Okay, but I keep reading about how I'm supposed to stand back and stop pressuring and stop talking about the affair...

Not in recovery.

In Plan A.

Been in plan A since beginning of Jan. 2010.

That's when I exposed to her parents and his. She of course spoke with him to apologize via email. He lives in London so they've had sex only a few times, so it's mostly an EA.

After that, I think OM stopped writing her. For three or four weeks we seemed to be making progress, sleeping in the same bed and holding each other a little.

But then she wrote him again because a mutual friend of theirs got sick and he wrote her back. That was at the end of Feb.

Since then they have been in No Contact again, at his bequest.

I am getting worn out. And I know it needs to end at some point. We are now sleeping in different rooms again and have good days and bad.

TE,
Keep going with Plan A. 2.5 months is not long enough to build up your love bank balance with her. Patience.

Big Pic & Pep,

You and the others on this site are really giving me the strength to keep going. Thanks.

I gave my WW the date of 4/18 to recommit to M by writing an NC letter. If she does not, we will D.

Right now, I would put my money on D.

TE,

The point of Plan A is to show her that you can be the man of her dreams if she remains in the marriage and dumps OM. She doesn't think you can do it for very long and that you are just making a show of it to get her to give up OM.

That's what it is supposed to do.

What you just did was tell her that you aren't going to be her Mr Dreamboat past 4/18 so she only has until then to respond because after that you are going back to putting yourself first.

Right now, I would not bet against you...

The way it is supposed to work is that you make yourself darned near perfect, let her see how much you are changing to become the man of her dreams and fantasies and how much better you would be to spend her life with as opposed to POSOM.

You do this without Love Busters and just when she is starting to think that maybe you really ARE different than she thought, or at least has been telling herself, you deliver a Plan B letter that tells her that you will have nothing to do with her until OM is gone and she agrees to working to build a MB marriage with you.

Then you shut up, sit down and wait till you figure out if you are even willing to recover if and when she comes back. Then you can decide if you will divorce based on rational decision instead of knee jerk reaction to her hurting you every five seconds.

If you want to win this war, you have to be willing to work at becoming the best TE that TE can be. And you have to tell her that your marriage cannot survive with OM in the picture. You tell her that you are not willing to share her with OM and that OM must be gone...

But you have to do it without making her feel like crap, without DJs or AOs. You DEMAND without being demanding and disrespectful.

You do it for 3 months and see if you can keep going. Then you do it longer if you can but plan for separation. Then you pull the plug on meeting her ENs and go dark and wait...

By giving her a time frame you are saying "I'll let you be a ho until April 18th and then I'll leave you. So tell me, why would she take that as a reason to end it with OM whom she is in love with and commit to turning the whole world upside down and inside out in recovery?

How have you been meeting her top ENs so that she is in love with you?

What Love Busters have you identified that you have been able to overcome and what ones do you still struggle with?

This is how you do Plan A...

Plan "I think I'll alternate between being a doormat and being an [censored]" isn't much of a draw for most women...

I'm outta lumber...

Mark

Thanks Mark for the advice.

I'm trying to be the best I can be. I'm listening better, going to counseling, quit drinking, doing more work around the house, taking the kids to school, making breakfast, telling my wife how much she means to me, working out all the time, taking her out to dinner, getting babysitters, taking her and the kids for walks in the park, taking her to a concert tonight...

I'm trying my best man.

And I'm doing the best I can to be rational and not act on my emotions.

But every time I turn my back, she is on the phone with her enabling friend plotting against me, or emailing the OM.

I'm tired of the lies. I'm tired of the enabling friend. I'm tired of the fog. Maybe she's just too far gone. Maybe she's the type that has to hit rock bottom.

I made her an offer of the life we can have if we reconcile. I told her what my parameters were. If she is not interested in that offer, then she is not interested. If we divorce, we divorce. I'm still young.

If we go through this again in 10 years, I'll have 10 years more wrinkles and 10 years less hair.

you have 2 young kids and you have to save the M for them too. If you did not have kids I would have encouraged you to D and get on with your life. NOt because I do not value a M without kids, but because you had no obligation as a father. That extra obligation requires you to put that extra time in saving the M.
That said, there are limits. It you W shows not effort in the R process after a few month of you trying, then the M can't be saved by your efforts alone. It takes 2. Then a D is appropriate and you will feel that you put all the effort you could and the M did not work. So you wil have no regrets to live with and you can share that with your kids.


blessing

I'm trying. I just can't do it.

Well said, atena. He's not just a husband. He's also a father. Being a father requires self sacrifice, not comfort.

Believe me, Dday was almost 7 months ago. The kids are about the only things keeping me in this M right now.

I believe you. It is hard. 7 months are a long time, but relatively long if you keep in mind recovery.
blessing

TE,

I'm not suggesting that you do Plan A for another 6 or 7 months. To the contrary, I am trying to point out that you are losing your love for her and need to get your ducks in a row for Plan B.

But until Plan B drops you have to avoid doing anything that makes her memory of you to be anything less than of you becoming the man of her dreams. ANY love busters set your cause back.

And Plan B is not for the purpose of leveraging her into returning to the marriage either. It is so that you can stop losing love for her by her constant love busters of continued contact with POSOM and other IB. It will let you start to gain clarity for your life and come to be a whole person in and of yourself so that IF she ever ends the affair and seeks reconciliation you will have enough left in the tank to pursue recovery with her.

But in your case it might also shake things up enough that she will be forced to make a choice since right now she thinks that she can continue with you and still have OM in her life. A well thought out Plan B letter might just get her to realize that life will not continue along the path she has set upon and if she doesn't drop OM then she will no longer have you in her life, even as a friend.

That is why you need to make that lasting impression now, while you have the chance to do it, that you will in fact be the man she can't live without so that when faced with the prospect of losing you she will decide that OM is not her future or at least not the one she wants for herself.

ANY love busters diminish you in her eyes. Your value decreases but not just by a normal amount for the love buster but well beyond that because she will append your love buster with a judgment that she was right all along and you are not capable of sustaining being Mr Wonderful. Mr Status Quo will not be enough to keep her. Mr Way Things Were is not who she wants.

Plan A needs to be short, intense and executed with precision. Then before the affair takes its toll on your emotions you need to have everything in place to jump to Plan B so that you don't drag out the agony of dealing with the pain of the affair beyond what you can tolerate. If you lose your cool and blow the gains made in Plan A before getting into Plan B then you will have wasted the efforts of Plan A entirely since her memories of you will be the negative part instead of how great a person you had become and how indispensable you have become to her life.

Plan A so long that you melt down before Plan B and Plan A is pretty much undone...

SDs, AOs, DJs are all instinctive parts of your Taker's tool box. When they begin to show up it is because your Taker is trying to get you what you need to be happy. It is a sign that your own Love Bank is pretty much overdrawn. When you can no longer control your Taker and your Taker is beginning to control you, you need to be away from her so that you don't hurt her as a parting shot and reduce any possibility of reconciliation to zero.

Mark

Thank you Mark.

Last night, we went to a rock concert. It was really cool.

WW and I got a babysitter around 6:30. I didn't tell her where we were going. We went to this really cool venue in our city for a great show.

There were three bands playing and a couple thousand people watching. WW had a few drinks. We danced. We shared a few touches�arm around waist, her hand on my shoulder a few times, etc. Got home a little after midnight. It was a lot of fun.

Today WW and I did some yard work. The kids played in the yard. Then we all went to my sons first little league game. And then we had a nice dinner.

All in all, it was a nice weekend and I told WW that. She said she had a nice weekend too. I think I did a pretty good job with Plan A.

Tomorrow I go back to work. Once I'm out of her sight, that's usually when the trouble starts. Well, I hope not, but...

We stopped with our MC about two weeks ago because of the cost and because I feel like WW has to recommit to the marriage before we can work on the problems in our marriage that led to the affair.

I am now seeing a counselor on my own, just because I like having someone to talk to. He is an LMFT and very pro-marriage.

Any thoughts on that?

WW's cousin/best friend/enabler just sent WW footage of the film project they shot starring OM last summer.

WW doesn't know, but I watched the footage. WW having a great time with her cousin and all the others, and the OM. In one scene she is running around on a beach in a tiny bikini.

She looks like she is having a blast cheating on me. It's disgusting.

Should I confront her and tell her I saw the footage? I don't want to compromise my spying techniques.