Bob, thanks. I have a question for you: If Squid and fugly had been at it for half your marriage, would you still feel the same?

Mr. G, the wine has turned to vinegar.

Z, I have my plan, and I'm sticking to it.

Please tell me that you are going to bail when your wifey thinks everything is just fine and swinnimgly.

That you are going to send her to the bottom in flames from a full broadside while she's anchored in port.

Hi Aph


Well Aph, it's a theoretical question of course, because I don't think that was the case for us.

But to answer your question within those restrictions :if Squid had been doing fugly for half our marriage I doubt very much if I would consider living WITHIN a deliberately dead marriage in a state of punitive withdrawal a better choice than either living singly / divorce or trying to recover, No.

I do not see the purpose to it. It would in no way "punish" my wife for her vile VLTA and half-assed repentance, neither would it in any way deliver me a decent quality of life in any way I am capable of measuring.

I think I would choose to end my marriage in your circumstances, Aph. Oddly, perhaps that is what you are doing.

I've thought about this senario when I look at Greenmile's marriage. In his case, his spouse, SSS, has had ZERO years of honesty, faithfulness, and protection. ZERO. And, I've asked myself "why" she's even entertaining continuing on in that non-marriage. In many cases I think some BS personality types prefer "the devil you know" to the unknown. And, after nearly 3 decades of isolation and emotional abandonment, it becomes their "normal" , and true intimacy is "not normal".

Aph, do you see yourself (in the future) happy with some other woman, in a close intimate relationship?

(edit to add) Because I don't see your current situation sowing seeds for future intimacy with someone else. You've self proclaimed you are without emotional needs. What future woman wants to deal with that?

Are you planning to enter the priesthood?


Ahhhh - you're quietly $quirreling $omething away - I get it!

Interesting question to Bob. I have been married 17 years. I cheated first for two years in about the 4 year of marriage. So we had two years of faithfulness and honesty. Then there were the years of my lies of ommission. Then from 2001 until the end of 2008 I was dealing with his 2 affairs, OC and his continued C with OW/OC behind my back. Doesn't really leave much of a marriage does it?

So why hang in there? I know I like my lifestyle and security. I see my H changing very slowly but he never has been much into true intimacy. Is that a reflection on me? Perhaps I don't want true intimacy either?

Appy, I truly hope your plans include opening your heart up to a good woman.

FWIW, I work with a woman who's parents' divorced after the last of her and her sisters finished university and moved out. They all knew their parents had a loveless marriage and, strangely enough, felt very guilty about it. They were glad when they finally divorced. Both parents are happier now. Dad has remarried. Mom is on her own but with tons of hobbies and friends. If there was any adultery involved, she either doesn't know or didn't say. But she's become an advocate for happy marriages now - she doesn't want to see anyone in the same position as her parents.

Yes, for you it is a gedunken experiment. Thanks for answering.

Well, see, the problem is in part finding MB too early in such a (VLTA) situation. I was confused. (I think even you would have been.) Then everyone tells you try to recover. Do whatever it takes for as long as it takes. Affairs are merely mistakes. It isn’t about you. MB works “all the time” (Dr H). Don’t worry. On and on and on... I could call up all the myriad posts advising me to maintain my sacred vows if you want to see for yourself terribly bad advice. And if this stupid search routine worked.

So, now I am where I am, and I attribute it to this place as much as to anything.

I have my plan. But it requires backing out a lot of things MB had me install and/or do for so long in the beginning. Takes time to identify and accomplish all this personal recovery stuff ethically. And to protect DS.

I’ve said it before, there needs to be some serious triage applied to most situations that arrive here. I should have been advised pretty quickly to do what you say you would do.

PS: I will be in your general area for a while this summer. I'll drink a pint to your marriage. Maybe two or three.

Oh God, no.

Not ever again. I am much happier on my own.

There is no way I will ever leave myself open to the remotest possibility of such pain ever again. Not for or with anyone. Not ever. It’s not anywhere near worth it in the end.

I don't see that persisting in a willfully loveless marriage for punitive / manipulative reasons has any basis in MB, Aph. MB is a pretty simple application of behavioral psychology. I worked that out with a couple of reference book readings early on as I am certain you did.

What I was told when I first arrived here, broken, beaten and scarred, was that I should make no long term decisions while I was short-term emotionally unstable. And that there was no harm in trying to use MB to end Squids affair and sure up my spousehood until I got stronger.

Also that EVEN if I decided to divorce I could make that decision a) knowing I'd done everything possible to recover my marriage and b) from a position of emotional stability and intelligence.

I stand by the wisdom and general applicability of that advice. Knee-jerk divorces leave regrets and a dirty separation wound. I see that here and elsewhere every day.

And MB does work "all the time" just as in "I walk my dog in priory park all the time". I am sure your life didn't become hateful because of confused semantic interpretation of a colloquialism though Aph !

I do not accept that you are a victim of being coerced into trying to save your marriage and that left you in your current situation. Strikes me that you're about as "un-coerceable" as anybody I've met lately.....



To back out MB you just stop doing it surely ? Want to unfill a lovebank you filled ? Then lovebust! Want to remove the perception that you care ? Then lovebust persistently ! Wouldn't take more than a week to destroy any "good" that MB may have engendered in your R with your wife, Aph. What is so permanent that it requires decommissioning that MB had you build ?


If you fancy a pint, ping me. We can speak of cabbages and kings but NOT, pray, affairs !

On my recognizing false recovery thread you asked:




I responded:


You replied:




Then you wrote:



I thought about your comments for awhile. Something was missing .... but what?

Finally, I recognized what was bothering me. So, I wrote the following (not to you but to the group, but inspired by you):




Most of your recent posts discuss the personal weaknesses of the cheater. Taking the cheater's inventory.

Where is your personal inventory? Your weaknesses and dependencies?
There is a part of you that took her back against your better judgement.
More than once.
Did you change YOUR spots?
You take a position about the never-changing character flaws of cheaters without acknowledging that repeated false recoveries would be impossible without the cooperation of the betrayed spouse.

It is ever-so much more satisfying to take our spouse's inventory. Trust me, as an AL-Anon, I know know know.

Written with care and admiration for who you are .....

This is just about the least insightful thing you've ever written.

Bob,

I am not sure that applies to a VLTA with multiple D-Days. It was past time I should have jerked something, but I didn’t. Too “broken, beaten and scarred” and scared. Then.

You may remember you and I are members of the very exclusive wedding night virgin first intercourse (wnvfi)club. That alone was enough to screw [<- 3 dimensional conical inclined plane] up my thinking, I think. I made the idea of that intimacy way too important to me for my own good.

That’s not what I meant. That would be mean. I do not want to be mean. I am talking of disentanglement in general, with some highly entangled specifics. More so than a typical M in some regards.

You can be sure I have thought quite a lot about these kinds of questions. No pat and easy answer magically appears in front of me. I sometimes see something shiny moving just off to the side in my peripheral vision but I never see it clearly.

As near as I can tell, I am pretty much returning to my roots. Becoming again who I was before I married her. Who I really am and should have stayed as. No more Mr. Nice Guy is not what I mean either. I tried very hard for 20 something years to change for her, but I couldn’t do it to her satisfaction. So it’s now, finally, back to being who I really am and being happy on my own.

Is that changing, or is that un-changing?

Re. inventories, yes I understand. I attend Al Anon too: FOO. We had a series of meeting on this very topic some time ago. Taking the cheater’s inventory is not wrong as long as you take your own inventory too. One needs to know oneself before one can best figure out what to do about who and what they are faced with. But one also must know in detail what they are faced with. Know yourself and know your adversary - whether liar, addict, adulterer, craven monster or just screwed <- inclined plane, again (this is a weird automatic censor program) up person. It’s all useful knowledge.


Really? I’ve written some doozies over the years. Mostly wrong insights about wife. But if this one takes the cake, well, a new personal best!

Generally meant to say, the road I mapped out by MB methods led me to where I am. However little wife participated, however lousy my timing, whatever it is others did or did not do, this is the road I followed with the map I constructed using MB and MB marriage counseling. I now believe VLTAs (especially ones with multiple D-Days) are too big, too all-encompassing, too messy for any recovery method to work. And, I am simply not ever going to get past the VLTA details and the total unmittigated meaness of it all.

I can survive just fine for a while longer. Especially for DS’s benefit. And I do not want to punish her or do anything abrupt or selfish. Bottom line is I now know I am not going to be able to get past it. MB did not help me at all in that. It’s all me. So, I am working a terminal plan, an end-game strategy. But the tactics are messy.

I don't know if it was bad advice, the advice to try and save your marriage, Ap. You do have to earn your way out, regardless of where you are starting from. Some people have already earned their way out before DD because the previous year or so they were on the receiving end of an affair, earning their way out, possibly without even knowing why it was broken, but still knowing it was broken. DD was just a catalyst or a culmination, or both, to the process. But they are acting from a different clarity and state of health.

But in a slow stew -

First you have to determine that it is broken. And what is broken about it. Or who, if that's the case.

Then you have to try to fix it, before you can determine if it is unfixable.

It was a slow stew, not a quick dunk in the steaming hot saute where you know to get out quickly.

I was with the master deceiver and con artist. Someone who is incapable of health in a relationship. So many layers of incapableness and deceipt that just describing it as evil doesn't do it justice. How could I have known it was he who was broken? My head was a whirly wind of confusion because of the deceipt from day one.

It's different when you are with a good person to begin with, because you maintain a certain health and strength within yourself, as well as in your marriage. But when you are in a slow stew, you lose that clarity.

Then throw in your own values about marriage/relationships/love/family...yikes, it's even harder to make a determination about leaving.

I totally get it and think that you have done what you needed to do to earn your way out with as little left over damage as possible.

2long always says that you have to go through it (recover) whether you do it alone, alone in the R, or together.


Who would have known which way it would go once you determined it was she who was broken, and not you as you had been led to believe, because it was only from that point on that you could try to fix it.

got it


btw ... sorry about that whole sunshine thing

Hi weaves!

Yup, we were lied to by magnificent and glorious masters of the craft.

They not only lie in what they speak, they lie in what they do. They lie in what they don’t do.

I suspect they even lie in what they think.

They were good at it, for sure.

That's it, they lie in what they think. That's why they are so good at it.

One thing I have learned throughout this life is that everything is all about perception.

A miracle is simply a change in perception.

That's the biggest hurdle victims of VLTA's face, I think.

Their perception has been mangled past the point of normal perception mangling. LOL

Thank God I was only in a five/six year mind bend.

You guys perfectly describe what it is like to be in a relationship with a BPD or NPD and the slow stew effect. The mask is on during courtship, and when it starts to come off, you are incredulous, at first. They brainwash you with isolation, and regular abuse with intermittent positive re-enforcement.
Discovery of my XW's serial cheating woke me up and made me see all the other crap that I'd become used to. Thank God for her cheating.

WoW :MrEEk:

Youse guys got INSIGHT