Put more time and effort into IMing with H than thinking about what I said...

Make H your priority all day long.

Mark

I'm waiting for his reply to a Q I asked over an hour ago. He's very busy with conference calls and meetings getting ready for next week's trip so he'll engage as he can and I'll be here as long as I can.

I'm online with IM and email open. Then I'll move to texts and drop him a line here and there throughout the day as I have all week. I just sent him a picture through my mobile of the gray conference room where we are. I'll keep him top of mind, fer sure.

Hi, ST. Thanks for your post. Love ya back.

A grey room, is that the best you can come up with L4 ..... I can think of
a few other things to discreetly take a pic of to send to hubby.

But the answer isn't to sacrifice ourselves or our lives in hopes of improving the marriage. Sacrifice is the PROBLEM. We sacrifice our marriage to get this other stuff, sometimes thinking it is for the good of the marriage. Once we start down that road, we get so wrapped up in all the other stuff we forget to make the marriage a priority and so the relationship suffers.

So the answer isn't to sacrifice more. The solution is to stop sacrificing what makes the marriage work for the work that makes the marriage comfortable or profitable.

Look at the situation with Tiger Woods right now. He is the richest athlete of of all time. He makes more money than MJ did at his peak. But his success did not translate into a healthy marriage. All of the stuff he accumulated, all of the things he bought, all of the endorsements he got paid for, all of the power, wealth and fame he experienced could not make his marriage a success. He made time for charities, for tournaments, for commercials, for all this STUFF...He fell out of love with his wife because he was doing all of this STUFF that had nothing to do with his relationship with her.

Tiger became accustomed to having whatever he wanted. He became not only the richest, but the most entitled of all. He began to think that whatever he wanted was within his reach and all he had to do was to take it. He became nothing but a spoiled selfish brat with power, money and fame. In the process, he sacrificed his promise to care for and protect his wife. He gave up his marriage to get something that was short term, less than the true value of a beautiful wife and family and the real cost is going to be much more than the money it is going to cost him in the long run. He traded his marriage for a roll in the hay.

Once we start down the road to placing our want for more ahead of our marriage, we end up making the MORE and what we feel is MISSING our top priority in life. To make a marriage work doesn't take more STUFF, it takes more TIME together being married...

UA time isn't a sacrifice of other stuff. It's an investment in the marriage. The price of a healthy marriage is maybe not having as much stuff. The price of having all of this stuff can end up being the marriage.

And just so you guys understand my meaning, STUFF means more than material possessions.

Remember back when you first got married? "We don't have much, but we have each other." Who of us didn't utter those words? But someplace along the way of life we forgot what we already had in order to go after what we didn't have. And that translates directly into not just a broken marriage but a sense of being entitled to anything we want. We define happiness as getting what we want when we want it and that is the road to infidelity.

Mark

V,

She needed to take those pix last night though and not in a conference room full of other folks...

Mark

Mark, you should email that post to Tiger Woods.
I can't imagine that he is getting better words spoken to him.

I'm actually not listening to any of our news, the polls, all the gossip anymore,
I'm just sick for his wife. She can't escape reliving it.

Still thinking of you L4 and sending tons of positive thoughts across the ocean for you.

Mark, I'm loving your posts to L4 today. Such important truths in there for all of us.

I'm going to make sure BB reads your posts later. L4, you are blessed to have Mark supporting you.

I so want you and Mr L4 to be happily married again. I want it so much that I hope you can feel it from all the way over here in england and I hope that having so many people here wanting the same thing for you will translate into something positive for you.

We're all her rooting for you L4.

L4, add this to your 'to do list' for lunch break.

btw, I did mention discreetly. and she is sitting at the back of the room.

I am very well aware of this, Sere. I don't know what I did to qualify for his attention, but I won't question it. I often thank God for his words as well as yours, V's, Lil's, E's, ST's, Jim's, LG's, Ace's, JT's, Queenie's, 6YL's, ottert's, TJD's, Zelmo's, Verve's, ivetz's, b_r's, lurioosi's, Chrysalis', drgnfly's, RubyDoo's, Curious', SC's, and the many others.

Thank you. And I can feel it.

The meeting's done so gotta shut down and find a place to take more pictures. I think we're going back to the hotel after lunch.

It is amazing how annoying someone can be when you don't love them and who wants to spend time with someone who annoys you all the time. The real issue isn't that the person annoys you but that you aren't in love.

Instead of feeling you are forcing yourself to be available try to be the person you want to be - ask yourself what would Jesus do? How would Jesus want me to love my H?

Your whole attitude may change. When he makes you mad your whole approach may change.

L4

Im caught up. i see you were able to tear mark away from my thread haha - i made him so exasperated he made his own!!! LOL

anyways i think the post was really something to think on. like REALLY think on.

I so want you and H to be in love. its always seemed as if you really want that too. perhaps there is a better route to it than the current one.

love ya L4 and i wish you safe travels

Thought I'd put this here for you L4



love ya

st (and others),

What is your response to my suggestion? If you see what I see, how could L4 change this dynamic?

I don't read your thread closely, L4, mainly because I find it so painful to read. I dip in and out, which means that I miss some events, and might misinterpret what I do see. I know that I might be wrong about this, but here is my suggestion.

Putting boundaries into place would mean things like: when you H says you wanted more children with OM, not him, you tell him that this was never true and you remove yourself from the conversation. When he says crude things during sex, you say that you will not tolerate the comments and you stop the sexual activity. When he says that you ARE various nasty things, you say that you WERE those things during the affair but you are not now, and you remove yourself from the conversation.

Show that you know that his withdrawn and hurt state will continue for a long time yet, and you are sorry for causing that and will work to overcome it. What must not continue is verbal abuse. I don't mean that you should demand that, out loud. You should demonstrate that it stops right now by refusing to interact with him while he is using abusive words.

I began a reply back for the other thread this morning. But I need to have another look at it - will do tonight - J is on nights. I see there has been more posted over there so will go and have a look.

SC,

This specific incident that you refer to above is one of the things that triggered my tirade over the weekend.

I asked about this very event (her husband's comments about her wanting kids with OM) and I asked her what she said or did in response. Her reply was not what I was expecting.

What jumped out at me was that it was a clear instance of what a boundary is supposed to be about. The thing that bothered ME the most went unchallenged. That was the comment about kids with OM.

So I got to asking myself why that might have been left laying there like that. It was set up, teed up and just waiting to be blown up. I don't recall this coming up before. I can't remember ever seeing this as something that L4 said was true so for me it begged to be corrected in a clear way.

Then it dawned on me that maybe it wasn't communicated here but Mr L4 maybe knew something that I didn't. At that moment I thought, "Uh-oh." Could it be that Mr L4 knows something that L4 never shared here. Or could it be that Mr L4 is so far off base that he needs to be smacked up beside the head?

That led me to ask the question, "Is he crazy or is he right?" And that led me to ask "Why is this still unresolved a year or more out from D-day?"

So was it true or was he off base? If he was off base it was easy to adjust at that very moment. If it was true, then it needs to be handled the way you suggest, "That was who I was, not who I am now."

But of course this week Mr L4 is the one who will be gone all week, or at least most of it. Last week, right after the incident, L4 was gone. This week it is him that leaves town and next week???

So where is the UA time? How are ENs getting met? Why was a profound Love Buster allowed to remain (his comment) and wasn't leaving it alone sort of emotional dishonesty?

This whole thing just reminds me so much of the threads from people (usually guys) who say, "I'm more or less in Plan A. My response to that is "Either you are doing a Plan A or you're not." Do or do not, is no try...

Settling for less than what we need to do excuses less than what we need to remain unchallenged. Not fixing my side of the line gives me no leverage as to what lies on the other side of the line. While sacrifice is what causes resentment it is seldom sacrifice of things that will make a difference when it comes to recovery. What we sacrifice is the marriage in the long run.

Jesus talked about this idea of removing the log from our own eye before we worry about the speck in our neighbor's. Of course if we are way off in our actions we can't have anything at all to say about others. But Jesus doesn't mean that bad behavior in others has to go unchallenged by us because we are less than perfect. We can't really tell someone else what they need to do when we have things that we know need to be done differently and yet can't seem to take care of them.

So in the name of meeting the need for FS, which I still have a hard time with being in a man's top 3 in our society (really only a guess any way since Mr L4 is not cooperating in L4's learning what his actual needs are), a rift is left unrepaired and the thinking behind it is left unchallenged for at least two weeks to stew and fester at a time when triggers will abound anyway because of the time line and coupled with the holidays which will also lead to triggers and...

I guess what I'm trying to get around to is, where is the Marriage Building come into all of this stuff?

Are ENs being met? Are Love Busters ALL being done away with? (IB can be a KILLER or romantic love) How many hours UA time are there? (Not much at all from what I can tell) and how can two people possibly be in enthusiastic agreement about ignoring each other?

So that means none of the stuff that MB is about is actually taking place here...

So, is it ever going to happen that way? O say give it a real shot. Actually do it with laser like focus for a set period of time and see if it has any effect on Mr L4. If not, then maybe this ain't gonna work after all.

But 10 minutes together here or there and leaving Love Busters laying about unchallenged and continuing to just be hurt without stopping the actions that hurt us is not practicing Marriage Builders principals. And I have enough confidence in MB to believe that if MB methods were actually applied in a planned and focused manner to this it would very quickly either begin to improve OR it would very quickly become evident that it isn't going to improve.

I think what burns people out so rapidly is that since until you get a key piece of it right you are getting nothing at all in return for your hard work. But based on my own experience and what I have seen here in other people's experience, the struggle is in getting it right to begin with. If we get it right, it works. If it ain't workin' are we doing it right?

Now knowing that when I first began looking at spending time with my wife which during Plan A, I did so much stuff with her that I ignored almost everything else, which was my error. But I have to tell you I HATED being around her. I would think about her and OM and I wanted to strangle her. I would see her get angry and twisted all out of shape because I was going to the store with her (which meant no calls to OM while she was out and that she had to actually go to the store, shop and return instead of vanishing for 6 or 10 or 14 hours to sit around and sulk or call OM or stop into work and IM and email sweet little poems and all that crap.--Not my reason for this post, so I'll drop it because that's another rant...)

My point is that I did the MB stuff as I learned it. I didn't try to apply it, I just did it. I committed to six months of doing it and then I shut the rest of my stuff down or out sio that I could do it for six months.

My pay check got smaller because I spent less time at work. I seldom worked OT and most weeks went home early a day or two per week. My fishing tackle collected a lot of dust. My garden was overgrown with weeds. O got somebody else to handle a lot of my jobs at church. And during this whole time I was only guessing at ENs because she wanted nothing to do with me. Our kids were grown, but I became the best Grandpa you've ever seen. I did very little that wasn't part of my plan.

Commitment to staying married first happened after an incident where I was given a choice to allow status quo or challenge her way of thinking by enforcing a boundary. I chose to enforce my boundary and was pretty sure at the time it was going to end our marriage. Instead it got her off her butt and made her decide and NC began two days later. I kept up Plan A intensity through withdrawal which was not as long as some but still sucked. I'd already been working at this a while and now she was going through this love sick puppy phase...staring off into space dreaming of OM... (I feel much better now)

Somewhere in about month three, I began to see glimmers of hope as things that I called Little Victories began to take place. One step forward and two back were replaced by two forward and one back and soon, I was getting enough in return to keep going. I have no experience with Plan B because Plan B was never required. But Plan A I think I got down to a science...

Now some of the things I gave up during that time I never went back to. I would still love to go fishing as often as I once did, but if it is a choice between time with my wife or fishing, I'm going to choose time with her. That is why she now buys into MB, BTW, because I showed her how it works by doing it...

And here's where the behavior modification BK alludes to on the other thread comes into play. I did these things not because I was getting immediate pay off but because I assumed that there might be one eventually. I knew that if this stuff works then I had to try it. If after I really did it for a while if nothing good happened I could walk away with my head held high knowing that I had in fact given it my best effort. I chose MB instead of some other program because I was reading of a higher success rate here than with other programs and the forums here seemed to include folks who had made this stuff work.

So knowing that MB is NOT really being applied 100%, I come back to saying do it 100% for a while to see if it works. Until it has actually been done long enough to get a feel for its effectiveness there is no way to know what Mr L4's response is.

And L4, I'm not trying to beat you up here, because I see this on other threads too and my original rant was going to be on one of those other threads not yours, but if my wife had gone on vacation without me in that first year, she might have come home to an empty house. And If I had gone off to a fishing trip in Alaska, one of my dream trips, BTW, during that time, I would expert our recovery to have been delayed at a minimum.

Work is a whole other can of worms, but about 5 months into recovery, my wife took a trip for work. It took her within less than 100 miles of OM's house. We talked on the phone a LOT during that trip. She even called me a couple of times so that I could look up things on Mapquest and relay driving instructions to her over the phone. During the affair she would go off someplace and not answer her phone for hours. I would go over a day without hearing from her. If that had happened on this trip, we might be divorced now.

So what did she give up for the marriage? She gave up a lucrative client account near OM. She tried to hire someone to handle it, but it ended up costing her company some real money because she couldn't go there any more. She eventually sold her horse, though other factors came into play on this and she seldom fails to answer the phone when I call her and if she does fail to answer, she calls me back pretty quickly and explains why she couldn't answer right then.

What I trying to tell you, L4 is that there IS a cost to saving a marriage. It does involve some sacrifice but the sacrifice is worth the goal. And the reason couples find themselves in this situation is because they do in fact sacrifice the relationship for all this other stuff.

And to be honest, I just don't see a focused, concerted, energized all out approach to applying MB. I know you can't keep giving forever without getting in return. That will make you go nuts at best. But then I see all this stuff happening that is counter productive to the application of MB methods and wonder how much actual MB is going on.

And since I know ST and Ivetz are both following along, this message is for them too. ST, you need to remain focused on doing this MB stuff so that the Love Busting can stop on both sides. And Ivetz, you need to examine if you are even really doing this or if you are just being a doormat and excusing his bad behavior because you behaved badly.

So, L4, why does your husband believe this? Because he clearly does believe it to be true...What are you doing to correct it? If it never was true, he needs to understand that somehow. And if it was in fact true and it is something he discovered or learned from you under your trun to total honesty, he is going to have to understand that this was not the L4 that married him not the one standing before him now but was a person who tried to hijack the real L4 but has been banished forever. That was why I asked the question about how you replied, because to me, this is a HUGE thing. It is a HUGE challenge but also a HUGE opportunity to right something that went seriously wrong. Either his thinking is wrong or your actions at the time we wrong and either way it is something you could correct at that very moment in time.



OK. I'm done whining now...

At least for a while...


Mark

Mark,

Please forgive my temerity but I really do not see how you can compare your post-affair days and L4's.

You were the BS, Mark. That makes an enormous difference. You were betrayed, but you were willing to work on recovery. Your wife was the WS and she was horrible to live with, but she was the WS and she stayed. Simply by being the WS who stayed, she was making a minimal commitment to recovery. She was accepting you.

By being simply the BS who stayed, Mr L4 is not doing anything similar. He is not making a minimal commitment. He is saying "you are a ****. I don't love you any more, but I am not leaving my children and I am not going to tell you to leave so that my children are without a mother. You can stay, and you can do the domestic support, you can be a willing an enthusiastic SF partner, you can get a job because I do not want to support you any more, you can get up early to clean, you can cook me fantastic meals, you can make yourself attractive and I will take it all, I will have sex when I want it, I will eat the food and sit in the comfortable sitting room, but I will never give back, because you betrayed me. I will take all the EN-meeting and I will never give back, and if you don't like it then you can****off like the*****that you always were". Your wife didn't 'say" (show) that to you, as I see it.

I too think that L4 is completely wrong about FS as a top need. I think that, if her H has expressed a desire for her to work, this is not one of his normal ENs but is his way of saying that she is on her own in the marriage. He will not support her. I also suspect that he might be hoping that she becomes secure so that he can leave one day. I cannot remember whether her current job is long-term, but if it is short term then I think she should let it end and not do another one like it. You, L4, are harming your marriage by working like this.

Mark, your wife flat-out rejected you by having an affair. All affairs are rejections, in my view. However, your wife accepted you back by not leaving after her affair. No matter how hard financially, or kid-wise, or any otherwise, it might have been for her, if she had wanted to be rid of you she would have left. By her staying, you had some tiny fragment of evidence that she did not want rid.

L4's BS is not doing the same thing by staying. He did not seek a way out in the first place. He did not abandon the marriage for an affair. He is "staying", but he seems to have decided to make L4 pay for her affair, for life, or until one of then calls it quits.

She should at least enforce boundaries against abusive expressions from him. I think we are in agreement on that?

Mark, great post.

pk

t/j

I am examining this, Mark. and i think i am doing both. I AM working the principles like mad. i was doing some of them wrong, and i know some i could do better on. But i am also a doormat at times. i need to set the boundary but continue to work the MB principles. its a tough balance. my main focus is this bank and keeping it full. When im doing that, i DO get a LOT in return. so its working to an extent.

end t/j

I am pleased L4. For now at least I think the focus here is on boundaries and how you deal with the stuf that comes from your H that hurts you.


Me too, very concerned about your UA time. I think I've said before that I think the cut in my hours was someone out there trying to give me a helping hand with my M and certainly so many friends pointed out here that this has given me more time to focus on my M.

I had that very dialogue with myself in the shower this morning, thinking that if people with small children are to remain married then really they need to only have one full time job between them - I was beating myself up again about wanting to have a proper job.

L4,

I just want to make sure you know that I am not trying to just pick on you. I think you know that, but I want to make sure that you do.

I want to challenge your thinking about the interaction between you and encourage you to change the way you react to his verbal bashings that hurt you. But I also want you to consider the possibility that you both tend to hide from each other through busy schedules.

Right now I'm waiting to hear what his mood was like and what happened when you got home and before he left himself for his job this week.

I don't think the answer lies in working harder but in working more efficiently. With so little UA time, and such frequent trips away from each other any time when you are both home needs to be maximized in order to actually connect with each other at a level that allows compatibility to be built. If the only interaction is when having a conversation about marriage issues and problems or even household issues and problems then no connection at the level required to restore intimacy is going to take place.

Side note to SC...Remember that I began from a position of her being in an active affair that she did not want to end and when called on it her first response was that she wanted a divorce. She was in fact planning her departure when I figured out what was going on.

Plan A was not all roses for me. I lost weight, had a near melt down almost daily, only ate when I was cooking for her for about three weeks and slept an average of about 2 hours per night for over 6 weeks. I nearly lost my job because I was not really able to do it very well. I left work early, came in late, took sick days gave up almost everything I had enjoyed in my life for some time.

At about 6 weeks I was ready to throw in the towel, suggested that she just go away and leave me alone and basically had my biggest AO of all time. Then she told me she thought she was staying, after two days of being convinced the marriage was done and her vanishing during most of that time, not answering her phone for anyone, not going home, not replying to even her twin. That was when NC began. And THAT night was the first time I was able to sleep beyond just napping on the couch after passing out from exhaustion. Still had sleepless nights after that, but after 6 weeks I can tell you I was ready to call it a day.

I had a serious support group around me. Was studying MB. Was reading stuff here and focused my every action toward figuring out how to meet her ENs while having a devilish time trying to avoid Love Busters, because I wanted to kill her a few time.

Now I got pretty lucky and I did get a commitment to "trying" after 6 weeks and another month of withdrawal and family crisis after family crisis allowed me to Plan A myself into being someone she could hardly make it without. But what I would call recovery didn't happen for quite a while after that. Our first real discussion of the affair took place almost a full year after all of it began and in fact it was held because I needed to explain to her why I was suddenly depressed again and withdrawn from her after so much focus on her for so long. And THAT was after she had spent 4 months caring for me while I was sick with an infection likely acquired in part because I was suffering from the stress.

Today I know that she can identify when we need to spend more time together as easily as I can. But a buy in regarding MB really only happened within the past few months...over three years after I began Plan A. We made progress before that, but have made as much progress in the last 6 months as we did in the previous 36. At two years, we were back to where we'd been before the affair. Where we are now is light years ahead of that though.

IB has been an issue as recently as this past summer and this after me explaining to her how IB was a real problem for me. IB even became a bigger problem when she began to read Townsend and Cloud. Her idea of boundaries was "I'm sick of not having any time for myself." Kind of scary when trying to recover from an affair marked by entitlement.

And we're still working on it. I didn't feel we were both working on the same goals until after two years and we only began using the same methods after 2 1/2.

We even had a problem this weekend, BTW. And it was related to our pot luck with our Marriage Builders study group of all things...

But now we know how to meet ENs and do away with the Love Busters, even apologizing for them and doing things to restore intimacy.

Which brings me to having to leave work and head home, so that I don't have to start from scratch again tonight...

L4, Just be sure that the proper ENs have been identified and that IB has gone the way of the dodo from your side. Try to find a way to maximize the little time you do have together so that it isn't spent recuperating from a week of one or both being absent and having to rebuild what was rebuilt ten times before.

I really hate using 2X4s and know I don't much like them when I get whopped up 'side the head with one. But I get concerned when the focus starts to shift from MB toward commiserating and a large pity party begins.

You and Ivetz both need to identify what you are going to stop tolerating, communicate that boundary clearly and consistently and take every opportunity to challenge the thinking he uses to maintain his stuck condition. Like I said to Ivetz, find a way to remove the payoff for him and it will stop.

But also remember that Withdrawal follows Conflict very quickly when Love Banks are empty. And filling up a Love Bank that is that far gone requires a very focused effort with any lapse causing even more harm than it will once things start to improve. Until then it's a short trip from being happy to being ready to shoot each other. And the key is still the same and that is UA time. Nothing helps restore intimacy better than actually having fun together.

If he won't participate at all, then you have a decision to make and no matter what your former status was, you don't deserve being made to feel worthless...'Cause you're not worthless. God didn't make anyone that's worthless.

I'm rereading a book called When Forgiveness Doesn't Make Sense, by Dr Robert Jeffress. You might want to look for it...

And maybe leave it laying around when you're done with it...

Mark