Okay, I'm assuming he's still in an affair.
I'm also assuming that his top ENs are admiration, SF, and attractive spouse.

In light of that:
Do NOT talk about the marriage at all with him. No relationship talk at all! Just bite your tongue.

I think the idea of getting him to fix things around the house is a good one. Then you can admire him for what a great job he did, and tell him how much nicer the place looks, or how much easier it is to get X done now that Y is fixed, whatever. If you guys go out to dinner again or if you're out around other people again, admire him to the waiter, or the neighbor. What I mean is brag on him to someone else, but where he can hear it. Admire how he looks, how well he does his job, what a competent driver he is, anything that you can find about him to admire - do it!

SF is kind of tough. I'd flirt with him and wear some hot clothes. If you want to have sex with him then do, but be sure he wears a condom. email him or text him a naughty joke. Get him a suggestive card.

Attractive spouse - every time you see him make sure you're wearing nice clothes, your hair is clean and brushed or fixed, if you wear makeup and nail polish make sure it's fresh and tasteful. Basically be a magazine-wife as far as your appearance goes.

NO relationship talk.
Keep looking for proof of an affair.

Yeah, this sounds dead-on how my wife would behave as she oscillated between me and the OM. When she was in affair land, she was VERY cold, blaming me and the marriage for everything. I would have these firm but hopeful conversations with her about fixing it, and she would come back around and stay at the house for a few days. I was pretty darn good at the Plan A stuff. Then she would drift back to the OM and emails would go unanswered, texts ignored, phone calls unanswered. It became a clear pattern. I would BET he's in an affair, but this waffling and occasional remorse are pretty good signs he's not done with the marriage. He's not only chasing an easier path (another person), he's feeling ashamed at what he's done, and can't see a way out. This creates a lot of self-loathing, so they go to what feels good - a new relationship.

I found that disrupting the relationship through exposure and confronting the other person really got the ball rolling. It got so they were breaking up and making up almost daily. That's not fun. The longer they're in the affair, the easier it is to believe all the self-dillusion. Try to help end it!

Set some boundaries for yourself. YOU DO NOT DESERVE TO BE TREATED THIS WAY. It's tantamount to abuse, and you need to protect yourself from it. Don't save your marriage at any cost. Save your marriage if you can, but only accept a renewed marriage.

What has seemed to work for me, if in fact I'm headed to recovery, was when I finally reached the end of my rope after a period of near monk-like Plan A tactics. She realized I was done and she wanted to come back.

Rely on this forum! So much good advice here. You'll find that all the crazy stuff fits perfectly into the well-scripted world of affairs. Hang in there and take care of yourself!

We talked today, and it was hard to listen to him go on about how he gave so much to the relationship, and I agreed, he continue to talk about how he married me and wanted to stay married for the rest of his life to me, I said that it must be hard to be where you are now in life, he agreed, I agreed that he did commit all to our marriage, he said that he had shared things with me because he trusted me, and I him. I agreed. He is still bitter and resentful. I do believe that he is having conflict with how his life is going, I did a lot of confirming and agreeing with him, however, he is not so nice. And I said to him that I do not deserve to be talk to in that way, he seems like he is someone I don't know. His mother called me today, and said that she wants to see me, and invited me to a function she is having at her church in a couple weeks, we talk about once or twice a month sometimes more, sometimes less. She said that he needs to get counseling for himself that he has personal issues that he has not resolved but he is a man now and needs to stop whinning about his childhood, and manup. He is not around his family much anymore. I do have to protect myself from his unkind verbish, and, I need some time not to make him my focus.

I am starting a new job and need to focus on my needs right now. I believe that he is not happy because he sounds horrible in his conversations. But he reminds me how much he put into our relationship. I ask him if he was seeing anyone, of course, he said no, that he is being selfish and working on himself. He is so flip-it. It is hard to make sense of his conversation, so I try to listen and then confirm him. It is so exhausting.....

What proof of an affair do I need. He is not here, and he keeps himself hidden away. He does not live around his family or friends. After today's conversation, I'm not sure were we are.

I have to wait a couple of days to send another text, he is acting so angry toward me, because I text him early this morning when he was with someone and he got angry, it must have interferred with what was going on at the time. (this is hard to handle).

I was looking good when we went to dinner last week, and I could tell he enjoyed looking at me. But he want admit it. So, What am I doing? He is so resistant. Why did he go to dinner with me? It is so confusing....

I feel like I need to get away for awhile, this has gone on for so long. Has anyone else experinced such resistance with there WH/WS. I will continue to send nice text and try to give some space. When do they come around, how long do one have to hang in there?

You need to quit "being nice" and bringing up relationship talk.
You need to meet his ENs (which are probably not conversation), find out if the affair is on-going, and if it is, expose it.

You need Plan A.
Not plan doormat and talk about the relationship.

It's really hard because conversation is probably one of your top ENs so that's how you naturally try to love someone. But you need to learn to love WH in the ways *he* wants to be loved.

It's also hard not to bring up marriage talk because that's filling your mind, but for now you have to bite your tongue. There will be plenty of time for relationship talk *after* the affair ends.

From your other thread:
Plan A is about working a plan together. or is it just being nice the WS for 6 weeks no matter what. .

You work plan A by yourself. Your wayward spouse is not part of Plan A.

Plan A is not about being nice. It's about learning to love your WH in the way in which he wants to be loved. In other words, it's about learning to meet his ENs and eliminate LBs. If your spouse is actively wayward, Plan A also involves exposure.

There is no time limit on Plan A. You do it as long as you can stand to do it. Then you go to Plan B or divorce.

There are links to Emotional Needs, Love Busters, and Plan A in my signature. I hope you find them helpful.

This is almost EXACTLY how my wife acted. They have to dehumanize you t ofeel OK with what they're doing. I would bet serious money he's having an affair. Listen to Turtlehead!

Look at the carrot and stick of Plan A.

Thank you guys for helping me get on the right track and thread. This information helps a lot. this is the hardest thing I have experienced. It has been a long time since we have been intimate, and I am getting anixous. I am not going to do anything, but I can see how not getting your needs met can have someone thinking in ways that would cause a wave of trouble.

I guess when you stop watching the water boil, it will not take as long. He keeps himself hidden, I am not sure how to expose the affair, I don't know where he lives, but his daughter does. she said that it does not look like another woman is around. He is good at keeping things under cover. I wish I hade some money I would hire a private investigator. I do talk with his mother, and she doesn't believe that he is involved with anyone. But she couldn't possibly know because he doesn't visit her much. I know that she would help me find out. But she only can get so much information, because WH lies too!

Any ideas? carrot and stick concept: I will read it tonight.

It has been a long day, and I need to start taking better care of myself.

Shouldn't he feel some guilt? or something?

If WH is still in a relationship your have very little chance.
This is why exposure is so important.

The plan is for a woman to give 6 weeks Plan A. This is both exposure and attempting to meet his EN's. Next, is Plan B, love letter with an intermediary which allows you to rebuild yourself.

Maybe his going away so long can be beneficial too. Gives him time to recognize the error of his ways. Try to recognise any areas of indisgresion in yourself. Use a friend that wont lie to you.

I will ask a good friend who is honest and objective about what she thinks about some of my ways. In the mean time I will try my best to expose the affair. He text me 3 times yesterday when he did not have to. I thanked him for helping with a bill. I am working on the admiration -EN. It seems to be doing something, because he continues to stay connected.

I am not good at [censored] tracey stuff, so I will need some help! I do not see of here from any of his friends, but I am in connect with his mother, she is outraged about this whole thing, and he keeps his distance from her, but she is able to talk with him, he still is not making sense to her either. but she is able to talk with him. He told her around the holidays that he was considering coming home. But he is also dealing with substance use. I am not sure on what level. I will talk with his mother.

Do WH come back after this amount of time with no physical contact?

The level of substance abuse could be a very viable problem. Plan A doesn't work for alcoholics. The usual response is to go go Plan B and let AA resolve the problem.

The answer to the second part: I have heard a story from Mark where the couple came back after many years. The wayward begged to return. It took so long because there was no proper planning to recover two people who loved each other.

I cannot state this enough: If you do everything from a position of fear, you have no power. Realize that you have already lost your husband. He's gone. It's done. Let it sink in. Stop fearing, just accept it. I say this because it was so hard for me to let go, but that was a HUGE step to begin the real work. He is lost, but you still believe in the big picture and are willing to take him back IF he does the right things. If not, you WILL be OK. You will be happy again. You don't deserve this.

Here's how you could approach exposure. (Others can weigh in on this) It's going to take some bravery on your part, and just stop fearing the outcome. Accepting that he's lost, you don't fear his anger or his reactions. The actions you take are for YOU and you have righteous and honorable intentions. Tell everyone you know and he knows that he has moved out and seems to want to end the marriage and may be engaged in substance abuse. Don't stretch the truth or state anything you don't know, but don't be afraid to call it like you see it. If you don't know of an affair, then don't state it, but state that you are willing to work on your marriage and would like to regain a healthy marriage. Then the people he knows ask him why he's doing this. He has to lie to all of them too. It starts being less comfortable. That's the goal of exposure. Make it hard to maintain the affair.

This is the gist of exposure, even if you don't know of the affair. His behavior sounds sooooo much like an affair, I just wouldn’t be surprised. Keep in mind that many affairs go on right under the spouse's nose at home, so this distance makes it very hard to detect. Dr. Harley's advice to me was not to turn into a super-spy. Frankly that's nauseating to me anyway. He said to just pay attention to the signs and the attitude. The behavior you describe is 100% normal affair and much the same way my wife acted. Now she's at home again, and I think giving recovery a shot. Much of what they do is out of guilt and shame. To avoid just HATING themselves, they self-delude and dehumanize you. When my wife comes out of the fog a bit, she's incredibly self-loathing. It's very very sad to see. So she puts the wall back up just to keep going. It'll take a long time for that to be fixed. She's drinking way too much right now, but not sure I'd call her an alcoholic yet. In another year if she's still drinking at this level, then we've got a whole other problem.

If you reach the end of a 6 week Plan A, or however long you can sustain it, moving to Plan B might just have the effect you are looking for. The fact that he's still fence-sitting is a good sign in that regard, IMHO. Please read as much MB material as you can. It's the cheapest and best help you can get! One call to Dr. Harley might get you set in a direction.

Others wanna weigh in on this?

Yep! Once the fear is gone you can act with direction.

Thank you for the encouragement. At the beginning I did tell his family that I believe that he is in an affair, and I did call the number on our phone bill,and a woman answered, a family member got on her phone and I told them that she was dealing with a married man, my husband then said that he was a marked man.

I have been fearful of saying the wrong thing, there is no wrong thing that I could say in this case. He is not home, and there is no apparent reason except that he does not want to be accountable and responsible for himself and our marriage.

I think that sometimes others do not want to get involved. And so, I feel like I am doing this by myself. He has this big wall up and he makes himself unapproachable to others who will address him by having angry outburst.

I read as much of the LB as I can daily and I do understand the concepts, taking inventory of myself, observing myself in view of my attitude and tones, body language etc... looking at my part in the relationship, that hard to do, but I can do it. Understanding my communication style and what that looks like to my husband.

you said that he is fence-sitting, I need to knock him off the fence in my side of the yard. I have figured out his ENs, SF, Admiration, and Physical Attractiveness. Now trying to apply them when he is not responding most of the time is difficult.

our communication is about 2-3 times a week on the phone or texting, and at other times he does not respond. and then he will call me sometimes saying that he has a lot of work to do, and at other times he will say that he doesn't want the marriage.


Plan A in action:

3/2/09

I was sent a text message regarding cell phone payment due date yesterday, I forwarded to him, he text back and said that he would pay it Friday. I text him back thanking him for paying bill. no response.

is this a start?

Yep.

Keep the message short. Remind yourself not to talk marriage at this time. You need to show him a nice picture of yourself. No arguments or hassles. He must have a great picture of you when you go Plan B. Send him short text jokes/notes to keep his attention.

Good luck.

SS01,

One of the hardest things to wrap your head around for a lot of us is Plan A. You've been directed to the Carrot and Stick of Plan A and that is a great post, but the breakthrough for most BS comes when you finally get that Plan A is about YOU and not him.

No matter how much we desire changing our spouse it is beyond our control. We wish the WS would just get his poop piled in one place and return to what he once was, but it never seems to be headed that way in real life. Instead we seem to drift farther and farther apart and no matter what we do we see the relationship slipping away.

Plan A is not just being nice to the WS. It is not avoiding conflict at all costs and it isn't rolling over and playing dead while a wayward spouse tramples all over you.

If a WS is allowing someone else to meet some EN, maybe one that has not been met by the BS very well though it doesn't need to be the case, then it is getting that EN met that became the affair to begin with.

So in Plan A you try to identify what ENs are really important for the WS and figure out a way to begin meeting them so that nothing is lacking in the marriage. Why would anyone want to return to a marriage that does not give them what they want? So you provide what they want to lure them back.

The second part is even more important than the first. No matter what ENs you are meeting or how good you get at meeting them, if you are not building a Love Bank balance because you are letting it all leak out because of Love Busters on your part, then you are never making any progress. Think of it as borrowing money and then trying to earn the money to pay it all back. You can work a little overtime, pay a little off at a time and make headway. But if you borrow against the account every month and borrow more than you can pay back then you are always getting farther behind and losing ground instead of paying off the debt.

Love Busters can be thought of as our debt load against our Love Bank balance. If we keep borrowing all the time we will never build up a balance that is going to amount to much. So another part of Plan A is to identify what Love Busters you as the BS commit routinely so that you can get rid of them. You have to cut up the credit cards no matter how small the credit limit to pay off debt and you have to do away with all Love Busters in order to stop your LB$ deposits from going up in smoke.

Now some Love Busters can place more load on the LB$ than others and it might be important to work extra hard on them, just like stopping the use of credit cards with the highest interest rate, but you will never be truly debt free till you stop wracking up debt and you will never stop wiping out your LB$ balance until you cut the Love Busters out of your life. Why would anyone want to remain married to someone who made them feel hopeless or sad all the time? So you remove this obstacle to returning.

Both ENs and LBs are things that are in YOUR control. Neither of them is about him and you don't work on either one to make him do anything. If the focus is on what he is doing, you can't really do these two things together very well. This is because you are reacting to what he does instead of doing what you need to do.

By meeting ENs you give him something to want to return to. By killing Love Busters you remove something that keeps him from returning. It becomes a simple equation that should be easily solved, but there is one more aspect that gets in the way, and you don't have any control over that either, though that is what the stick side of the plan is all about.

What comes into play here is that if there is an ongoing affair, then he is addicted to someone else based on the EN(s) that the OP is meeting. Now meeting ENs helps and avoiding LBs helps, but that only means that he is getting everything from two people instead of one. So the stick part is to make the affair too expensive to continue. This doesn't imply money, though it might include finances. You work to make it too emotionally expensive to continue. You put pressure on the affair by exposing, by not letting him make you into the bad-guy who ruined the relationship. (You do this by keeping your head, focusing on controlling yourself and stopping all the raving and raging that usually is the response to someone who is hurting us like this)

You let other people know that he is having an affair and you don't care whether he is mad, if he ever talks to them again or even if they tell him he is wrong or they think you are an evil villain. It causes turmoil on the affair side of the ledger and because you are doing all this other stuff, meeting ENs and avoiding LBs, then YOUR side starts looking better than the affair side.

But another often missed part of the stick is not giving too much for too little in return. While you have to meet ENs and avoid LBs while expecting nothing in return from the WS at least early on, you can't simply give, give, give and allow him to take, take, take, because there is no incentive to return if he gets all that he wants from you without commitment.

And this is where my fishing experience comes into play...

One way I can often trigger a bass into biting my lure is to try to take it away from him. I can put a bait right in front of his nose and he might ignore it, unless he is really hungry for what I am offering. I can make it look like an easy target but sometimes a fish will ignore that completely. And then what I do is make my bait look like it is trying to get away. I dangle it right in front of him and when he shows interest, move it away...

What I'm suggesting here is that you show him that you can and will meet his every EN and do it without Love Busters but when it comes time that he is showing interest, (this will likely manifest itself in his showing interest in sex, BTW) at that instant, you pull away....No shouting, no demands, no tantrums, no discussion of the affair, just withdraw what seemed to be an offer...This is really hard, BTW. And it isn't always sex that is the trigger, so the better you know his ENs the easier it is to use this tactic.

So if you have any personal contact with him, you make yourself irresistible. You look good, smell great, smile, even flirt a bit...But let him have none of it if he isn't ready to return to you and you alone Just disengage and say, "I have to meet someone for lunch> and get away before you lose your resolve.

And here is the hard part...

Don't expect it to suddenly flip a switch and get him to respond to you instantly. Do it over and over and over again until he is going nuts from not getting what he wants and even then make it clear that he can have it all, but only with you and not with someone else in the picture.

And it might not be sex that is his trigger in this, though it can be stronger than almost anything else for most men. It could be admiration or recreational companionship that will turn the trick. Figure out his top 3 ENs and cycle through them a few times. You'll know when you get a bite...

Once you have shown him that you can meet his ENs and that you have eliminated LBs and he is sufficiently attracted to you and enjoys getting his ENs met by you so wonderfully, then you rip the bait away completely and let him long for it. I'm talking Plan B here. You make him want you more and more and then just stop giving him anything at all. But before you do you put in writing what conditions must be met for you to take him back.

And then you go dark, stay away from him and his drama and heal yourself.

Plan A isn't about him at all. It is about what YOU do and not how he reacts to it. If you get to Plan B, that isn't about him either. It is about healing YOU so that you have something to give if he returns. And if he never does, Plan B let's you build a new life that doesn't allow him control of your emotions and without having to respond to his drama...

But before Plan B, work Plan A for all it's worth and get every tiny bit out of it.

Focus on meeting his ENs, avoid LBs and keep up pressure on the other side. When it looks like it might not be working, do it again. Do it over and over and over again and eventually it will start to matter. Even if you don't see it working, it is.

Mark

Mark, great post as always but I was wondering... could you expound a bit?

Don't tempt me... :MrEEk:

Thanks Mark, even I took some things away from that.
Some....."duh" things......

Mark, and others, thank you for such a vast amount of information. I feel empowered from all the info. I have some ideas that I can now apply in a structured manner.
I believe that I have made some love deposits, and as you said, don't expect anything, just keep making deposits. until, until, until, I come to that place.....

I talked with him last night, and ask him to tell me if he could-what it is that we could do to work on our marriage, he said that he was to tired to talk about it right now. He seemed depressed, and I do believe that he was alone. we talked a short while. He said he does not know why he is not happy. He said that he was content in our marriage, but he was not happy, I ask him, what was the difference. He couldn't tell me and he seemed really exhausted, sounds like he is wearing down. He said that he had to go. I told him ok.

I believe that he is reaching a bottom. not sure what that means at this point, I didn't want to push the issue right now.

His tone was soft, and he did engage in conversation. This past weekend we talked for a while and he shared his disappointment in our relationship, more talking than he has in a while. dinner last week, long conversation this week, and with a softer tone. but still resistant to reconciliation at this point.

Did I do a LB? or are we getting anywhere?

I now feel that I can assess things better with all the info provided.

I really like the story about fishing, and the radio man, the analogies are great!

So much information, boy!, I hope it is not to late, I am removing the LB, and trying to make those deposits. I am taking more time for myself, and getting involved with some business ventures. I had a good day, and did not want to call him, just because I know he needs to think, and he seem so depressed last night. but I will send him a nice text tomorrow/couple days. Working with the carrot and stick concept.

In the mean time I have created a work out schedule - toning up, good eating habits, I have to get my beauty rest.

Thanks again guys!