Hi KiwiJ, How are things in the Land Up Over?

This Letter to OW was really sad and un-necessary at best!


Emotionally, you have not written a NC letter nor can you until NC is possible.

I'm not going to blast you, even if you do deserve it. I am going to tell you that this letter combined with the song and dance that you are just unable to show emotion tells me how extremely entitled you feel about everything you do.

I feel very sad for your wife.

Emotionally-yllanoitomE
NC stands for N.O. C.O.N.T.A.C.T.
How can you be writing a NC letter to someone you see every day?
That letter just blamed her for all of YOUR mistakes.
Sure, she's a lowlife, but so are you. SHE wasn't the one who took vows with your wife. YOU were.
SHE wasn't the one who gave your wife an STD. YOU were.
SHE wasn't the one who forsaked all that was built in your marriage for some quick satistfaction. YOU were.
You don't lack emotions. You lack remorse. That's worse. You seem to feel lots of love...for yourself.

ok guys im going to ask you to hold off on the NC for a second.

Im seeking the job and will hopefully hear about interview soon.

I'll explain more about the letter later as its not as black and white as your seeing it - but thats my fault for not covering my explaination properly.

Right now my wife is expecting me to leave this evening once kids are asleep, I dont want to lose her, but am unable to show her more than a few weak words.....

Please help me as this really feels like it could be it for us and although my lack of emotions and actions dont show it I really want her.... I just dont know what to say/do

Please treat me as an idiot at this point as thats what its going to take...

Please advise....

You are not unble to show emotion. You are unwilling. If you were truly unable to show any emotion, chances are you wouldn't be married. You care, you just don't want your feathers ruffled. You want to feel enough to get your wife off of your back but not enough to have to change who you are. If you truly do not feel ANYTHING, something is very very wrong. The reason therapy didn't work is because you wanted the therapist to make you emotional. In many ways, emotions are choices. Impulses may not be, which is why temper is not a problem. But showing emotion is an act of the will in many ways. I believe that you do not WANT to see who you have become. So you keep it at arm's length.

Make the choice. List all the ways you have hurt your family, and read it back to your wife if necessary. Live with it. Sit down with your wife, hold her hand, then ask what she is feeling. And hold her while she tells you.

Why are you not even ATTEMPTING to meet your wife's ENs?

I totally agree about this letter being anything but NC. My H wrote one of the weenie-ish NC letters I have ever seen (this was pre-marriage builders or I would have had him re-write it) and yet it was short and to the point. Did not use any emotional words re: their relationship. The only time he mentioned "love" was in reference to me.

yllanoitomE, how could words from a stranger's mouth be more suitable than the words that are in your heart? You've got a career, a family, a computer that you know how to use, I don't buy it that this is beyond you...

You've been going on for days about owning your actions & admitting your fault, but this ongoing rubbish we're hearing, to the effect that your "lack of emotions" is the obstacle, strikes me as a refusal by you to let go of an excuse to shirk fully admitting to yourself how low you once sank. Let go of the excuse. Just say to yourself that there was no excuse. You may find it a bit liberating, insofar as it's the truth.

Look, man: When I got on these boards 2 months ago, I'm not sure that I'd been able to fully accept my wife's forgiveness. And the reason was, that I hadn't wrapped my mind around what it was that I needed to be forgiven for; I had not gotten to the core of how utterly selfish I'd been during my affair. I still wanted to believe I was a Good Man. Sometimes I still said certain things similar to some things you said ... how I'd only been 'trying to counsel a friend' & how I had been 'naive to the OW's intentions', how my 'positive trait' of empathy for my OW's marital difficulties had clouded my judgement, etc. And yeah, any lawyer could mine a few grains of truth from such rationalizations, but on the whole they all added up to rubbish.

Shut down your computer, go to her. Take her hand & get on your knees. Tell her WHY she is more important to you than anyone else in the world including yourself (if you can do so without lying); ask her what she needs from you, what she needs you to do for her, tell her you want to be again someday the Good Man who she once was sure you were, and then pledge to do it, and then prove you mean what you say.

There's no shortcut ahead for you. You have to be abjectly sorry not once, not for a week or a year, but every day for the rest of yor life, AND you must admit to yourself, fully, what it is that you're sorry for. Then it may come to you to treat her like she deserves, to work hard, to start earning back her trust.

Glove Oil is right. You need to open up if you want to save your M. You opened up to the OW skank and it's killing your wife to remember that. Your love letter (NC letter?) to the OW shows just how much emotion you actually DID feel for that woman. Don't be a coward and hide behind this--own it. Don't blame the skank. She's not the one who married your wife.
Beg for a chance, or pack your chit and live your "emotionally devoid" life.

yllan, I think you can see fairly clearly that this letter has been taken rather differently by people here than you might have thought?

I'm not going to lambast you, because that's been done by others. They've picked up accurately on many issues. Let's just put it in less emotional language.

The letter is essentially a child's attempt to avoid blame. "It was her fault! She made me do it!" This is rationally unsupportable, so it's not surprising you're stuck. And you'll stay stuck, until and unless you truly face up to the truth about yourself.

Let's get down to brass tacks. You were not made to do anything by the OW, and the OW is not the essence of evil to your pure, innocent child.

She sounds much like an awful lot of OWs - a woman with a terrible need to fill her empty spaces with intense emotion and the attention of a man. OWs like her are always scanning for a likely source of that intense attention. You can bet that she's run her fingers - figuratively speaking - over a lot more men that she's had affairs with.

Her victims are the ones with character weaknesses.

She's looking for the ones who harbour self-pity, a sense of entitlement, a lack of adult morality, a fear of being laughed at...

You.

There is nothing - absolutely nothing - that the woman could have done to get you out of your clothes if you hadn't been willing to cross that line. So quit with the blaming, and QUIT WITH THE LYING TO YOURSELF. Every word of hatred and blame that you wrote in that letter should have been addressed..TO YOURSELF.

By projecting all the selfishness and cruelty onto the OW, you can only keep yourself in the blameless zone if you constantly feed that sense that she's evil. So it's really not that surprising that you're a) still keeping her within easy hating distance and b) emotionally stuck. You can't go for a walk when you're trying to push a door shut against pressure from the other side, can you?

Whatever happens to your marriage, you are going to be very easy meat for the next needy woman who senses your feeling of victimhood.

And whatever happens to your marriage, you are not going to grow up until you are ruthlessly honest with yourself about every choice you made along the road to infidelity. Get real with yourself. You made a ton of choices. Will I tell this woman about problems in my marriage? Will I let her comfort me? Will I bask in the warm glow of her sympathy? If she touches me, will I let her hand stay on me? Will I touch her? Do you get it, yllan? YOU made many, many selfish choices along the way.

Right now, you sound as if your message is 'My wife is at the end of her tether. My marriage is collapsing. Poor me!'

You certainly don't lack emotions. But your unwillingness to feel the emotions of shame, guilt and appropriate self-disgust are blocking any capacity to feel compassion. Without that, BH is better off without you.

TA

Well said TA.

TA!!!!

wonderfully written, very simply explained, you nailed it TA.
YLLAN!! you'd better pay attention to what has been written.
you are all about you, we see it from here, Your W see's it from there! You need to show your W how remorseful you are, you know the saying, talk is cheap.

I repeat my question:

Why are you not actively attempting to meet your wife's ENs?

Cos, I see what some of hers are, and I see that you did nothing but sit like a lump on a pickle last night.

For a man who "wants to save his marriage" you sure are doing a whole lotta nothing.

TA got it right! If you glossed over that post, go back and read it again.

Ok first the infamous letter. I am shocked and frustrated about the responses to the letter, but I will believe it is down to my communication.

That letter was written in anger (pretty obvious), this anger stemmed from the this:

after D-Day I was trying to focus on wife and marriage and was also trying to ensure NC as strickly as I could will still working with her. OW predominatly works at front of the store as front end supervisor (till/checkouts) and im controlling the stock side in the back of the store. Should I need to venture to the front I would wait until she had gone on break or was busy elsewhere and complete my task. This wasnt done like a sneaking school boy but tactfully and nobody picked up on it. Any communication went through other people so what im getting at is contact was minimal if not absent.

What she was doing was posting on her and her friends facebook page, slagging off my wife!! and I, getting her friends to instigate contact or laughing behind my back. Then she fausly got police involved by her and her friends lying again about my wife and I having violent natures and she was scared.

So everytime my wife and I would get a calm moment together to try to improve things she would rear her ugly head and my wife would go mental demanding justice. Usually me going and ripping her to threads. I maintained NC to my wifes horror. This persisted and in the end I decided along with my wife to write a letter to her directly, making her feel horrible about her actions, showing her that I didnt give a damn and that we were staying together (my wife and I).

My wife proof read the letter and we altered it accordingly and then sent it. I accept that its not a NC letter in accordance with these forums but at the time it was a 'cross us again if you dare letter' and it worked she quietened right down and wouldnt even look in my direction (she would give me evils before).

No more facebook comments no nothing.....

Maybe you still wont approve but for my wife and I it did the trick, so I would hope you can see it a little more from my side now.

I didnt love OW and certainly wouldnt touch her with a bargepole now or ANY time in the future.

I didnt do the right thing by leaving, I was excited at transfer from store but once that was sabotaged and my sickness went to final written warning I guess I gave up on leaving.

I FULLY accept this was wrong and am serious about leaving even if it has been this long.

Yeah, it did the trick all right. How's that working for you now, sleeping at your folks' house? You've got to be a MAN and accept what you did to your marriage.
No more pussyfooting around. OWN your mistakes. Get in there and fight.
BTW, if I was trying to make a case that you were an unstable, violent person, I'd show that letter to the police. Nice going. Filled with venom and vulgarities, that sure did show you were stable. Not.
If this situation was this bad, you should have quit your job a year ago. Actions speak. No contact might mean moving to another town. Either that or just divorce. You don't seem willing to do any of the hard work.

You're missing the point entirely!

Your letter STILL shows your state of mind then and your justifications and rationalizations show your state of mind now!

Justification and rationalization are like masterbation...... you're only skrewing yourself!

What

are

you

doing

to

try

to

meet

your

wife's

ENs?

BTW: you are totally focused on the wrong stuff here. The letter is NOTHING. The letter means NOTHING.

Your wife was a puddle last night and you did NOTHING.

You use a whole lot of words and have ZERO actions to back up those words.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda...

No wonder your wife is fed up.

I just found a new favorite line to replace 'resentment is like taking poison...' line.

I hope my recent post made this clearer but if not then I guess im beyond help?!!?? I've tried everything to explain my feeling and contact with OW and have nothing more to say or offer of you still believe im wrong?? I cannot do anymore so I REALLY hope my latest post helped explain situation a little better.



ok I have to say I do match these traits, your spot on with that...



Maybe this is the case - the issue I have here is that my W is convinced the OW is evil and wont let me forget it. Unless I utterly hate her guts my W has made it VERY clear that this will never be acceptable. But by hating her your saying I wont hate myself as that means I would be blaming her?? Is that right???



Yes I made a ton of horrendous choices, your right and I logically hate myself for that and for not thinking about my W for a minute. But how do I FEEL hate?? I struggle to feel emotions whether reading/talking/shouting etc.... A few posts above it was suggested that being emotional was a choice! yeah right come on, if it was I or at least 4 professionals would have had some luck. Its NOTHING to do with will power in my eyes (I sense another 2x4 coming). Again im just being honest to see if someone can understand and guide me.



I guess I do feel sorry for myself as everyone is tearing me apart believing that I do know what to do, im just having fun watching my wife die inside before my very eyes. Like im thinking hmmmm a little longer and ill MAKE THE CHOICE to be emotional.. Come on people not even Satan is that evil!! Maybe, just maybe its not as easy for me as you all think it is??! IM STRUGGLING and im losing badly and im completely lost LIKE A LITTLE BOY!



Your right I dont feel the compassion you talk of. But how do you suggest I go about feeling?? Ive made lists and read and re-read them, I've spoken to my wife and shes poured her heart out to me about how shes feeling and what I did to her (while crying and hurting), Ive read and re-read emails between the three of us W,OW and me but nothing has helped me???

I may not be normal but can I really be beyond all help????

Emotion aside, what are you DOING to meet your wife's ENs?

***** it.

It's all about you.

I give up.