I guess I am just thinking out loud here but I was wondering which sex has more success at being brought back into a marriage via PLAN A, men or women? I have read so many postings about men who have strayed multiple times. I think of the quote from Billy Crystal :

"Women need a reason to have sex, men just need a place."

If a man just wants emotionless sex, I would think it would be extremely difficlt to pull them back into an emotional relationship using PLAN A and get them to stop fooling around. My guess is that it is easier for a man to pull his wife back than it would be for a woman to pull her husband. More women seem to need that emotional connection than men.

I'm curious as to the responses with this. From what I've observed on this board, men are more likely to do a rapid, nuclear exposure as part of their Plan A. Perhaps even the main part. OTOH, women seem to focus more on the "carrot" of Plan A - and also tend to drag it way, way out. In fact, I'm not sure I've seen a BH write about Plan A after the WW has moved in with the OM, while there are at least a couple of active BWs who have moved in with their OW. If your theory is correct, Plan A would not be a good strategy after the WH has moved out.

I think men have it easier in Plan A and that more women come back to the marriage than men. But I also see a lot of men here who focus on the stick and don't do any "real" changing. The whole "man up" and take charge mantra that has been going on lately seems to miss the whole point of Plan A. Even if they succeed in breaking up the affair, without doing any soul searching and changing what they did wrong PRIOR to the A, their marriages will not improve.....

BYW, I am a woman who Plan A'ed her butt off after her H moved out.....it worked for me. Of course, he didn't move in with COW and COW lived half a country away, which, worked in my favor.

And personally, I think Plan Aing was easier with him gone, because I got breaks from the tension. But then again, the move helped facilitate the affair....

oh well, having a bad day so I may not be the person to listen to....

not2fun

Wanna bet? I worked with Steve Harley. The truth is most women who leave are gone, done, never come back. Men are more likely to return from an affair than women.

Women get done emotionally and just quit.

Men go looking for sex, but more often than women, return home. Women who have affairs usually make an emotional connection and are unwilling or unable to return home.

So you would lose the bet more often if you wagered women return home in greater percentages.

Nope, men simply are not willing to engage in a low probability of success strategy. Given how seldom women return when they are unfaithful, it makes no sense to even try.

Even Dr Harley says he would not try to restore his marriage if Joyce cheated. What does that tell you about how he feels about it?

True, no argument from me about that. But that's not a gender issue, it's simply not addressing why needs were not met. The same is true for women who break up the affair, but don't change their approach to marriage.
But it doesn't mean it works for men who are plan A'ing a wife. Dr H knows that when women cheat, they have emotionally shut out their husbands and even the best plan A is seldom enough to win her back.

If you REALLY look at the numbers, really look at what Dr H says about women who leave and/or cheat. Their husbands were not abusive, were not mean. They were ignorant and even dismissive of their wives needs. But most women who leave were not abused.

So they emotionally give up on their husbands AND never give him another chance. Never giving another chance means it doesn't matter how perfect his plan A is, he's not getting another chance.

This happens with women far more often than it does with men. Do the research and see for yourself.

Well, bad day or not isn't what makes what you are saying bad information. It's the reality that women are far less likely to return than men.

But don't take my word for it, ask Dr H.

Enlightened,


As far as my statement on about my sitch, it was a reply to Tabby, who said that one shouldn't Plan A when the WH moves out. I think now, after re-reading it, she meant WW's.

not2fun

I think that's actually the reason plan A is more effective on WH than on WW's.

Men can cheat without having an emotional connection to the woman. Which means he's probably STILL emotionally connected to his wife.

Women typically cannot sleep with a man unless they are emotionally connected to him. Which often means they have emotionally disconnected from their husband.

This is why a BH's plan A attempts are typically less successful than those of BW's. The women were gone long before they left to have their affair. They simply didn't tell the man.

Oh, they'll say they did tell him. But seldom did they say the simple statement, I am not happy, or I do not feel our emotional connection, or any of these other things that they'll say should have been obvious.

If they were obvious, how could anyone miss them.

Not saying men are any more clear. But the assumption is that the man was ignoring his wife, so she closed herself off and eventually had an affair and/or left.

I guess my situation is not normal then. My WW was shut down, disconnected from me, ice cold, had no interest in recovery, no interest in staying married and so on. If was like she had a steel re-enforced concrete dome built around her emotional heart and I was out and not getting back in. After weeks of trying to use LOGIC and talking, I stopped and used PLAN A. It was like a bunker buster missle breaking through that barrier and blowing it up. We are well on our way back, SF has returned, affection is stronger than it ever was, even pre-marriage, and we are both happier.

If you were in my house the week after d-day and saw her tone and mood, there is no way anyone would have thought our marriage would survive.

I can really see where a guy can pull his emotionally disconnect wife back into the relationship. Looking back now, it was pretty easy.... no LB's and meet her EN's. I wasted about 6 - 8 weeks with LB's and logical thinking, trying to convince her. Then I found "His Needs, Her Needs" as well as this site. I started PLAN A and her concrete barrier started breaking apart.

I hope things continue to improve, but beware.

I went through "positive" periods where I thought everything was going to be great.

I now view those times as temporary insanity. It's now been over 2 years since d-day.

Good luck to you.

Oh trust me, I am cautiously optimistic. The only thing I did was FIX MYSELF. She is seeing that and came back. If she walked out on me tomorrow, I would be sad but at least I will know that I did everything I could to save my marriage and she is leaving because of HER, not because of me.

It can certainly be done. By making changes in myself - concentrating first on eliminating Love Busters and then on meeting Emotional Needs - my emotionally disconnected wife came back into the relationship. It happened very quickly, too.

However... I also agree that women who have affairs will often attach themselves emotionally to their affair partner, and that attachment can be hard to break. My wife did not have an affair - though she came close. In my particular case, if she had actually had an affair, I am pretty sure she would never have looked back, and never given me a second chance.

I was mostly refering to the original post that suggested that Plan A won't work as well on men because they "need a place" rather than an attachment, so maybe providing that emotional attachment has less effect. I can also see from the subsequent discussion that the A itself is merely the "place" so there's no emotional attachment to break. Obviously each situation is different - my Wstbxh definitely had emotional attahcment to is OW as it was a LTA.

I have definitely noticed the difference in how women and men apply Plan A, which unless I'm mistaken involves both the carrot and the stick. Women apply the carrot stronger and longer. Men apply the stick faster and harder. Does anyone know or recall a man who Plan A'd after WW moved out and in with OM?

Dazednconfusedks (from around the 2005-06 timeframe) Plan A'd his WW after she moved out... although she did not move in with OM.

I did.

I plan A'ed for 9-10 months after my XW moved out to have her affair with the OM.

The OM was long distance, so she didn't move in with him, so my situation wasn't exactly what you asked.

But from the day I joined here until near the end of June 2004, I plan A'ed my XW all to no avail. She filed for divorce in January of 2004, I plan A'ed for close to 6 months after that with no gains.

In June 2004, I lowered the boom, stopped all financial support save for the state required child support, paid voluntarily with no court order. I stopped paying her car payment, etc. If she needed money, I advance her child support, but made it clear that was a child support check and nothing more. When she wanted to trade our van that was nearly paid for, for another vehicle, I demanded that in return for me signing over the equity in that she give up any claims to the equity in my two vehicles, etc. I did scortched earth exposure, changed the locks on the house, etc. The terms of the divorce were final by the end of 2004, just waiting for the judge to sign off.

I worked with Steve Harley until the end of 2003 when I could no longer afford to pay CS, keep my home, pay off the debt my XW created and left me with, and eat and put gas in my car. I had already turned off satellite TV, cut back on things, sold stuff I didn't need, etc and I was seeing no results from my coaching with Steve and my X would not enter counseling with me, so I had to stop paying for his time.

But I plan A'ed for a long time. Maybe too long. I don't regret it. But as Steve said, it may work, but most times it doesn't for BH's.

You wrote:

But for many women the order is turned round: She sleeps with him to keep him and make him continue to make "feel good" deposits in her love bank. And when she has slept with him she concludes:

I have slept with him. That must mean I am in love with him!

We have had strugling (f)WW here on MB who have said just those words. Later they could not believe what they had done. But that was after the wind had cleared the fog.

I almost feel this is what my WW has done.... It was an EA and she kept it that way(caught an email of her saying she can't deal with OM relationship right now while she was at home). As far as I know from all the info I can gather and PI work, it was an EA until she moved out with a GF. At that time she slept with him. She was emotionaly distant from me and was scared to be on her own so I think those two factors along with being scared to hurt/loose him may have driven her to sleep with him. She does have a co-dependency issue. A few weeks after I confronted her on the PA it seems like there is no mention of him anymore. I can't find anything in her emails to her friends (mentioning him, there was before), No pics on her Facebook pg. of them, still wedding pics and trip pics of us on her pg.

Ding, Ding, Ding ... we have a winner ... the best explanation so far of "Mad WW Syndrome". This is the EXACT diagnosis our MC had for FogFree's crazy attraction to someone she would otherwise have never given the time of day.

After experiencing what I have in the past year+, and reading a lot of the other stories here, I will never underestimate another persons abilities of "self-deception/delusion" again.

This is a good point that I think often gets overlooked.


"and if I'm in love with him, I must not love my husband"..."and if I don't love my husband, I must have never loved him."

I really don't know if this is a gender thing or not. I guess just for me, I tend to think its harder to get a WW to reconnect. IMHO, in many, but not all cases, woman view relationships and recovery as riskier ventures than men do.

A friend once told me:

Haha. No kidding. I just take self-delusion in others as a given. After my wife's affair, I hear self-delusion and cognitive dissonance everywhere.