What is your "new stance"? What is your plan? Do you have one?

AGG

i apologize to everyone who has responded on my post. i am not usually so dense. i talked to someone at work that went through the same thing. he was the one who wanted to leave. he also lost a great deal of weight just like my wife.i gained some valuable information. no more lovebusters. i been living in a minefield and stepping on many. no more. i have a plan, be loving but passive. smother hert with en give her space. nothing i can do if she wants to leave. just tell her i don't want her to leave, but if it makes her happy, she will leave if she wants to. tell i love her and only want the best, no more confrontations. i am the most at peace since she said she wanted to leave. thank you all for the imput. i am ready

1954, that is all nice, but will not help you much if she is having an affair. You must rule out an affair first. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />

I dunno, it doesn't sound like any marital recovery plan I ever heard of. Sounds like you are planning to be a doormat - it always sounds good, but it never works.

AGG

calculus, thanks for the imput, i was able to deal with my wife tonight very calmly. it was hard.no argument. all she talked about was her feelings about leaving and how she felt more at ease after we went to mc last night. i had to grit my teeth. i do not want our marriage to end. i have read all the material on the website. vey valuable. but advice from the trenches is most valuable. so if any body has more insight please let me know. i was amazed how comfortable she was talking to me tonight.i know this could take some time. our 13yr old was very upset about the whole situation tonight. but the wife still does not realize how much this is going to hurt the kids. she is in some sort of denial. i am praying for clarity for her. i know its been just 9 days since the announcement.but it seems like an eternity. thank you keep the input coming

1954-

I'm glad to see you've been reading the concepts at this site.

I'm going to explain a little bit how I won my wife back. She wanted to divorce me after years of severe neglect on my part. She was about to inherit enough money to give her the chance to do so. I was clueless as to how she felt - I mean, I knew things were a little distant between us, but I thought we were basically sound. I found out, by accident, that she had a secret email account, so I decided to look it over and see what she *really* thought of me. Her password was easy to guess, and I saw - I saw that she had been complaining about me to her friends and brother for years, and that she wanted a divorce. She had a laundry list of complaints in there. As I read it, I realized "she's got a point". I knew I didn't want my marriage to end, so I knew I had to stop doing the things that alienated her, that she had been complaining about. That included giving up a solitary hobby I'd been passionate about for almost 20 years. I also found that she'd been emailing an ex-boyfriend, who she saw about once a year when on vacation . The tone of her emails to him indicated that they might be having an affair.

My plan to win her back was to stop LoveBusting and to do what I could to meet her Emotional Needs. I hadn't discovered MarriageBuilders yet, so I didn't have words for my plan, but when I did discover MB a day or so later, I found the words to describe the plan I'd already decided on. That night, I started doing things around the house I'd put off for weeks. I told my wife I was putting the hobby aside for the time being, and that I would start going to bed same time as her from now on. I sat and talked with her about her day, my day, and an issue about our kids that she'd tried to engage me in a conversation about earlier. I listened to her.

In a very short period of time, my wife's attitude changed completely. She told me she loved me - which I hadn't heard her say for 5 or 6 years. Suddenly, we were in love again. I couldn't believe how well things were going. She told me how she'd been thinking about divorce, and that she wasn't thinking that anymore... as long as I didn't go back to the way things were before. And then she wanted to know *why* I changed. So... I told her about snooping her email.

She wasn't angry, upset or defensive. I asked her about the ex-boyfriend, and she answered all of my questions. Yes, she had thought about possibly getting together with him after leaving me, if he left his wife first, but no, she had never told him that. And it turned out he had proposed having an affair, but she turned him down. Everything she said was consistent, and everything she said matched up with the emails I'd read. That, plus her reaction to my snooping (she was hiding nothing because she had nothing to hide), plus her absence of "fog" (the confused and contradictory thinking that accompanies an affair), plus how rapidly she fell back in love with me, all indicated she was telling the truth. I was prepared to forgive her if she'd had an affair with him, but I am so thankful she hadn't.

So, that's my story. Little by little we have learned to work together on everything. We've remained in love ever since, 2 1/2 years now, and we deal with issues as they come, together. And we've had a lot to deal with - death of a beloved cat, death of her estranged father, money issues, her mother's descent into Alzheimers.

Now, I want to tell you about a friend I made here at MB. He showed up a couple of months after I did, with a similar story - his wife had told him she'd had enough, after years of his neglect, she no longer loved him and was thinking about divorce. He tried to do the same things I did. I tried to encourage him, along with the other members of the EN board. But nothing he did was good enough. If he tried to talk to her or do things with her, she told him he was "smothering" her, and that she needed "space". If he gave her space, she told him "you're ignoring me, this is why we'll never be able to work this out." When he cried, she mocked him for crying. And when he came to MB for help, she showed up here too, telling us that he wasn't telling the whole story.

After several months of this, my friend was worn down and exhausted. At his lowest ebb he made his discovery... his wife was having an affair. With a friend of his.

Suddenly, everything made sense. This was why he was never able to reach her, and why nothing he did was good enough. Because she was in love with another man, and wanted him to fail at reconciliation so she could leave with a "clean" conscience.

Once she was discovered, she promised to end the affair and begged for a second chance. Sadly, she was lying and continued to carry on the affair, and they are now divorced.

The reason I am telling you about my friend is to illustrate a lesson I took away from this. The path I took - stopping Love Busters and meeting Emotional Needs - is not sufficient to win back a Wayward Wife from her affair. It is not enough. In fact, it may be worse than nothing at all, because in his case it appeared to feed her sense of entitlement.

Another lesson I took from his situation was that by the time he discovered the affair, he was exhausted from trying to reach her, and not at all in the emotional shape he needed to be for the fight of his life. If he had only discovered the affair earlier, he would have had a much easier time following Plan A and, if necessary, Plan B. If he had only discovered the affair *first*, things might have turned out very differently.

Since then, I have continued to participate on the MB discussion board, though lately not nearly as often as I did before. And I have seen the same story again and again. And based on what I have seen, I have come to a few conclusions.

1.) By the time a husband realizes something is wrong in the marriage, things are usually pretty bad. Most often, by the time a husband shows up to MB, his wife is already embroiled in an affair.

2.) If there is an affair going on, than stopping Love Busters and trying to meet Emotional Needs is insufficient, in and of itself, to win back the wife. The Betrayed Husband needs to employ the full Plan A, which includes exposure of the affair as one of the tools.

3.) If the Betrayed Husband tries for a long time to win back the wife using the "stop LB-meet EN" method alone, he will quickly become emotionally exhausted. When he finally discovers the affair, he will be in the worst possible shape to fight it.

4.) If the Betrayed Husband tries for a long time to win back the wife using the "stop LB-meet EN" method alone, it will feed the Wayward Wife's sense of entitlement, and actually feed the affair. The time wasted on this approach will also allow the affair to become more entrenched, and thus more difficult to break up. During this interval an Emotional Affair (EA) may become a Physical Affair (PA), simply because nothing is being done to stop it.

5.) Therefore, it is ESSENTIAL that a husband quickly determine if an affair is going on. It is ESSENTIAL that this is discovered early, to prevent the affair from getting any further entrenched, and to preserve the emotional strength of the BH for the fight of his life.

These are my conclusions, based on everything I've seen at this site.

Now, 1954, I know you don't want to hear this, but I see so many red flags in your wife's behavior. I really think something is rotten in Denmark. I very, very strongly suspect your wife is having an affair, and I am so suspicious of this that I am spending the time this morning to write this response when I have other things I need to be doing. I URGE YOU to investigate if she is having an affair, probably with someone at the gym, and I URGE YOU to do so quickly.

This is one of the most important battles you will ever face. Please don't go into it blindly.

You are hearing from the trenches, bud. And believe me, your wife's talk is all too familiar to me (and others), that is why you are hearing the unanimous "ding ding ding, she's having an affair" feedback.


That is the classic behavior of someone in an affair. It's not that she in denial or doesn't realize how it's going to hurt the kids, it's that she doesn't care. Classic classic WS outlook, it's all about them and their happiness. And if you start your "be nice" act now, it is only going to smooth the way for her to leave the marriage with "no hard feelings".

Take it from someone who took the same approach and is now divorced. You can be a doormat or you can fight, I'd suggest the latter.

AGG

sigh... Rome is burning and he is fiddling. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

1954, please listen to AGoodGuy. He is exactly right. This can't be repaired until you know what you are dealing with. Those of us with experience smell a HUGE RAT here, commonly known as an AFFAIR. Please investigate and find out what is going on.