OK, having spent 25 years married to a serial adulterer who also was far more concerned about not being rude/mean/abusive/whatever to the OW than he was about my feelings, IMHO maybe your WH is doign what mine did?

Maybe his choice of abusive behavior is to let you know, repeatedly, that the feelings of the OW matter more than your feelings, that he is much more willing to hurt you than he is to hurt the OW.

I don't understand why WH's don't get this blind spot regarding the way they hurt the BW each time they choose to protect the OW's feelings at the expense of the BW.

Have you tried explaining to him that his desire to protect the OW's feelings is in itself hurtful to you?

"Can I ask whether Dr Harley was able to help you? Your posting seemed to indicate that he had not been able to save your marriage.

No need to answer if this is too personal."

I honestly don't know whether or not counseling with the Harley's would have saved my marriage. In my case by the time I found MB's:

WH had already moved out of the home for over a year

WH was on OW#7 (just counting the OW I discovered - WH NEVER confessed A's that were not discovered)

He had alreayd filed for divorce.

WH was having a severe midlife crisis

WH was not interested in counseling - even family counseling for our daughters even though one was hospitalized and another was cutting herself.

I was already involved in some very good counseling for myself and my daughters, consistent with MB philosophy.
The family counselor informed me that my WH had sociopathic tendencies.

By applying MB principles for a Plan A and Plan B I was able to convince WH to file for a one-year separation on the day the divorce was to be final; and was able to bring the adultery to an end sooner. Also, I was able to set some boundaries with WH.

I was still open to reconciliation even after the divorce but WH has never shown any genuine interest.

I doubt seriously that my WXH will ever be interested in having a healthy relationship with any woman, let alone me.

At this point if he wanted to reconcile I would insist on counseling with either the Harley's or a counselor well-versed in MB principles. Plus WXH would have to go to IC to deal with his problems.

But I don't think WXH will ever change.

I have stayed off my thread while we have been working with Jennifer but I wanted to say a special thank you to the fabulous posters that helped me. I come back to this advice again and again and get more from it each time I read it.

You are amazing all of you and I terribly miss LovingAnyway whose beautiful long posts I have read on many threads.

Sadly things are not going very well with Jennifer so I'm back, this time with a rant that I could not air anywhere else safely. Hope you don't mind.

So I suppose this is about resentment and forgiveness but not in the normal way.

My H seemed to come from a normal family. Except that he was somwaht estranged from his parents and married unusually late, there did not seem anything particularly dysfunctional about them.

After we had been married for a short while, relations with his FOO started to improve and MIL started coming to stay with us for a couple of weeks each summer and his sister let slip that it was so that FIL could spend two weeks with his girlfriend.

Then she also told me, how FIL had refused to have anything to do with his children at all from the time of their birth through adulthood stating that they interfered with his work and that he did not want to see them. And he totally ignored them.

As time went on it became clear that this monster FIL had had affairs and trawled for women during most of the marriage and that MIL had accepted his behaviour. Crucially, none of this was ever discussed with the children who of course knew and said nothing so there was a mutual conspiracy of silence. Children ALWAYS know.

So fast forward to two years ago when I discovered that my H had been having affairs and trawling for women for 15 years starting when the children were born as his response to the stress of not being able to parent.

His parents are both dead now (MIL only last year) but I feel a burning anger every day towards her. She who said and did nothing. She who kept all this secret from me. I feel that they are directly responsible for the route that H took as he saw no consequences to his own father’s behaviour and thought that this was what one did when our marriage hit problems.

At the very least, she could have spoken out about why he was incapable of parenting so that we could have got the help he needed. When she saw my suffering, how could she stay silent?

Thanks for reading this, makes me feel better to write it down. H won’t talk about any of it.