Have you ever had any female long term role models? Sounds like your mom was a pretty bad one. How about an aunt or something-- did anyone step up and help take care of you when you were a kid?

Not to be all Dr. Phil-- but do you think that part of the reason you struggle so much more than most here (or at least it seems) is that most females in your life either have treated you extremely poorly (your mom, and your wife, during her A), or were non-existent? That you are still now lumping your W in with the rest of these women?

Have you ever had any IC to deal any FOO issues?

Of course, I can't discount the fact that you walked in on it. That-- in and of itself-- I think would be one of the hugest blows of all.

E.

Because she is a great person all-around.

A ridiculously great person.

Does your wife know that you feel this way about her...and, can your wife take her lead as far as how to live her life?

No, no positive female role models. My mother always provided for me, and would gladly give me her last penny, but parenting is about much more than providing a roof and material things.

I do think I'm guilty as lumping my W in with the rest. When we married, I thought I had finally found a woman who would be there for me. One who deserved my heart and would give me hers in return.

One of the first lengthy conversations we had, after we started dating, was about cheating. She probably doesn't even remember, but I never forgot it.

After d-day, I realized she wasn't who I thought she was. She was just like so many other awful, unfaithful spouses. WE were just like so many other dysfunctional couples. I was a pessimist in every other part of life, but my marriage and my family were exceptions.

Not any more.

She took many things away from me on d-day.

Funny thing...

Yeah, she knows how I feel, and when she was growing up, her mother and grandmother played tug-of-war with her.

Her mom was a terrible influence, and grandma only had her during the summers.

My W credits her grandma with her turning out as well as she has...that without her, she would probably be a drug addict, in jail, or would've been a teenage mom.

Obviously, she wasn't around grandma enough.

Man, if your name weren't attached to this post I would have thought I typed it in my sleep or something. Spooky.

That honestly touches my heart, Krazy, and it makes me see you in a different light (and makes a lot of things make more sense now...).

Given your past, you would think that your W should take EPs to ensure that you did not go down the path that your mom did.

But at the same time, you can't expect your W to be your hero. She's still human, she'll make mistakes. Do you think that maybe you put her up on a pedestal just a bit too much-- and that makes her fall all that much more painful? I'm sure you've seen all the classic superhero movies-- when someone is supposed to be such a great and noble person-- it makes their "fall" that much harder to take.

Have you asked her about that conversation you had about cheating way back when-- if she remembers?

FWIW-- I don't think all WWs are "just like all unfaithful spouses". There is definitely different classes of cheating-- and most certainly different classes of how hard people try to recover. And I think all of that should be taken into consideration when you look at your W's current character...

E.

ok.....NOw I suspected from the begining of ever reading your stuff that your respect of your wife comes from what you learned from your mom (obviously she didn't teach about respect....)...

Now, help jog my memory here....what about your dad?? Did you respect him?? Did he respect your mom???

not2fun

I know I put her on a pedestal, and I shouldn't have.

I always thought that's how a person was supposed to treat their spouse.

One thing that seems to be different about me is the fact that I witnessed the mistakes of my parents and tried to avoid them, rather than repeating the cycle. I thought that my life revolving around my marriage and my family was the way to go...it was the opposite of what my parents did. They met via an affair, I came along, they proceeded to cheat on each other, then divorced.

I learned the hard way that anyone can stab you in the back, at any time.

I knew the other 99.999999% of people would, but I thought she was the one person who never would.

My last post might clear some of that up.

No, my dad was a mess, too.

He was an off again/on again alcoholic. After the divorce, he promptly moved 1,000 miles away & never contacted me. I always contacted him. I visited him for 1-2 weeks most summers, mainly for the chance to vacation in Florida.

I was the second child he abandoned. He had another with his first wife.

Speaking of respect, I lost my respect for my parents at around age 10.

I was respectful in their presence, but inside I looked down on them both.

I am a living, breathing example of the type of person an affairage can produce. Fun!

By the way, what are "FOO" issues?

I haven't read this thread. I'm answering based on the question in the first post.


My H was WELL-RESPECTED prior to his AFFAIR by OUTSIDERS but not by those that mattered to him, HIS FAMILY. The BOYS and I DISRESPECTED him immensely despite how hard he worked and how WONDERFUL he WAS....In came, PYT (Pretty young thing) and offered APPRECIATION and ADMIRATION, the major ENs that she met...and he became a FALLEN MAN...LOST RESPECT to GAIN RESPECT..Weird..never thought of it that way...but in reading the book LOVE AND RESPECT by Eggerichs that author's viewpoint is that MEN associate RESPECT with LOVE and that is certainly TRUE for MY HUSBAND...

So I EASILY can RESPECT my REAL HUSBAND that WAS and IS and NOT the WAYWARD that WAS....This is/was SIMPLE for me...

He has GAINED my UTMOST RESPECT for choosing to RECOVER our MARRIAGE and how hard he has worked to do that..

I APPRECIATE how DIFFICULT that was for him...

Having had his AFFAIR has WOUNDED him terribly and he remains HIGHLY SHAMED and EMBARASSED by it..

I don't know if he will ever be the same...

Because HE WAS a GOOD MAN and now I think he has gotten in touch with his PERSONALITY FLAWS, lived in the midst of EVIL and has sunk to LOW LEVELS where folks don't want to go...

I don't know if others have shared any of this same perspective or not...

RESPECT has not been a MAJOR ISSUE for me regarding HIM...

I had to do a lot of work on gaining my OWN SELF-RESPECT...

I have made MAJOR STRIDES in that AREA and feel that I am a much DIFFERENT and BETTER PERSON in that regard...

I STRIVE TO DISALLOW OTHERS FROM DISRESPECTING ME..I'm almost a FANATIC about it...

OK. Respect...

Some others have posted definitions. I read this article, with way too much to post: Respect


I'm one of those that believes that respect is something that is earned. Loss of respect is also earned. It is by a person's actions that they either gain or lose my respect, and it is in fact often a person who has had a great moral failure that I respect most of all, if they do certain things that show that they are now worthy of respect.

One of those things has to do with how they deal with their own moral failures. Hiding them, attempting to justify them or making light of those failures will not gain my trust nor will it garner my respect. Rather showing true remorse, the ability to learn from failure and doing things that respectable people might do can go a long way toward earning my respect.

I have much greater respect for someone who had a moral failure, owned the consequences of that failure and made obvious changes to their life to prevent a recurrence of that failure in the future than for a person who has never been tested by anything. An example of this in my estimation is Charles Colson.

I'm way too tired for this tonight...

Read the article...

Mark

This is why my husband has gained MY RESPECT...along with the other REPENTANT WAYWARD SPOUSES on this forum..such as LaLa, Mrs. W, TST and others....

"The value of self-respect may be something we can take for granted, or we may discover how very important it is when our self-respect is threatened, or we lose it and have to work to regain it, or we have to struggle to develop or maintain it in a hostile environment. "


I took this quote from the article Mark supplied. I think it wraps up respect in a nutshell. I think that the respect we give to others is DIRECTLY tied to the self-respect we have for ourselves.

In our situation, my self-respect and esteem were at an ultimate low Pre-A and after Dday. Not soon after DDay it began to rise. Why?? Mostly because no matter how I felt about myself, I KNEW I did not deserve what had been done. As time went on and I seriously LOOKED at my M and saw MY FAILURES, and accepted them and changed them (well, I'm still working on that...), my self-esteem rose. In spades.

And now because my self-respect is returning, it is only then that I can begin to gain respect for my WS. Has he done everything perfectly??? No. Is he trying?? You betcha.

I know for a FACT my WS felt no self-respect for himself during the A. He's never said it to me, but just LOOKING at him, I could see. It made me so very empathetic towards him. And now, as he works to fix this marriage and his business, he is gaining his OWN self-respect back, which in turns helps ME to respect him......

Its a give and take process here. I have seen where my self-esteem goes a little low, then Recover seems a little shakier.

So, maybe its not about what is the WS doing to gain our respect back, but maybe its about what WE are doing to gain OUR own self-respect back?????

not2fun

Mark,

This just made me laugh......

Thanks....Not2fun

Not,

I think you got the drift of where I would go with the discussion if I had the time and energy to put into it.

When we are betrayed, not only does our respect for our WS take a hit, but our own self-respect takes a big one as well. Our first reaction is "What did I do to cause this to happen?" Of course we are all told that we didn't cause it and that it was all the fault of the WS, but...

When we really examine ourselves, we see that we did do things that contributed to the condition of the marriage and though we did not make our WS betray us, we did in fact not do what we needed to do to prevent it from happening.

I am not referring here to the time when a decision might have been made to cross the line or that when we first learned of OP that we should have put our foot down and demanded that our already WS not go any further or that we should have loaded our Glock and gone to visit OP. What I am saying is that if we really look at what the problems were in the marriage before the affair, we were probably not doing what we needed to do to fill up our spouse's Love Bank to overflowing.

Just like a WS, we BSs have a layer of fog that hinders us from seeing and correcting our own faults, at least prior to D-day. Just like the WS uses typical phrases in order to justify the affair, a BS will also find lots of "reasons" they did things the way they did, pre-affair. We needed more money to make a nice life for our soon to be WS, and that was why we worked longer and longer hours. We were having a tough time at work and that was why we were short-tempered and had all those AOs all the time. We had just lost someone close to us and so we were depressed and that made us less attentive and made us show less affection than we should have...

It wasn't OUR fault!

Was it?

I mean the kids were driving us nuts and every time we looked at the budget and thought we had made ends meet, somebody would move one of the ends...

Or cut it into pieces so we had even more ends to deal with...

Of course that kind of reasoning doesn't fly long for a WS around here and it shouldn't fly for a BS either.

Our real problem is that we KNOW it doesn't fly.

Especially for those BHs that derive so much sense of self worth from their abilities to "take care of a woman" and then find that their sweetie is getting serviced by someone else, I think the sense of self esteem and even self-respect takes a beating. For many it is a sign of our own failure that we didn't "take care of business."

Add to that the way many of us act right after discovering the affair, what with all the whining, crying, begging, pleading...add your own adjectives here...and we end up not so very proud of our own actions.

"If only I had known..."

Known what?

Done what?

Changed what?

Fixed what?

Corrected what?

Why did it take an affair by our beloved to get us to see those things?

Now before anyone thinks that I am saying that the BS is responsible for the WS breaking their vows, that is not what I am saying at all. What I am saying is that in order to respect the FWS, even one who is clearly changed, has put extraordinary precautions into place to preclude a repeat either with the same OP or a new OP, we also have to decide to do something different than we did before it happened the first time.

We also have to respect ourselves.

If the goal of recovery is to be a marriage in which both the FWS and the BS value each other, have compassion for each other, cherish each other and desire more than anything the happiness of each other, then BOTH play a role in the process of recovery.

Respect for other people can be granted without much thought in some ways. We should all respect other's opinions, though we don't have to agree with those opinions. We still should respect their right to have them.

We should all respect authority. Though many elected officials show little regard for right and wrong, we still need to show respect for the office even though we might work to have the bums impeached, recalled, thrown out of office or as we do here in Illinois with our former governors, imprisoned.

But what a person does when they fail, morally, financially, in business etc, and how they respond to the mess they have made of their own life because of those failures is more a sign of respectability than their failures never coming to light at all. Because we all fail in some way. We all do things we aren't proud of later in life and we all make errors in judgment along the way. It's what we do THEN that earns us respectability.

Just my opinion...

Not, I blame YOU for getting me into this...

or NOT...

Put a fork in me; I think I'm done...

Mark

BLAMESHIFTER.....


consider yourself forked......

not2fun

EXACTLY......This is what I was trying to convey. I think sometimes the BS'S on here (INCLUDING MYSELF....) sometimes get a "superior" air about them because after all WE didn't have an affair......

BUT is that to say we have been perfect?? Were we in fact perfect in our Marriage?? Did WE do everything right???

No......this caused me great great pain right after Dday. Before I even read SAA, I knew the truth. I had treated my WS wrong....it still pains me.

But that is why I am here and working on improving myself......

not2fun

ps...the above is not to say that the WS is not responsible for their actions. My WS choice to have his A is his to own, not mine. And my actions towards him and not meeting his EN's prior to the A are MINE to own......

Mark,

That's exactly what I would have said...



S&C