to leave the marriage. They can easily imagine the hardship in trying to make things work with their spouse after all the damage done. They wonder if they can ever be trusted again. They wonder if they will have to hear about their past mistakes everytime there's a squabble with their spouse. They have someone to run to, the OP, who is the last person to tell them that what they've done is wrong. And, of course, there are the powerful emotions that drive them to the OM."

I'm a FWS and I will say that this fear has been true in my case. The affair is used over and over again out of anger. If I had to do this over again . . . I probably wouldn't have tried to reconcile. I wouldn't have wasted the last 5 years trying to plug the holes in the marriage dyke. The problems is I'm running out of toes and fingers . . . and more holes keep popping up.

If you and WS do reconcile do not bash her with this for years and years. It will kill what love she does have for you and turn her mean . . . you can only kick the puppy so many times before it learns to fear and hate you.

This type of conversation requires the clarity that only comes with maturity or very good advice and guidance. In my case, we were teenagers when we married...we didn't really know what we doing...seemed like the right thing to do at the time.



Why do you think that I wasn't honest about this? I always disclosed my thoughts that we needed to establish a passionate relationship in our marriage. I always believed we could up until the day we split. I've since changed that tune.

What I THINK happened...I don't know, only she does...is that I became very proactive about what I expected in our relationship...I was very clear about what I believed we could achieve and had ideas about how we could get there. I had spent many years being very passive about the marriage...leaving "management" of the relationship up to her. I think this is very common in marriages.

She disengaged because I was challenging her...because I wasn't satisfied with the status quo. She no longer felt "in control" of our relationship.

So, yes, initially she was willing to spend her life trying to recover a ship that never sailed...as was I. I was willing spend the rest of my life working towards something we my have never been able to achieve...but I would have done it.
Perhaps such a thing is not to be grasped, but the struggle to achieve it is, in fact, the heart of a passionate relationship itself? Isn't that what MB promises?

Interestingly, over the last couple of months she's been making overtures toward re-establishing some kind of relationship with me. She has expressed that she thinks she may have been a bit hasty in her decision to ask me to leave.

I'm thinking her experience with her own recent flings may be helping her with perspective.

I may soften and build some kind of friendship for the sake of our daughters, but I'm not currently inclined to attempt to reconcile.

After you're through with Pittman and Glass, read "Passionate Marriage" by David Schnarch. It's a tough read...some pretty difficult concepts...some of which I'm still struggling with.

The assertion that I have real issues with is when someone complains about a lack of passion in the marriage, many will advise them that "it's supposed to be this way" or "that passion gives way to attachment" - both lies.

Marriage is SUPPOSED to be passionate. But it takes INTENTION and some understanding to make it that way. It's way to easy for spouses to fall into "fusion" (enmeshment) and abdicate their own power and identity to their spouse. They then become angry and resentful at its loss and tend to blame their spouse for it.

Do you think this could have happened to your wife?

Here's the real positive spin for the BS...the possibility that she did this WAS ENTIRELY HER OWN DECISION. Yes, you may have had a powerful personality that she found tough to stand up to, but ultimately, it's her responsibility to do it. An affair is an attempt to sidestep that responsibility or to get out of it via subterfuge.

It's a good, challenging read.

Low,

How is South Africa treating you? You are still there right?

So your wife is about done playing house with the dentist?

Hmmm....


If you did try to reconcile you may find it easier this time for the simple fact that the power center has evened out a bit as you both are guilty of similar extra-curricular activities.

I'm still keeping on for now. I don't have any great expectations that things are going to get better, I do know that they could get worse though.

I've enjoyed reading you thoughts on a passionate relationship, those ideas just seem so far removed from the life that I am living . . . passion? butterfly fluttering? maybe a small smidgen of excitement . . . some romance and affection . . . not here, I’m married don’t you know .

Hi, CN

SA has has pretty good. The first couple of months were pretty exciting, but I've settled into the routine...the new has worn off...but I hear that's supposed to happen <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Met some interesting people since, but not currently involved with any one of them.



I understand this struggle thoroughly...but I'd challenge you to think about how they might get "worse". Are you, perhaps, engaging in a little "feared fantasy"?

Schnarch was recently on NBC Dateline. A man had convinced his wife to go to Scharch's retreat thinking she had a problem as he was the unhappy one. At the retreat, Schnarch help start them down the road to differentiation. Turns out that his wife was not happy either but had been settling for fear of offending her H.

When she took back her power and identity and made her own desires and expectations clear to her H, he was intimidated to the point that they eventually divorced. He could not accept her "engagement" and her requirement for him to do the same. This is sort of what happened in my case, but my wife disengaged.

I wonder, if in you case, you are afraid to start that process because you fear the outcome?

Do this for the next few days...for you, not for her. You can begin to feel passionate when you act passionate. Kinda like women who buy VS undies for themselves.

Anyway....

Get some post it notes.

Write something thoughtful on it that you think she'd like to hear (Ex. "I love the way your lip curls up when you're feeling naughty" or "I love how you make special treats for the kids...you're a great mom.")

Just the act of you thinking about this stuff will spin your day.

Put the note where she can find it unexpectedly (on the speedo in the car)

Take a deep breath and let go of any expectation that she will acknowledge or respond to it. Remember...this is about you...not her...don't let her reaction drive yours.

Do this for a few days and see what happens...I bet you feel that "smidgen"...just a little.

Oh, BTW...don't try the VS undies thing...

The very point Schnarch makes, CN...is that YOU can decide that YOU are going to be a passionate person TODAY...

That's your power. It doesn't depend on your wife.

catgirl,

Assuming one does a good Plan A, when Plan B happens it puts a little distance between you and your spouse, allowing them to view things from the "outside." By that I mean there are other forces at work in your favor.

Sure, it looks easier to run out on your spouse when you consider all the things I wrote above, but remember, your WS may still be in the fantasy world where everything about the OP looks wonderful. What happens when that begins to wear off? What happens when they have their first big fight? As time goes on, your WS may look back on your marriage and think, "it wasn't so bad after all." Maybe a good Plan A does help Plan B work the old "absence makes the heart grow fonder" feelings.

Of course, this is all speculation. But the fact remains that Pittman, Glass, and Harley have found that most WSs return to their BSs at some point, even after divorce. Maybe they're seeking reconciliation. Maybe they just want assurance that they're still loved. I don't know, but they do return.