I can assure you that if there were no kids involved, I'd of left long ago.

We have 3,
7yo boy, 4yo girl and 8month old baby girl.

That changes everything and as hard as it is you someday will look at yourself in the mirror (regardless of how this ultimately turns out) and be proud that you stood tall for your children.

Why is the woman so defiant about her need to not be so selfish. I am amazed that she has any friends at all or that family members want to be around her??? She sounds very immature.

Has she ever been to IC sessions? Have you two been to MC together? Is there someone in her family or circle of friends that she admires that would just tell her the truth about her behavior and selfishness?

Also, I take that you are a huge giver or this M would have already been over. I know in my case I gave about 75% and got about 25% but because I loved her and our children I didn't mind. I sometimes look back and wonder if that made me look weak to her somehow, I think it did. I wished I would have done less giving and let the chips fall where they may because I started to build up resentment and then her A, well I want her destroyed now...I know that I shouldn't feel this way but I'd be lying if I said I didn't.

She is defiant about it because she does not want to give up the things she has, and she has no room for compromise.
She knows that with the combination of her selfishness, and my history of being the giver, she has been able to do what she wants, act as she wants and treat me like she wants. She will not give that up.



She refuses counselling, there is no hope of her going to a counsellor.
As far as close friends or family circle that could "get through" to her... well, I've tried. I tried using her own mother and sister. Her sister gets nowhere, and her mother doesnt either. Infact my wife will actually tell me she is angry because her mom is "taking my side".

Yes I am the giver. probably about 90% / 10%.
She already had a minor email EA that I found out about ,, thats over and done with. (that was my fault ofcourse)

Here's an interesting fact...

3 months ago my wife told me that her selfishness and stubborness etc.. is because of our marriage. She said she was miserable for the last few years and its made her into the person she is now. She then useed that as the reason for her EA. She cleary pointed out that her miserable marriage was my fault, and her miserable marriage was what made her fall into the EA.

3 months later, she now realizes and admits that it is her selfishness that is the problem, and guess what, she wont change.

Wow, Lan...

I don't know what else to say except that you can only work on you and be the best you can be. you cannot go on giving 90/10 and not expect to still be in love or love her at some point. Resentment will sit in.

I'd suggest as before, work on you and become the best mate and father possible all the while maintaining boundaires that you will not allow to be crossed (i.e. - affairs, neglecting or hurting the children, immoral behavior, etc).

If she crosses them then there has to be some sort of consequence perceived or real. The last thing I would do is start to really document her actions and selfishness in a diary or log that you update daily, including the A and any other history that is relevant or important. Two things, one it will be therauputic (spelling?) and two it could be useful should the worse happen and D occur and a custody battle ensue.

Keep coming her for venting and advice and help. It helps to know you are not alone out here. I know from experience.

I feel I am at the point to which I already did this?
How do I go on being the best mate possible ?


how do I set bounderies around her selfishness, and what consequences can there possibly be if she refuses to change? She has clearly said she wont change so my bounderies wont mean anything will they?

or do I have to accept her selfishness and ignore it?

Lang,

That is why I made some of my suggestions.

Sometimes with a selfish person, even an admittedly selfish person, you have to be selfish too.

You see my FWW admitted being selfish, she never said she wouldn't change, to the contrary she said she would. However she kept on being selfish.

Like you we were about 90/10 and her idea of not being selfish was moving closer to 75/25.

Finally I looked at it and said well there are two ways to make it 50/50. Her doing more or me doing less.

Her doing more wasn't happening so I started doing less through emotional detachment, indifference and the 180.

It is easy to be selfish when you are getting or taking what you want.

It is hard to be selfish when the other person is making it even.

So one day my FWW woke up and figured out things had been very, very different.

I wasn't selfish, I was just less giving.

Every thing I did that she said or acted like she didn't appreciate I stopped doing.

When she brought it up that I never answer the phone during the day when she called. I just said you didn't appreciate it nor did you consider that I was being nice to you.

I don't owe that to you. I am the only man in the office who's wife calls 3 to 6 times a day. Heck one day a guys wife called and he was nervous. She just wanted to check to see if it was ok to spend $200.

So now I won't pick up your calls and spend that time. She said but I like talking to you. I said that is nice but that is an interuption to my day and if you don't look at that as a positive trait in me then I just see no reason to do it.

She used to say I want to take a bath tonight. I would take out the cleanser and clean the tub. Then light some candles and play some music and draw her a bath. I told her I thought that was nice. She said she doesn't even like that. I said great now I will never do it again.

I thought it was nice. You said you liked it but now when you ask me what I have done nice for you, you say you don't like it. Well since you don't I won't.

I went through some nice things I did she said she didn't like them. NOw I just won't do them.

You see a selfish person can also minimize the things you do or say they don't like them so they don't have to put as much effort into it.

I can tell my FWW misses those things now. But since I get the bare minimum I don't see a reason to give more then the bare minimum.

Quite frankly when we go to the MC I think I need it to be at least 51/49 in my favor.

well the next few days should be interesting...

Well last night was interesting.

I got home at 5, first thing my wife wanted was for me to paint a bedroom. My son's bedroom had a leak, so i had to rip out the carpet and repair the corner walls. This is the same bedroom that she accused me of taking my time to do, when she felt it should have been done in 1 day.
I told her the other night that if she didnt like the way i do things around the house, then she can do them.
So, the next day when i was at work she finished up some sanding and painted a corner of a wall where i had put new drywall up.

sure enough, she didnt sand it properly and the drywall tape is showing through, and she used the wrong paint. So when i got home i had to paint the whole room so it was the same colour.lol

just before we sat down to eat supper, she asked me if we could put some cheap sticky tiles down on the bedroom floor until we can afford to re-carpet it. I told her there was no point in spending money on that when we can just put some throw rugs down temporarily.

Anyways, we had supper, then i went downstairs to paint.
As soon as I walked in the room, i nearly tripped on a little box on the floor. What was in the box??? yep... new sticky tiles. She had laready bought them when she asked if we should do it. lol, typical. I ignored it and began painting.
While I was painting, she came down and asked me "is this how its going to be?"
i asked "what do you mean?" she said "are you going to be cold, rude, snotty and give me nothing but brief answers?"

i said i wasnt being snotty or rude, she was. she said fine, but what about the brief answers and coldness? I said that was pretty much gonna stay that way.
she said fine and walked out of the room..

20 seconds later...
she came back in and started to accuse me of being selfish.. OMG!!

at that point i told her she would have to finish the painting because i was taking the kids swimming and we had to leave.

We got back from swimming, and my wife was just starting to put the tiles down. Im not sure how much she got done lastnight, as I watched a movie and she had went to bed b4 it was done.

First thing this morning at work, she calls me to see if I can lend her some $$ to buy more tiles as she didnt have enough. I said ok, id lend it to her.


Now, during lastnight and today there has been 3 times where she has "felt" the detachment/distance from me, and she usually says something then walks away and doesnt say anything to me for a cpl hours.

Once she realizes that I am not chasing her to make her feel better or say Im sorry for whatever, she pretends shes not upset and starts referring to me as "sweetie" again.

its like shes waiting for me to give in and apologize for something, but then realizes it isnt gonna happen.

She also made a comment to me after I had told her that things were pretty much gonna stay how they seem, cold/distant etc...
she said " it works both ways" LOL she then told me not to crawl into bed with her at night and expect anything.

I giggled and told her to sleep on the couch.

Well,

Good for you. Dang she already notices the difference and doesn't like it.

I would say you did everything great except the sleep on teh couch part.

Next time just say I don't have any expectations from you. I don't even feel like SF tonight anyway.

She will probably say well don't expect it until your attitude changes.(or something just like that)

Don't get upset or emotional just say "I can understand why you would feel like that, and that's why I don't expect it."

Where I have gone wrong is that when I heard or saw a little progress I jumped right back in again hoping for the best. For this time do not jump right back in.

You should acknoledge the positive things but do not look at them as her changing.

Look for a consistent pattern of behaviour that proves change.

Good luck. Oh BTW once my FWW said not to expect anything and I took care of myself right next to her in bed when she was supposedly sleeping. LOL. Mighta reinforced the point that I am a big boy and I can take care of myself.

She tried to use it as a tool that night and I took that tool right out of her toolbox. BTW that tool was her hammer. Hard to drive a point home with a screwdriver.

let me clarify...
she said "Don't crawl into bed tonight and start fondling me" lol
you see, I have this habit of fondling my wife while I am asleep. well, I sometimes wkae myself up doing it, but it's NOT me making a concious decision to fondle my sleeping wife.lol

at any rate, my point wasn't to tell her to sleep on the couch because she wasnt going to give or get SF, but it was because if she is worried about what my hands might do that night she can sleep somewhere else.lol




You have no idea how loud that made me laugh. Man, when you make your point, you make your point. lol

Oh. I gotcha. Well nothing you can do about that. LOL. Next time just tell her you were dreaming of a nice big rib eye steak.


Hey sometimes you need something and you just gotta figure out a way to get it. LOL. Can't always have the rib eye when you are hungry you gotta just have a burger.

To this day she still hasn't said anything about it. Funny thing though since that night she has been a little more outgoing and giving when it comes to that. I wonder if there is a corolation.

Who the heck knows. I had told her SF was one of my biggest needs from her. Mighta been a big wake up call or fake asleep call. LOL.

Hang in there. Like I said before things will change. Hopefully for the positive.

Make sure not to back slide. Good job with the tiles. Indifferent to her actions. She was trying to get one and you didn't feed into it.

The main thing is to not be the bad guy. She may see you as that for a while. Then you can ask how have I been a bad guy? She will say no tiles etc. You can then say that's not being a bad guy that is just putting in what I can take out. You don't expect me to put in more then you do you? If she says yes then say well IMVHO that is an unrealistic expectation.

We shall see, but I am pretty confident that my wife is not going to react to the 180 the way I hope she does long term.

you see,,
if i am giving 90% and she is giving 10%, and I tell her that I am now only going to give 10%, she will say "fine, it works both ways, so she will go from giving 10% to giving 0%"

infact if i said i was going to stop giving 90% and only give 85%, she would probably still say the same thing.

Thats how she works... if she is in the wrong, even if she knows shes in the wrong, and there are consequences, she punishes by giving even less.

She fights fire with fire instead of fighting fire with water.

Well fighting fire with fire works. LOL.

The thing is the fire needs to be a control fire or I think they call it a back burn or something. LOL.

Ok so let say you decide to only give 10% and she gives 0% well technically you are ahead of the game you are only giving 10% more then you are getting.

In the other scenario you are giving 80% more then you are getting.

So by default you are still ahead of the game.

See that is exactly when I came to my decesion that giving less just made sense.

Well here's one problem I forsee...

I amy have said in this thread that my wife has made no changes, but there is 1 change that she has made in the past few months and years.

I've told her for a very long time that SF is a big one for me.
In the past I have told her that I need SF more often, i got that. And it is quite possible that she did this because i made improvements by filling some of her EN.

as we went on I placed concerns about SF, such as how often I/we have sf, how when how long and where we get sf .. LOL

she has mad improvements without a doubt. infact in the last 2 months there have been 1 or 2 things that ive suggested to her that I would really like, and she has always refused to do them ...

but, she now does and has a few times...

it goes without saying that with me going from 90% to 10%, I am most definately not going to see that anymore lol

So, I cant say to her, "you know Id really like for us to still have SF" because she is going to say "like I said, it works both ways"

how do i tell her that what I am doing is simply giving her less because she needs to give me more, and expect her to continue giving that 10%?

Deemphasize your need for SF. Trust me I know exactly what you are saying.

In my M my FWW told me that she doesn't like SF after we have argued. Problem was if I did something wrong and we agrued no SF. If she did something wrong no SF.

So I had to essentially decide if the thing she did was worth the potential arguement and trust me she would escalate it to that point. LOL.

So here is where the ephiphany came to me. My need for SF increased because that was one of the only EN's my fww was filling for me. I wasn't getting the other needs filled so I made due with just getting one filled.

So I decided painfully so that I could do without SF. Boy was that a tough decesion.

I stopped making the overt actions that made her even believe I was interested in SF. But guess what my overt actions also served to fill her ego. Like god you look awsome in that top. Or I can't resist you in that....

So then and trust me this will happen to you. She started wearing those things. Getting out of the shower and putting on a little accidental show. I felt like a politician I just kept saying in my head "No Comment."

You don't tell her anything. You just continue putting in what you can take out.
Or at least get the appreciation and admiration you deserve for doing some of the things you do.
Like I said sooner or later a light will go on.

My FWW actually said all I want is SF. I said no here is my list of what I really want. But since you have declined all of the others that's all that is left.

She said so all I am good for is that. I said no I want more then that. How about open and honest conversation? How about admiration? I have asked your actions told me you were interested in those things. So right now you are telling me that is all you are willing to give.

I can tell you it will be tough. BTW I know some things that turn the FWW on and I used those things casually without following through so she would approach me.

The biggest was "accidently" rubbing up against her in the kitchen. Then appologizing instead of stopping and giving a little more affection or attention. Heck I think sometimes she was doing it to me to try to get me to fold. I didn't. Last 3 times now she has initiated including last night.

well the last time I posted was thursday,,,

its been a few days,,,

thursday afternoon my dad called me at work and told me he was on his way in for a visit (havent seen him in cpl years)

so, after work, my wife and I took the kids to their hotel to go swimming with my dad, waterslide and all.

my wife and the baby didnt go in, instead they sat on the side with my dads wife (not my mom). probably not much converstaion, my wife doesnt like her at all. she doesnt like my dad for that matter.

after swimming, took my kids hom, we had supper, then i went out with my dad for the night. was at his hotel afterwardsm around 1am-3am, and then i found out that my mom had talked to my dad about my situation. lets just say my dad wasnt happy with my wife, and he was drunk, so i sat there and had to convince him to not say anythign to my wife (he really wnated to talk to her lol)

next day, after work, took the kids swimming again at the hotel, supper, then dad came over for coffee.

after they left, my wife came to me and said "this has to stop". she was referring to the lack of converstaion etc... that i had had with ther since she told me she wouldnt change her ways about things that she know she should,,,

later that night, after a lot of talking, she finally admitted something to me (after i begged her to be honest about it)

i asked her if the real reason she wouldnt see counselling is because she would be afraid that we would find out that she needs to change some thigns that she doesnt want to change, and give more things that she doesnt want to give etc....
she said yes.

i told her that since she had now admitted and realized it, MAYBE we could work on it without a counsellor.
but, after aabout half an hour of talking about that, i could see that it wouldnt work, and again told her i wanted counselling. she got angry and started ranting.
i gave up and told her we needed to talk about what would happen if we split, what we would do with the kids etc....

after about 15 minutes of that, i asked her again about counselling and she said "fine, just tell me where and when and i will go.
rest of the night was spent "making up"

now,
i cant afford it yet, so counselling is not scheduled, but atleast weve agreed to do it... so thats good...


but, now i am worried. reason is, i found out last night that she re-installed yahoo messenger.
for those who havent been following my story, my wife used yahoo messenger for her EA with a guy from germany, that she had met in dom republic on vacation. i caught her 3 tiems, and she hasnt talked to him since the 3rd time which was 2-3 months ago. ( i know this for a fact )

but, yesterday she did re-install it, and this guy is 1 of only 2 contacts she has on yahoo. the other is her sister, and she talks to her sister everyday on MSN messenger, they dont use yahoo.

i will have to see tonight, but i am guess that my wife will turn off yahoo messenger right before i get hom tongiht and then turn it on again tommorrow morning when i leave for work.

im guessing that she doesnt really plan to send him a message, but im also guessing there is a part of her that hopes the other guy notices that she is online again and sends her a message, to which im sure she would reply.

and thne, if/when that happens, we are back to square 1.

hip hip hooray!

so do i continue to re-instate the no contact rule if she contacts him? I mean do i confront her again for the 4th time

or should i just give up and see what happens...

to be honest, i dont see light at the end of either tunnel.
i just hope she doesnt contact him again,,,

infact i wish she would delete yahoo messenger. now that she has it my mind is racing about the other guy again, and i thought i was done with that.

Tell her you would feel much better if she uninstalled the messenger. Tell her why. Plain as day.

Protection is hugh after this. She must be willing to protect you so you feel safe. if you do not feel safe then she shouldn't do it.

Tell her it is triggering you and you don't like the way that feels and you are afraid it might make things worse between you too.

Sounds like she doesn't like the 180/emotional detachment. Do not push her away just do not pull her closer. You let her stand where she is. If she wants to move toward you that is up to her. Her own free will and actions.

Good luck.

I'm sorry, my DD got on the computer again.

HL;
what if i already did tell her that after the first time i caught her?
i asked her to uninstall it after the first time i caught her. she claimed she did,
then i caught her a 2nd and 3rd time as you know, and the 3rd time i asked her why she had yahoo installed... she claimed she tried to dleete it but couldnt (she was lying )

at any rate, i reinforced the need for no contact and told her she needs to uninstall it for obvious reasons, and she did.

here we are again months later, and she installed it again.

so, she knows better, she just installed it anyway...



and no, she doesnt like the 180 lol

i did the 180, and her reaction was either go back to the way it was or get out lol