My thinking is that I am having a hard enough time saying things that my wife feels good about, and putting a bunch of strangers in the room with me just makes it even harder.

It's like trying to make love to my wife in public! Does that analogy get across what I'm feeling? It's not about any stigma; it's not about worrying about what they think. It's not about protecting my job, and it's certainly not about valuing my job or my reputation more than my wife or being embarrassed by her.

Do you not feel that he's disrespecting his wife in front of you when he does that?

No not at all.... The only time I think it would be disrespectful to his wife is if he was truly being disrespectful to her. As a matter of fact, the one time I heard him being disrespectul to his wife during one of those chats, I called him on it and gave him some MB type of tips..... I'm kind of a loud "out there" kind of person, if you haven't noticed.....lol....

This is how you feel, but could you see how it is reasonable for her to feel the way she does? It isn't wrong for her to feel that way. It just is. Especially now you need to go above and beyond to demonstrate your care for her. She has point blank said these things don't bother her and make her feel you're embarrassed of her.

I don't know how, but is there some way to POJA this situation? It is valid that you feel this way but so are her feelings. Just telling her you're not embarrassed of her isn't going to help because her interpretation of your actions negates your words.

If I were making love to my wife in public I'd feel awesome, amazing, and all kinds of good feelings....lol.... And hey, some women would find that totally hot. But seriously, I think I get what you're saying but I really can't relate to that feeling.

Yeah, KEEP IT UP!

Of course! I think her feelings are perfectly reasonable! I just haven't had any insight into them until today, and am trying to process and figure out what to do.

I am PERFECTLY willing to talk to her on the phone if that will deposit love units. And I've now made THREE calls to the Marriage Builders office from my desk. (Placed one, got two calls back.) Including a long list of questions to register for the MB weekend.

I'm perfectly willing to step out of my comfort zone. My problem is this: I suck at talking to her on the phone around my coworkers because I am so uncomfortable. It bothers my wife for me to call like that because I sound like I have almost nothing to say. She told me specifically that if that's going to be the case, then she'd rather just not be called.

I guess I need to become comfortable having intimate conversations on the telephone. Maybe I should practice by making love to my wife in public.

How did it come about that you decided to make these multiple phone calls a day to your wife? Are you sure this is something that she wants, or something that you've decided she should like to bring you closer together.

A quick story from my marriage...

When we were dating my dh used to call about once a day to say hi, or to pass information. He was calling from a work mobile and always kept the calls short. Like you he was calling from his car.

Unfortunately he doesn't really like to talk on the phone and anytime I tried to tell some story or give details about what was going on at the moment, he'd cut me off and end the call.

Our calls got shorter and shorter until I could script them out.

Him: <ring>Hi, how's it going?
Me: OK.
Him: Whatcha working on?
Me: Oh, just normal stuff.
Him: All right, love ya, gotta go.

When I started looking at the phone time on the mobile all our calls were under 2 mins some even less than 1 min! I finally asked him to stop calling if that's all that it was going to be because it was an interruption to my day for not much reward.

Could be that she feels the same.

Hmnnn...

Sounds like you feel exposed when you are talking with your wife.

Like you and she are on display... Like intimate secrets (the most important of your life) are being paraded in front of others.

there is nothing wrong with that. My H feels much the same way.

At some point, you should be able to Poja this. I think that would be important.

The last I heard yesterday, the Marriage Builders office was trying to find out what we paid for the home study course in 2005, to credit us that much of a discount toward Marriage Builders weekend. No charge seems to have come through, yet.

Meanwhile, we made hotel reservations and bought plane tickets last night, made a packing list, and planned a trip to Mall of America.

Woohoo! Man I'm so excited for y'all!!!! I got flutterbys!

And as an aside. DH has offered that if you ever need more guy advice (though you're getting some of the best there is here) he's more than willing to share emails with you. He's shy about posting. He accesses the email addy in my profile and if you drop him a line I'm sure he'd be willing to give you his personal email acct. He just wanted to have me offer =-).

SCHAWEEEEEETNESS, Markos..... I've been to the Mall of America a couple of times and during one of my trips there I pee'd next to the lead singer of Sawyer Brown..... Ohhhh the memories.....

It's not often undivided attention time with my wife involves planning the exact contents of a bag of makeup while reading about government regulations.

But I must say I did enjoy it.

Okay, how do I respond to:

What is the context?

Off the cuff I'd say, don't email her. Pick up a treat/ gift for her on your way home with a note: "Thought of you today. Love, Markos" give it to her without fanfare. Be pleasant, upbeat, and loving when you get home. Ask if there is anything you can do for her- if there is do it, cheerfully. Let her know you're there if she wants to talk/ vent.

If possible, see if you can take the kids/ deal with the house and give her a little time to herself to unwind.

Wouldn't want to harm you with psychobabble, markos...but what gets to you most about Prisca doing this is no time stated...

for how long? Ever? A month? All day? Two hours? One? Or 20 minutes?

Prisca knows better than to do this...she knows she's love-busting you big time and wants you to hurt...because she's hurting for some reason.

She knows you could email her all day and she could choose not to respond, not to read them. Hence, she controls what she hears from you and how...

She knows. Respect her choice. And address how long does she want you to hurt? How long (in hours) before she'll tell you what she feels and why she feels it?

Tell her how much you hurt, and where...and why. What the shut out and shut off feels like...deep rejection and shame?

Because inside, we think we will feel that hurt from rejection and/or shame for as long as our spouse rejects/shames us. So time matters.

Sad part is that though we do feel the pain, not knowing when the shut out ends adds to our anger, ups our desire to hurt back to get her to stop hurting you...really opens us up to LB'ing where we can hurt the other enough to get them to stop rejecting/shaming.

Did she say how long, btw? Only just occurred to me that you might have edited that part out...that it was there. I don't know. I just assumed.

And to double-check...how would you have felt if her email said:

"Please stop sending me emails for two hours. I'm in a bad place right now and I want to sort myself out. I'll email you at noon." Or better yet "I'll call you on your lunch break to explain. I love you."

You can state it as the commitment you make every day, and feel it afterward. Prisca knows this and is choosing not to do it right now.

LA

The context is she is worrying about Subject X, which I think she'd rather I not disclose to this forum. Yesterday she introduced the subject to me for the first time in a long time and asked the question "What if we can't resolve this by POJA." I said it would be a good idea to bring it up to Steve.

Today she wanted to talk about it again and I commented that I thought we should get Steve to help us learn the MB tools and how to apply this here, and also to work at applying POJA to some smaller issues first before we try to handle this.

She told me she doesn't want to talk about Subject X with Steve. By then her answers were getting short and not offering much information, and then she started saying things like "whatever you want."

Here's the end of that conversation:









We haven't even gotten to POJA and negotiation yet. Obstacles I'm seeing are that when I express my point of view on subjects we disagree on, my wife shuts down; when we make agreements on these subjects, my wife tends to be emotionally dishonest, so I can never really know if she was enthusiastic; I've never seen my wife participate in a brainstorming session and I don't know whether she really knows how to do that yet or not.

Yes, that is exactly what hurts me the most. No, she did not say how long. Nor did she give any scope: do I just stay at work today till she tells me to come home, or what? When I come home, do I talk to her? Do I attempt to continue with our Marriage Builders activities like UA time, or stop?


Those options would have been perfect, and I would have felt great!

I could email her and ask her how long. But I'm not sure if I should email her at all at this point. Also, asking how long sounds like I am focusing on my feelings in disregard of hers, especially since I'd have to disregard her request if I did that.

Could this be an occasion for some Drive By Honesty? something like

"I understand you needed a break from our earlier conversation, but I feel very hurt and rejected when you tell me not to contact you without a time frame in which I can reasonably expect to communicate with you again."

Then walk away - you've let her know how her action makes you feel. Then just let it go and leave it in her court to address the issue further.

I agree with LA, she knows better.

I'll admit I'm a MB newb and my advice could be way out of line here- so take it with a grain of salt and I'm willing to be corrected, here.

However, you know enough of the basics of POJA at the very least you could have POJAd WHEN to talk about it as opposed to shutting her down and saying - not until we talk to Steve. She's clear she doesn't want to talk about it with Steve (understandable if it's very personal). She clearly wants to talk to you about it and 2-3 months from now may not be good enough for her. You're worried about hurting her and not being able to express yourself. POJA a solution to THAT. Maybe you could come up with a framework in which you could discuss the issue that you both can be happy with.

I see you making an executive decision to not talk about it because you weren't comfortable with it, because y'all aren't ready. I see how that can be LB - telling her she doesn't have the knowledge to POJA this; not what you said but could reasonably have been interpreted from what you're saying, especially based on her previous reactions to you.

She has a valid point

you did refuse to do it with her. You have a valid reason, Dr. Harley even recommends starting with little things. A POJA discussion on discussing the issue could be a little thing.

These conversations really shouldn't be had over email - it's too impersonal. Do you two ever have light- hearted, fun, playful, loving conversations through email?

I'm quite willing to do that, but I don't know how to make it any clearer that that is what I am trying to do than saying things like "How about ..." and "I think ..." How do I make her feel more welcome to respond with what she thinks and engage with me in the process of brainstorming/negotiating, instead of shutting down? Because all I'm hearing is that if I offer any suggestions she doesn't like, she will shut the process down, so if there's going to be any POJA apparently I won't get any input into it. Which does not inspire confidence in me: if I don't get input into small things like this, I'm sure not going to feel ready to make commitments on bigger subjects.


I would love for her to work with me to come up with such a framework.


How do I express it differently? I'm simply asking her to respect my side of the POJA ... is she willing to not talk about it if I'm not ready to talk about it?

From where I sit, it looks like a demand was made to talk about it and since I didn't agree to the demand, she went to independent behavior.