Frankly it's because if you BELIEVE it you would DO IT!

And cut the 'not making sense' comments. It's juvenile.

Shouted down? huh? You think you should be free to contradict Marriage Builders and we can't contradict YOU? Wouldn't that be a one way street? If you want to freely contradict MB principles, shouldn't others feel free to contradict you? Why would you be exclusively entitled to contradict but not others?



Actually, MyRev, you are not being HONEST. You told this man to kick his wife out if she did not end her affair IMMEDIATELY. Very stupid and shortsighted advice. You were pushing and badgering him into making a HASTY DECISION while under duress, which makes me SICK:

MyRev: " I simply see the BH enforcing a boundary to not allow his WW to disrespect him by carrying on her ongoing A while still living in the marital home."

The man came here to get help saving his marriage, and you and your kick em to the curb crowd told him to kick his wife out while he was in a state of great mental duress. He did not know if he wanted to save his marriage yet and you were pushing him to make a decision.

NOWHERE does Dr. Harley tell people to kick their spouse out. In fact, he advises against it. This man was ill served here by your little gang and by the bickering you caused on his thread by attacking others and attcking MB principles.

Not at all. One can believe in the plans but not want to save their marriage. Not everyone chooses to save their marriage. Again, you make no sense.

Guys,

I think we're disagreeing on semantics. The purpose of my thread was to provoke some thought about feelings I've had lately. I don't know if I'd want to save my marriage if i went back in time. I don't know if the cost of recovery and settling for sloppy seconds with my wife was worth the price of recovery.

My point in this thread is that I feel betrayed husbands have a tall order and a higher amount of failure due to the differences between men and women.

I understand how a WH would rather return to his family after the fog lifts. I understand, as a man, how SF is SF and it can be done without emotions involved.

I just don't think that women are the same in that regard and that a WW that has crossed the line into a PA appears to me to be a lost cause.

I've tried advising many newly betrayed husbands on this board and really feel that most are driven by the fear of losing their kids and contact with their kids than they are by love for their WW.

It's what drove me for a long time.

Yet now I see on the other side that the court system is evolving and that fathers are getting their just due and that family court isn't the woman's domain anymore. Good fathers get recognition and being a divorced good dad is a better alternative than living in a state of limbo for years with a woman who is basically an incarnation of evil and a massive source of disrespect.

MM, I commend you for waiting 4 years. I don't think I could have done it with my WW if she was actively in an affair that involved a fantasy relationship with another man. My exww had brief encounter with strangers from the internet.

I could see myself really struggling upon her return from and don't know if I could have handled it if her physical betrayal had gone further than it did.

I know the goal of this board is Marriage Building. I just think that we have to let the betrayed husbands understand that it isn't the end of the world on the other side and that it may be preferable to taking sloppy seconds by taking back a woman with no morals, no sense of committment, and no sense of values and then trying to work your way through the triggers once that happens.

MM, I really believe that being in the military was a big part of the challenge for you in your case and part of why you have had a successful recovery is that you're no longer there.

For me, there has been no honeymoon period. My FWW was gone for 3 years and 9 months. She hasn't been back long enough for me to comment on what will happen next.


No.


I don't think I will live with this feeling. It just isn't going to happen. This is not a statement of blind trust in my FWW. It's just I can't envision any way that I would ever have the "blinders" on like I did before.

I haven’t been around here much lately, but I saw this topic and just couldn’t resist jumping in.

First, let me say that I am a firm believer in Dr Harley’s teachings. I have applied both the stick and the carrot of Plan A in my situation and I have had tremendous results. I am glad that I worked to save my marriage and I see a great future ahead for us. Like MyRev, I think he does a tremendous job of giving us a language to communicate about different aspects of marriage and we have used this platform to rebuild and improve our marriage.

But, I also think that it takes a special person to carry out the plans properly to accomplish TRUE recovery. It is obvious to me that in many cases we continue to push new posters to continue in Plan A when they obviously don’t have the personality to follow through with a full Plan A(both carrot and STICK). What they end up with is a WS that returns to the marriage, but the marriage is really no better, and in many ways, worse than it was pre-A.

I am now far enough into recovery that I can testify to how hard true recovery truly is. I had a WW that was totally repentant and committed to recovery shortly after d-day and it is still very hard. There was definitely a honeymoon period, but that doesn’t last very long before things go back to “normal.” It’s only because both I and my WIFE bought into the concepts presented here that we have been able to weather the difficulties (mostly on my part ) associated with recovery. Thing go great for a while, but then she’ll neglect my needs for a few days and I start to get angry and question why I signed up for this ride. I get particularly jealous and angry when my needs are neglected because of her being so tied up taking care of this new baby which was a result of her affair. I know I fall short at meeting her needs every bit as much as she does mine, but it’s hard not to have a little bit of an attitude of I took you back after what you did so you owe me.

I guess the bottom line is that I still recommend Plan A to almost everyone who finds themselves in this situation because I think it is the best plan out there for recovering broken marriages. But, I am quick to back off when it becomes apparent that the BS just doesn’t have the strength to FULLY implement Plan A, including setting firm boundaries, exposure, and meeting ENs w/o becoming a doormat

RB,

You're one of the stories I'm talking about. You're now raising an OC and have a situation that was forced on you. The jury is still out if this has a chance for long term success but one clear boundary of mine was that I was no way ever going to raise a child that wasn't mine. Absolutely no way.

I say that simply because I know myself and my attitude about "blood".

That child wouldn't be blood. I would foreve see him/her as an outsider to my marriage.

Not good for the child.

You're trying and I commend you for it, but I feel it's more of an imposed sentence you're enduring because your WW certainly has a win/win situation with you taking her back. She gets the genes for her offspring from another man and gets you to raise him/her as the "provider".

AW3 didn't take his WW back and appears to be pretty happy without her in his life.

The more I'm on this board and the more I hear the stories of BHes the less hope I feel about advising men to take their wives back and putting in the effort to get them back.

I feel that a five alarm fire should be going off in their heads about how much danger they face in terms of losing custody of their kids.

Some have been able to do it, such as Mr. W and Mrs W, who I admire greatly. Same with MM.

Your situation sucks in every way. But you choose it and that's good for you if you're willing to deal with the challenges you face.

Perhaps I'm just disillusioned by the flood of BHes who have come here lately and who seem to be the same doormats that I was 3 years ago. I feel for them and wish I could give them strength to do what they need to to secure their rights as fathers. It's that action that gives them the best hope of waking the WW out of the fog, but it preserves their rights if she doesn't snap out of it.

pom,

Very well stated.

I've tried to participate in this thread, but my words have either been purposefully twisted out of context, OR I was unclear in my delivery, OR I was too harsh in some of my criticisms, which put some on the defensive.

Anyway ... regardless of my difficulties, I wanted to try to set the record straight by saying that what I was trying to articulate, is exactly what you posted.

Thank You.

I'm sorry you can't comprehend logic.

I've already answered that question for you.

I believe Plan A WILL work.....with a remorseful wayward.

I believe Exposure WILL end an affair.

I believe Plan B WILL ease the pain of a BS.

I just don't believe in Plan A'ing someone whose dropping their panties/pants on the floor for someone other than their spouse.

[/quote]

Exposure doesn't end an affair. My WW and her OM were BOTH exposed. I know I exposed him to his wife, not to mention those he worked with. I exposed her as well.

It didn't do a darn thing to stop the affair. It seemed to bring them close together.

There are so many variables that one plan cannot work for all cases.

So simple statements like exposure ends affairs are way too simple to reflect all realities.

Well EE, the fastest horse doesn't always win, but it's still the best bet...

Mrs. W

The simple reality is exposure DID end my wife's affair and I know of others who had the same experience.

Nothing ALWAYS works but like MrsW said - back the fastest horse.

I agree with this. If not for the anxiety and sheer panic I was feeling, I would have realized tat my XW's true character was that of a remorseless, serial cheater and that she ,most likely, has a personality disorder.
I had the opportunity, early on to get a much better deal inthe divorce as she was willing to give away the store and go unrepresented while I had a lwayer.
Instead, liie a frightened idiot, I waited and let her affair continue for 3 months before fiing, hoping she would come around. It husrt my settlement,a lthough I stilldid alright.
I beleive the truth is that few marriages survive and it can work to a BS's advantage to use the fog as a window of opportunity.

I think there are two things here that are getting mixed up. One is ending an affair. The other is recovering from an affair by your WW.

Plan A, when done with both the carrot and the stick will often, though not always lead to the end of the affair. I agree with the previous statement, the fastest horse doesn't always win, but if I am going to bet, it probably wouldn't be on the 40:1 long shot but on the fastest with the best record.

And considering that marital therapists have about a 16% success rate and usually never get around to identifying an affair until the divorce is in the works, I will still place my bet on MB.

Frank Pittman has said that he never found a case where a couple ended up divorced after counseling with him other than where infidelity was taking place. There were a few cases where that seemed to be true but it was later discovered that an affair was taking place during his time counseling the couple. After years of counseling he can point to only a handful where infidelity was not the ultimate cause of a divorce and believes that he just doesn't know the truth yet in those.

If a WW (or WH for that matter) ends the affair and is instantly remorseful upon confrontation with no effort put into either the carrot or the stick of Plan A by the BS I would suggest that they are a statistical anomaly rather than a case to be held up as even the ideal. The statistically typical WS does NOT end the affair at once and will NOT show remorse even once the affair has ended.

This is in part because in order to become wayward in the first place a person uses resentments that have been saved up from the beginning of the marriage and even before in order to justify the affair, not to others, but to him or herself. This is especially true I think for wayward wives who usually decide that the marriage is untenable before jumping into the bed of OM. This coupled with a tendency to rewrite the history of the relationship in order to make the BS the bad guy means that the WS has pretty much decided that the AP is the solution to his or her happiness.

Confrontation often throws the WS off balance and causes him or her to question their own logic and justifications, but even then they are in the affair because they GET something from the AP and this is something they are not often willing to give up.

The fact that seldom does a WS say that he or she wants a divorce until confronted suggests that they do not really want the marriage to end at all but what they really want is to continue the affair while remaining married because of the things they get from the BS. OM might flip a WW's switch in ways she feels her H never did, but she knows a good stable family guy when she sees one and instinctively knows OM isn't likely to be able to sustain THAT kind of support structure.

What the WW (and WH to a lesser degree) usually wants is to have the affair until it burns out, take what they want form it and the OM (or OW) and then return to a "normal" life with the BS. So while the BS is trying desperately to get the WS to give up the AP, the WS is doing all that can be done to keep the AP in the loop in whatever way can be negotiated. This is what Plan A is meant to overcome. If the WS shows remorse, ends the affair and agrees to a plan of recovery that includes everything the BS asks for, in essence an unconditional surrender before the first shot is fired, then Plan A is not needed though real recovery requires some of the same self examination from the BS as Plan A in order to affair-proof, within reason, the relationship going forward.

Consider what your reaction would be if you were being pushed to give up that recreational activity that brought you the most joy in life. Or imagine if you were told that the only way you could remain married would be to never have any contact with any member of your family ever again for as long as you lived. This is what a WS is being asked to do and very few of them will be willing to do it without a fight.

Much is said around here that a WS chooses to have an affair. That is true, but it is also true that they chose the affair partner. They chose to have an affair with OM/OW and not just as a way to hurt the BS in most cases. So they are now being asked to choose to NOT have the AP in their life.

For those who choose to fight for their marriage as a BS, consider this. Your WS has to choose to NOT fight for the affair partner in order for you to win. As hard as it is for you to give up your spouse, it could be as hard for your spouse to give up OM/OW, at least in the beginning stages of Plan A.

Now all this ignores the logic of remaining married in a relationship that should have enough good history to overcome the selfish attitude of the WS eventually and that the marriage was in fact good enough to warrant going to the trouble of not only saving it but rebuilding it as well.

And rebuilding it is what recovery is all about. And as alluded to already, recovery is even harder than Plan A for most and entering recovery is no assurance that it will lead to a better marriage or even a recovered one and not even guarantee that divorce will be avoided.

The question that eventually needs answering is whether or not the marriage is worth trying to save and rebuild. If I have a 1957 Chevy, I might be willing to put a lot of effort and money into rescuing it from the bottom of a ravine and completely rebuilding it from the ground up. A Pacer might not be worth the effort and a 2004 Civic that has been abused on a daily basis by a teenager delivering pizzas would hardly be worth the expense of a frame up restoration. But each BS gets to decide if the restoration is worth the effort.

When confronted my wife did not agree to end her affair though she did not see OM in person again after that. She did talk to him on the phone and usually right afterward would make my life a hell I do not wish to revisit by telling me she was done with our marriage, wanted a divorce and would never give OM up. She also kept up email contact with him for a while and it was really but a short time in the scheme of things before she began real NC though it seemed like an eternity.

While she was still in contact I continued to expose, did my best to make myself a better choice than OM and reminded her of our history together while doing what I could to keep her from having any time with OM even on the phone and email, though while she was not with me physically it was not really possible for me to prevent. But it didn't stop me from making her realize that unless she gave up OM she was not going to walk away with half of the marital assets and a comfortable lifestyle that I would be paying for.

My first exposure was to her twin sister who I told about the affair before I even confronted her and friends and family followed soon after, some again before I confronted her about the affair. Everyone who was exposed to was shocked since they considered it to be completely out of character for her and no one was telling her that she should "follow her heart" or any of that Hollywood type garbage that passes for advice these days.

Once she committed to ending the affair and agreed to work on our marriage, it was still months before she ever showed any signs of being remorseful. The first few weeks, I was relieved that it seemed I was going to win the battle but she was miserable. I would say that if she had just simply and suddenly given up OM and wanted to get into MC and all the rest, showing that she was willing to work on recovery we might not have recovered at all (though we are still "recovering" and not yet "recovered" IME, though she might disagree). To think that she was willing to leave me because she fell in love with some jerk hurts. To think that she was willing to climb into bed with some random any old guy who came along and was really trying to destroy our marriage or just acting like a sl^t makes me think the end product isn't worth the effort.

So was my wife remorseful? Yes.
Was she immediately remorseful and willing to end her affair? Not by a long shot.
Has she shown remorse and a willingness to try to make our marriage better than it was so that it can't happen again? Without a doubt, she has.
Does the affair still haunt both of us? Yep.

Plan A is hard but only needed under two conditions. 1) You want to try to save the marriage and 2) Recovery isn't the first choice of your WS. Unless both of these are present, there is no need to Plan A.

Recovery is harder because that is where the real trials come into play. It's in recovery we fix what's broken, throw out that which no longer serves its intended purpose and try to make an effort to rebuild a wreck that was destined for the scrapyard and to make it BETTER than showroom new condition, since the way it came from the showroom was flawed enough to break down in the first place.

The reason a 1957 is so rare is because not many fixed them when they broke down and now it is rare to see one in usable condition. And a completely restored one is much more valuable than it was when new.

A recovered marriage can be the same way. What makes one so valuable is that they are rare. And they are rare because not many are willing to fix them when they break down.

But not everyone who sets out to restore either one from the ground up will end up with a completed project though some will stay with it and keep working at it till the day they die.

And some will give up and move on to something else because they are tired of the effort. But failing to try guarantees failure.

Confrontation is required. Stating that NC is necessary is required. I'd even say that demanding an end to the affair is required. And all of it right up front. This will all lead o conflict over the affair, but without conflict there can be no resolution.

Some will end the affair at once merely by being confronted. This usually takes place when a more recreational type of affair is present than any kind of deep emotional attachment that feels like true love, but even in some of those cases confrontation alone can bring an end to the affair.

If Plan A is embarked upon than sometimes THAT will lead to the end of the affair. In some case Plan B is entered into with the understanding that it might lead to the demise of the affair. In any case, if the affair ends and the WS wants to return and the BS is willing to try to begin recovery, the real and hard work begins. And for THAT there is nothing that works better than MB, IME.

MyRev, in answer to your question about where a more militant approach to ending an affair might be found, I posted for a while on a Usenet forum about infidelity and that was the normal tack taken there. I will tell you though that there were few who had been there for longer than a few months and there were no real plans for recovery either marital or personal beyond drawing a line in the sand. I myself drew a line in the sand. It was crossed with glee. If that had been my only option, I wouldn't be here tonight.

And I believe that the reason Dr Haley says that he would not do Plan A if his wife Joyce had an affair is because of the rest of this stuff on MB. If you are actively trying to meet your spouse's ENs daily, have negotiating tools to help resolve conflicts and know what it takes to prevent yourself from having an affair, you can only have one by willfully committing adultery with the intent of hurting your spouse. And Dr Harley has said that Joyce has said that if he had an affair, she would kill him. I think that would be for the same reason.

Now that my wife and I know what to do to prevent having an affair and know how to meet each others ENs and understand that POJA, PORH and UA are what a good marriage demands, then any affair by either of us from this day forward will result in Plan D since once you know what it takes and still don't do what it means that you really don't want to be married at all.

The fantasy marriage is dead.

Long live the marriage...

JMO, FWIW.

Mark

That's good stuff. Mark. But, hell, don't you feel a ton of resentment having to virtually force your spouse by way of all types of etraneous pressure to remain with you? I mean, it would bother the heck out of me knowing that ,given her choice without all the consequences, she'd choose to be with the other guy. I'd feel like i was holding a gun to her head and i would not want to go through life forcing someone to be with me.

What you really don't seem to get Zelmo is that an affair is a fantasy.

If you can in ANY way and by ANY means get NC then your marriage will recover if you follow the plans.

NC is the key.

Sure you can choose to be resentful about it all but really when NC is established, the marriage inevitably improves to the point where the REASONS the affair ended are irrelevant.

I think it would only be like "holding a gun to their head" at first and then when everything is coming along, they want to be with you. You have to do what you have to do a the beginning, though.

I'd need another lobotomy, Kahuna, to get to that point. Just my limitation, I guess. Maybe I'll be Ghandi next lifetime.

You know Z, when this first started I felt that it was only avoiding the consequences that led her to stay in the marriage and not divorce me to run off with OM. He has more money, a bigger house, is retired and able to be around all the time...

But once the fog cleared and she thanked me for fighting for her and not just letting her go, a lot of that feeling began to fade. Yes, there is still resentment. Some of it has to do with what I feel is the fact that she wasted what could have been the best part of our life together to chase after OM, but I fought for her because I believed she was worth the effort and the sacrifice.

If the marriage had been as bad as she tried to make it seem during the affair, I would have walked away and been relieved, but I knew it wasn't true and so I fought for her and won.

I can say that it was Plan A that brought her back but she would say that she chose to come back. We would both be right.

I can say that if I had not done the things I did, she would have left me for OM and she could say the same because from her perspective, my Plan A showed her that I was willing to be the man she wanted.

I can point to exposure as being the key to getting her to stay married to me rather than running off with OM but she can say that it was my willingness to fight for her that tipped the scales in my favor. She would also say that it was people telling her that our marriage was not worth throwing way that made her choose to end the affair. Again, we would both be right.

The bottom line is that you cannot make another person do anything. Even holding a gun to a person's head does not guarantee compliance with your wishes. I didn't MAKE her stay with me, I made her WANT to stay with me.

I didn't manipulate her into not getting a divorce; I just told her that we could divorce any time but saving our marriage only had one shot. I didn't follow her around telling her that she was acting like a sl^t but I told her that she had to give up OM if she wanted to stay with me. Then I gave her reasons to stay with me, not by forcing her to not leave, but by showing her that staying with me was better and right.

Saving my marriage was a long shot. Throwing her out and filing for divorce would be a sure thing. I decided to try for the long shot, but I placed my money on what I thought would work rather than on a method I had seen fail so many times when used by my friends.

I was awakened one morning at around 3 am by a knock on the door. It was a friend of mine. He had done some time as a guest of the state and when he got home his wife had a job working afternoon shift while he worked days. They spent almost no time together in repairing the time lost while he was incarcerated (he only did 3 months of a six month sentence and what for really isn't relevant) and she was staying out later every night while he held down the fort at home waiting for her.

One night he went looking for her and found her. She was in his car outside a bar making out in the backseat with a guy that was playing in the band at the bar that night. When he showed up on my doorstep, he looked like he was near death. Almost everyone told him his marriage was unrecoverable and that he should tell her that she had to quit her job, stay home and not go out without him ever again. She rebelled of course and moved out six weeks later. They divorced in record time and moved on with their lives.

But two years after the divorce, he came by our house and my wife's BF was there having dinner. He brought a bottle of Jack and we drank, put n some music and danced like fools till the Jack ran out. My wife's BF and he left before midnight an went to his place where his ex-wife showed up at 6 in the morning to visit him. She went ballistic and was mad as hell that he had let this other woman spend the night.

His xW spent the next several days begging my wife and I to help her win him back because she knew she had screwed up the marriage and she wanted him back.

He's been married to someone else for 20 years and they have 3 kids, 16, 12 and 2 (whoops) and have had troubles over the years but are still together. His xW has been married three more times and is currently living with a guy she works with.

I decided to fight for my marriage and am still married. I chose to fight because I felt my marriage was worth saving and unless I did all I could to save it I would always have doubts.

Another friend and his wife divorced when she had an EA with a coworker. They shared custody of the kids and were the poster children for amicable divorce. Neither remarried until after 12 years they married each other again and have been together for 7 now even though her health is failing and will probably not make it another year. He said not long ago that he wished he had stayed with her the first time because the time they were apart he felt was wasting the best years of their lives.

Ive seen many marriages end in divorce and seen many more that remained married when it seemed there was no hope. Half of all first time marriages end in divorce. Considering that 60% of men and 40% of women admit to cheating while, and if even 1/4 of the women cheated with men that are not included in the 60% who admit infidelity, as much as 70% of all marriages are hit by adultery. When you take into account that most do not consider an EA to be an affair and yet we around here understand that an EA can be as devastating to a marriage as a PA, the fact that more don't divorce is amazing.

Now those numbers do not indicate that the ones who remained married recovered from the affair since most affairs are probably never discovered. And since 90% of the men and 75% of the women who admitted to having an affair admitted to having more than one, the fact that half of all marriage don't end in divorce becomes an amazing anomaly.

But it also points to an affair not being the definitive end of any marriage. It also shows that not everyone who has an affair is looking for a way out of the marriage at all.

BTW, only 47% of women and 35% of men said they thought that their spouses had cheated during the marriage.

According to Barna Research, among evangelical Christians, the number of both men and women are higher than the general public (63% of men and 49% of women). The researchers believe this has more to do with admission of guilt rather than lack of it in the general population at large. The divorce rate among Christians is the same as the general population at just over 50%.

I could easily make a case that it was my wife's fear of the consequences that brought her home. But the fear of the consequences isn't what keeps her there. The bottom line is that I still have my wife and OM has had several more affairs since then, some with married women and he currently lives alone because his own wife filed for legal separation and refuses to file for divorce and he's too afraid to do it himself. His grown children avoid him most of the time, he sees his grandchildren only a couple times per year and has been shot at twice in the last 18 months once by a jealous husband and once by a jealous married affair partner.

But his house is till bigger than mine, he still has more money than I do and he's still retired and I am not...

I think I got the better end of the deal.

My wife thinks she did too.

Mark

Mark, do you have kids?

I think that's a big motivator for men to take back cheating wives.

I honestly don't think I would have wanted to do so at all if I had no kids with my exww.

I saw what my parents went through with my dad cheating and I didn't want to be married with a cheater.

She would tell you she wasn't a cheater since "she had already decided the marriage was over" but no one bothered to tell me that while I was at war. And you don't tell a heartbroken husband that they will get a chance and simply ask him to sweep her "mistake" under the rug.

I really think that there are some waywards who simply got caught up in a weird situation and made an honest to God one time mistake and there are some waywards who have poor boundary issues and will always be susceptible to making that mistake.

The first kind are salvageable. The second type require far too much therapy and patience and life experience to go through before they "get it".

erichh is with a woman who is on her 3rd husband (him) and she cheated on 2 of her 3 husbands. Doesn't sound like a recipe for a good recovery.