What about him telling me, to my face, that he does NOT have ENs? Am I to believe he's lying?
It means he's misinformed or so far into Withdrawal that he has no ENs that he is willing to let you meet right now.
My H has never given of himself emotionally to me. He himself would say that he doesn't have strong emotions, that that's just not "him".
He must have given something to you at some point in time. You've been with him for 12 years, 6 of them married.
Call it fog, I don't know... I feel I Plan A'd in my marriage for a long time. When he would come home from a job he hated I would inquire about his day. "S**tty," was the extent of the answer that I would get. I hunted for jobs for him closer to home. I attempted to engage him in conversation. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to talk to me.
I'm betting that Conversation is one of your top ENs. I'd put money on it not being one of his top 6.
You hunted for jobs for him? Did you also complain about his job to him? You were trying to "fix" him???
One of the things I see a BS often doing is trying to talk to an actively wayward spouse about the relationship, the affair, the marriage etc. The problem with this strategy is that seldom do they want to talk about those things very much because they are a source of stress. This fuels the desire to get away rather than creating intimacy within the relationship. Why would I want to talk to my wife about something that causes me stress? Do you follow that?
What I am suffesting to you is that he does have ENs but has never considered what they might be. You can't just begin spelling them out until you even have a concept about what ENs really are.
But right now, he isn't very willing to even give you any clues. He is looking for you to show him, not explain to him, but show him by your actions that you are 100% committed to staying with him and that you need him, and not just to get your own ENs met without having to have another guy on the side.
His world blew up 12 days ago!
I truly do understand what you're saying. He told me, many times before I moved out, that he wasn't unhappy in our marriage, that he thought it was good. I wondered then, and continue to wonder now, how one of us could be "not unhappy" while the other (me) was drowning. How can that be? Forgive me, Mark, but if my H could go back in time 2 years he would believe our marriage was good. I was the one who hoped for more.
So what did you do to make it more? I didn't ask what you tried to get HIM to do but what did YOU do about it?
You were probably doing "OK' in meeting his ENs while he wasn't meeting yours very well. My guess is that the same subjects came up several times over the years. You saw a lot of things missing. Your focus became those things that were missing. He was content or at least willing to live with what there was. Not a lack of dreams or desires at all in this case, but it was probably that his goals were way down the road, looking forward to something in the future. Not uncommon in men, BTW.
You see when we have a problem we want to fix it. The problem is to define it in such a way that it is a problem for our spouse. If I want something more from my wife I need to ask for it in a way that she understands what I want, buys into the idea that it is something I should be able to have and then commit to providing it for me.
Example: If I want more sex, I need to tell my wife I want more sex. But if I approach her while she is in the kitchen doing dishes and try to fondle her while she works, it might not go over very well. She might even be offended enough that the likelihood of her fulfilling that request later is out of the question.
So if the next time I approach her, I insist that she "give in" to my demands (which is the real problem, BTW) she might go so far as to push me away. My need hasn't gone away, I've tried to get the message through to her, so what am I to do about it?
What most people do is get mad and try to demand even more. But if That doesn't work for me what happens is I store up resentment because my needs aren't getting met. So now I am still unsatisfied, AND I now have this huge load of resentment to deal with.
What happens at this point with some people is that they give up. And since nothing comes of doing nothing, further resentment builds up. Then one day that cute new girl at work makes it clear that she thinks that I am just all that and a bag of chips...
My wife isn't giving me what I want. So what am I likely to do when this cute young girl throws herself at me?
If I'm a buyer, I run away as fast as I can and vow to find a better way to communicate what I want from my wife or continue to negotiate (ala POJA) until we can arrive at a solution that will make us both happy. But for most women the situation is different at least at first. A woman might never dream of having sex with a guy but will be more than willing to let him chat away for hours with her...
His top EN is probably SF too.
If we let someone meet our ENs that we are not getting met by our spouse, we invite disaster every time. That is because whenever anyone meets one of our ENs they are making deposits into our Love Bank. Once that balance exceeds the romantic threshold, we have fallen in love with that person. What En they met initially does not matter.
But here is the proof that you can restore the love in a marriage. Once your OM reached that point where you felt as though you were in love with him, I'll bet it became easy to meet any EN that he might have, even an EN that you might have trouble meeting for your husband while you were not feeling in love with him, even though he was your husband.
My point is that If you were doing lots of things to meet ENs for your husband and he was in fact in love with you and happy with what you were doing, then you were doing it right. At the same time he was not able to meet your ENs the way you needed them to be met. There are now two possibilities. 1) He simply didn't want to meet your ENs because he is a selfish person or 2) He had no idea what was lacking form your side.
If the problem is #2, then he needs to be educated. If i were #1 then you never would have fallen in love with him at all. You wouldn't have married him if he never did anything right...And this applies mostly to your top ENs.
But I would bet you had not even identified your top ENs for yourself let alone come up with a way to describe to him what was missing. "I'm unhappy" is not a description of what is missing. And neither is "I want more ___." Those are complaints and not a statement of the problem.
And just so you know, we all hope for more. Hoping for more isn't a sin. Going out side of marriage to get it is the problem. And once that decision was made I promise you that you used just such a logic to justify the affair. You did in fact rewrite the history of your marriage. It happens in every affair. The alternative would be to say "I am a bad person" and we know there is no viable reason to do what we know is wrong. So we rewrite history. "I've been unhappy for a long time." And the best one, "I tired to tell you I was was unhappy for years." I heard this stuff myself many times...
Still not a very good reason to have an affair BTW.
RooGirl, my guess is that you were considered by all before this to be a moral and ethical person. That you would be the last one anyone would say would have an affair. In order to actually have one you had to disconnect in some way from those ethical and moral foundations. You just can't do what you believe is wrong. You can't do it.
So what nearly EVERY WS does is find a way to make it not a betrayal. To do this they make the BS the bad guy. The blame gets shifted to the betrayed from the betrayer. This is not an indictment, just an observation from experience.
Call it fog-speak or whatever else you can come up with, it is how a WS justifies having an affair that they themselves believes to be wrong.
The marriage is dissolved unilaterally and the new relationship that isn't missing what was missing in the marriage is pursued.
The problem of course is that the BS knows nothing of the dissolution of the marriage.
As for the vows and which are important...
None outweigh any other. That said, an affair is not loving. It is not honorable. It is not cherishing. It is not forsaking all others...It is NONE of those things.
He did not show you love the way you wanted him to. Does THAT justify an affair?
He did not "cherish" you like you wanted him to. Does THAT justify an affair?
He did not honor you like you thought he should. Does THAT justify an affair?
An affair is not loving. It is not honorable and it is not cherishing the other in the relationship...
Let me ask you this. What would you do if your husband got sick, maybe early onset Alzheimer's or some such. Or maybe he became incapacitated in some way do to an accident, perhaps confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life...
Maybe he could no longer talk at all and couldn't dress or feed himself...
What would you do then? He would be meeting none of your ENs and you would have to do everything for him just for him to survive. What would you do under those circumstances? Would you stay with him and take care of him because YOU made vows for life or would you run off and leave him to die because he was unable to meet ANY of your ENs for you and there was NEVER going to be an improvement in that regard?
A real buyer stays because they made the vow. A renter looks for something else because what they have is lacking...
So he didn't meet your ENs and you had an affair. Now you want more than anything for him to begin meeting your ENs...
Not till the affair has been dealt with I'm afraid. The biggest problem in you relationship right now IS the affair and it's aftermath. Even your attitude toward your husband is still colored by it and his ability to accept your repentance will be based on what you do for him and not the other way around.
I wanted to feel loved and needed and important and cherished
I want to be rich, retired and living in a different house, one that doesn't need so much in the way of repairs...
Does that give me the justification to rob a bank? Or to stop paying my payment to the bank for my house?
Same thing, RooGirl. It's exactly the same justification you are spouting. You had the affair because you decided that it was in your own self interest to get your ENs met outside of the marriage. There are no other reason for affairs. That's the only one that ends in an affair...
If your marriage was unrepairable for years, why didn't you file for divorce?
If your husband was never willing or able to meet any of your ENs and so make you happy, why did you marry him?
If the relationship was so awful, why not walk away from it before having an affair?
Until the affair is dealt with, I wouldn't expect much of anything from him. Either live with that or call it a day...
Suppose you backed into my car in a parking lot and put a dent in it. In response I burned your house down. My reason..."You dented my car." And then when you demanded I be held accountable for burning your house down I shouted "When are you going to pay to fix my car?"
It really is what you are asking here. You want your husband to fix his half of the marriage so you can be happy and yet remain in it. You just burned his house down...
Fix your half, RooGirl. It's all you have control over. Fix what is broken in YOU and see if he doesn't follow because you will be someone he wants to be with and make happy...
Mark