Agreed, and I add we learned a lot about ourselves and met all these cool peeps on MB.com...DUDE

Wow, this really hit home with me today. I've gone through a couple of weeks with my two teenagers deceiving me. I told my FWH today all three of them have lied and deceived me and I can't help but think of the connection to FWH behavior two years ago. Maybe it's not connected but somehow I think it is, especially since my son brought it up with my FWH the other night. And I'm here today pondering this and the consequences of my choices.

Gg

Once someone lies to me, gg, I feel no qualms about letting them feel the consequences.

I think your choices likely taught your children a lot about relationships, trust and forgiveness. Your husband's choices (to commit adultery), on the other hand, were the actual sin which does result in unintended consequences. I rue the day our 10 year old daughter becomes a teenager and throws my wife's former adultery in her face. We predict it WILL happen as teenagers are hormonal and LACK appropriate filters and it's up to us to teach them. I will feel bad for my wife, but she'll accept it like a big girl I am certain. WE will not allow my daughter to get away with it. Lessons of what repentence and restoration are might be involved along with discipline for disrespectfulness. There ARE valuable lessons in there. However, I can't see where MY CHOICES to reconcile and forgive will ever be an issue. You see...whether you reconciled or not...your children would incur the natural consequences of your husband's sin. I think they are MUCH better off with reconciliation than divorce.

Also, teenagers LIE...their brains are developing and this is an important stage in their development. I lied and my parents ignored it. I was expected to make good choices and I did, in many areas; however, I was overindulged and pretty much allowed to run amok when it came to socializing. I was a 3.5 gpa binge drinking womanizing frat boy. The result, I carried quite the wayward mindset along with me until 2005. They NEED parenting and you are just the person to do it. I suggest you read "Boundaries" by Cloud and Townsend (I think). I doubt you are utilizing corporal punishment at this age so erecting and enforcing boundaries is your best bet. (THAT and make them get a job...idle time leads to idle thoughts AND NO PORNOGRAPHY, I strongly suggest you search the boys rooms from top to bottom to find it...I guaran-told-ya it's there or on their computer then you AND your husband give them the lesson on how disrespectful that is to their mother and sister(s), if any. Use the Harley principles of exposure to bring this incidious secretive behavior into the light BEFORE they become men. It's NOT OK in YOUR house (a boundary)).

Mr. Wondering

I'm not picking on you. I really want you to think about this and respond.

You are good at figuring out what your wife's adultery was about. However, what was YOUR adultery about? You were out the door and seemingly on your way to doing it yourself regardless of what your wife did (first).

Could your wife make the statement "It wasn't about them (plural), it was about his low self-esteem and how talking to them alleviated that temporarily"

What about repentence? Do you believe in it? Have you or did you merely utilize, by the fortunate fact your wife went first, a "get out of repentence free card"? Is repentence necessary for you or does the end justify the means?

If you feel you have repented...it seems odd to me that you still harbor feelings that it was somehow a good time. How do you balance being repentent, yet glorifying the sin. Wasn't it empty sex? Wasn't it seedy and ungratifying when you really think about it?

Someone said on the other thread (I believe) that they wish they had utilized their single sinful days learning something productive like Chinese. I feel the same way myself about college, in general. I am repentent for the things I did back then. The premarital sex and the pursuit of such was a big ole waste of time. It wasn't fun, looking back. That's how I feel, now. What about you? Are you coming around to this? Does any of this cause you pause and get you to reflect or am I just wasting my time?

Mr. Wondering

p.s. - I've said this before and I'll say it again. I ADMIT to fogginess. My ambition is to clear the fog by the time I reach my deathbed. I am approaching you sincerely and do not view my opinions here or anywhere as omnipotent. I HOPE your current unrest and uneasiness with the board is a RESULT of your resistance to your own conscience. What you see as the betrayed spouses losing the ability to reason and make judgements is, IMO, actually the losing of SOME of the ability to rationalize and justify (even Paul was unable to lose it all). Once your conscience gets ahold of you...it gets tougher to "reason" wrong-right or "judge" wrong-right. It seems you may be in conflict (dissonance) and you desperately want to hold on to gray thinking. Why?

p.p.s. - Finally, you are harping on the betrayed's being "absolutists" as a natural result of being betrayed. How do you explain away/dismiss Mrs. W absoluteness? (hint: to repent is to change your mind and heart)

>My ambition is to clear the fog by the time I reach my deathbed.

That's how I see it too.

The things I've learned about what is right and wrong and how I deal with those issues have changed so much over the last few years.

I am intolerant of any kind of deception anymore - from anyone...there is no justification for not doing the right thing and my life WILL be spent doing the right thing.

First off, I saw your family pic on Photo Bucket and you have a beautiful family!!!

Second, if you are referring to the RA, I have absolute remorse. If you are talking about the single life afterwards, yes, there are many regrets, but not much remorse. I mean, I was single. That is the partying/sex escapades I refer to on here, not the RA. The RA was pure spitefullness sin. The other was sinful, but not adulterous behavior. Does that answer your question?


"p.p.s. - Finally, you are harping on the betrayed's being "absolutists" as a natural result of being betrayed. How do you explain away/dismiss Mrs. W absoluteness? (hint: to repent is to change your mind and heart)"

She does this for a reason different then the betrayed. She stepped over a boundary and sinned against her family and GOD. She knows that and has had to deal w/ all the consequences of her actions. Its these consequences that have put "the fear of God in her" so to speak. It is a similar symptom but for her its because of the consequences of her waywardness. Make sense? DUDE

I'm about to start a thread, HOW TO KNOW WHEN YOU ARE DEFOGGED! DUDE

>HOW TO KNOW WHEN YOU ARE DEFOGGED!

When you open your mouth and "ribbit, ribbit" doesn't fall from your lips?

Oh...deFOGGED...I read de-FROGged.

Not to be cornfused with de-FIGged which is what happens to certain trees when it's time to make the pudding.

Carry on.

Happy Friday.

Just make sure when you search the boys rooms for Porn, you search the girls', as well. And, make sure you tell the girls how disrespectful it is to their dad and brothers.
Also, don't tell your kids masturabation is bad. It's normal.

You are making a lot of assumptions, Zel.

That is true. Just trying to highlight that Mr W was making some assumptions re the male gender, as well.

Ah.

Okie dokie. I thought it was directed at me.

I actually think it has a lot more to do with the wayward attitude you yourself had when going "betrayed-spouse-crazy" and seeing/using women as you did after your W's A. If you had/have never experiences that sort of wayward attitude, you would be feeling MUCH different as a BS.

Just a hunch though.

I TOTALLY AGREE w/ YOU!! DUDE

I've had one of the most terrible epiphanies I ever hope to experience. I have just today realised that I agree with Dude's basic premise about many of today's marriages not being that special, and about betrayal not being that big a deal, if you were "modern" in your sexual behaviour before it.

On nexus6's thread, which led Mr W to start this one, Dude seems to be saying that if you did not treat sex as belonging only in marriage BEFORE you were married, you are holding up a false standard to see it as that AFTER you are married.

People like me, who have sex lives before marriage, especially with other people whom we were not married to then either, are showing that we do not believe that sex should be preserved for marriage. Marriage is a touching way of making a public commitment to each other, but sex with the spouse can never be special if there was ever sex with other people. We see it as special only when betrayal happens to us, but we never saw it as special before, evidenced by our prior sexual activeness.

I have always wondered whether Dr Harley's methods are designed to work with "sacred' marriages. My very first, incredibly long, rambling and emotional post here wondered whether the methods could ever successfully work on my H, who does not see secret, well-behaved, contained adultery as necessarily wrong. I talked about the modern, trendy, metropolitan marriages that I and my friends have, where we live together, get pregnant and sometimes have the children before we tie the knot.

My fellow Londoners, and friends from university, and people that I work with, generally do not say a word if a woman goes to a sperm bank for a baby, or has a baby with a gay man, or lives with and never marries the father of her children, or has different fathers for her children, none of whom she has ever married. And if she gets married after having done all that, then we are happy for her and never say "what is the point?"

We have Sex and the City lifestyles and then get the shock of our lives when a spouse is unfaithful. They were not supposed to do that because THEY PROMISED. Wah wah! But really, they are behaving as they did before they got married. They make the assumption that their unfaithfulness would not be a big deal for us BSs, either, because we knew what they were like when we married them, and we lived like that too for some time. Did we really think they meant that they would never have sex with anyone else, ever again? Really?

In my defence I would say that I grew to understand the specialness of marriage only gradually after I entered into it. For the first few years, what kept me faithful and committed was the honeymoon period during which the state of intimacy was effortless, as Dr Harley describes. There was no room in my heart and mind for anyone else.

Later, when the honeymoon was over, my commitment came from realising what it really meant to say that I would die for my children. It meant not indulging my desires. I did not even risk having my ENs met by other men because I could see, down some distant line, how that would break up my family. When H and I were in deep conflict, even a quick coffee with another man was not an option because I had an understanding of the value of marriage for everyone in the family, and I hoped to get back to intimacy when the children were not so small. However, hope is not action, as we all know.

Today I believe in marriage more than I ever did on my wedding day. I still have problems with my own marriage, but I am highest supporter of the institution. However, my H has not undergone the process that I have, and I still feel that our marriage is wide open to the next pretty woman that he is prepared to take a risk with. He might not be actively wayward now, but he appears to me to still have a wayward mindset.

So I agree with Dude now (where is that fainting icon when I need it?) that I did nothing to respect marriage before I was married. I disagree with Dude's assertion that it is the adultery that changed me. I think it was having children that changed me, and the ongoing problem for me now is that my H is still the man I married!

AND YOU MY FRIEND ARE HEALED!!! RIGHT NOW, THIS MOMENT!! YOU CROSSED OVER!! I LOVE YOU AND I PRAY FOR YOU EVERY DAY!! DOESN'T IT FEEL GOOD??!! DUDE

I'm not sure it feels good, Dude. I think I should be taken for a psychiatric assessment right now. No offence.

Assuming she has daughters. Don't know why but I got the impression we were talking about 3 sons.

Pornography is certainly becoming an increasing problem for women.

Women becoming increasingly addicted to pornography

Mr. Wondering

Very common once you are healed. "How can I heal from such a terrible thing? Am I crazy?" No, it wasnt as bad as you thought. You healed my friend. Believe it..Doesn't it feel good? The marriage was never pure ANYWAY? He broke a promise. That is all. Did it hurt? yeah, are we over it, YOU BETCHA! Its that simple...DUDE