I do agree that we sometimes do not realize how important an EN is until it isn't being met (found this out in my own M with FS. It wasn't one of my top needs until I was faced with my home going into foreclosure and not having anywhere to live). However, if her top EN's are Affection, SF, Conversation and Recreational Companionship and he isn't making any effort at all to meet any of them in any way, then he can make all the money in the world and clean the house until it shines and WPG's LB is still going to be in overdrawn mode.

When I get in that mode -- I've been there lately -- I get more down than up.

It's important to take a break from learning, engaging in "analysis paralysis", and just doing what you think is the right thing for a bit, then evaluating. I've taken weeks off from the board at a time, typically right when the discussion is getting heated about me being a coward or running away from the discussion.

Not running away. Just taking a break to really focus on meeting my wife's needs, living the program instead of talking about it, and trying to avoid thinking about the affair.


Anything involving substance abuse or another woman filling his emotional needs would qualify as "outrageous" for sure.

Gently teach him that selfish demands, disrespectful judgments, and angry outbursts will not be tolerated. Remove yourself from the situation. IB and Dishonesty are harder nuts to crack as Dr. Harley covers in "Love Busters" (you've read that one, right?).

Remember what we talked about earlier? Set a very generous date -- in your mind, not as an ultimatum to your BH, and something on the order of months or years, not weeks -- by which you hope your spouse will be re-engaged in the marriage. Work your tail off to meet his needs and gently encourage -- don't educate! -- him to meet yours. If that date arrives without your spouse being engaged in your marriage again, you have a decision point: separate or stay? Dr. Harley gives numerous examples of men who neglect their wives, and potential resolution strategies. You can find some of them in "Effective Marriage Counseling". One of the most radical is also the most effective: separate and set up weekly -- or more often -- dates with one another to practice meeting each other's needs in those narrow time windows.

I think that WPG is afraid to let her H know her needs, emotions and feelings though. Those are the things she feels she cannot be O&H about with her H at this point. Not some nit-picky thing like telling him his butt is too big.

My pants don't make my butt look big. It's the enormous derri�re inside the pants that makes my butt look big!

My point wasn't it being a nit-picky thing; my point is that often O&H is used as a way to hurt our spouse and then claim "but I was just being O&H!".

Dr. H is clear that if you know something is going to hurt your spouse you aren't to say it. O&H as an EN isn't a "get out of jail free" card, now you get to say whatever you want, even when you know it's going to hurt your spouse.

If she KNOWS it bothers him she shouldn't say it and then claim she was just being O&H. Not now anyways, maybe in the future if they can handle it. Common sense says her H is in no place to be hearing hurtful things right now.

The problem is, it seems that everything WPG says to her H is hurtful. She is even afraid to say things like, "I really like it when you hold me" or "I enjoy it when we spend time together." Pretty much everything she says to her BS seems hurtful according to both of them. Is she not supposed to say anything to him at all?

I suspect even this is triggering him somehow and so yes, she needs to avoid saying this for now.

There is PLENTY she could be doing without saying things that hurt him, for whatever reason. It isn't up to us to judge that it seems silly that these things bother him. As a BS, for the longest time it triggered the gourd out of me to shave my legs. I didn't understand why for the longest time but it did. We just needed to accept that and do what we could to avoid it ruining our night. WPG needs to do the same for now, IMO.

I think part of the problem is that she has asked her H numerous times about what bothers him in an attempt to not do it anymore, but he won't even tell her what she is doing wrong and what she is doing right. How can she avoid all triggers if he doesn't communicate with her at all?

I think this is an important point that many FWS don't understand...

If they are not willing to let the BS back into THEIR lives by sharing what THEIR EN's are they really don't have any reason to expect the BS to share theirs.

It has to do with making yourself vulnerable to someone when you feel they have the ability to hurt you...

which you MUST do to be in love.

Mrs.Flint and I called it laying down our swords...

Its a little difficult to be emotionally intimate when you see someone that refuses to lie down their sword.

Which is what sharing your most intimate feelings are...

it was one of the most difficult things we faced...

and that made the most progress in our recovery.

There comes a time when you have to put all of your chips on the table and give it a spin...

or get out of the game.

I think for most people, both BS and WS, after the dust has settled of Plan A there needs to be a signed agreement that the MB Plans are going to be worked by both parties or it's time to hang it up.

If you can't even sit down and POJA an agreement to follow a plan of recovery meeting both of your EN's after months of Plan A you are wasting your life chasing a fantasy that your spouse is marriage material...

This stuff where people go for YEARS hoping to change their partners without any CONSEQUENCES for their actions is
nuts and if there are children in the home witnessing the constant fighting borders on child abuse...

Jim

Just please remember that a false recovery ENTIRELY changes the thing that the BS is trying to recover from.

On the first D Day the WS can argue, as mine did, that the spouses were so estranged that the WS thought the BS wouldn't care what they did, or they can argue that they didn't mean to have an affair, or they didn't mean to hurt the BS - they were not thinking, or any other "I was stupid, but not evil" statements. But after D Day, having seen the BS fall apart, the second the WS decides to continue in the affair they are saying "I don't care about you. You can die from your broken heart; I don't care about your hurt enough to stop doing what feels good to me." That is very hard to recover from.

10 months out with a FR is very little time to have recovered. I was still at emotional breakdown point after 10 months, having learned that all the rebuilding that I thought we were doing hadn't been real. I wasn't bitter; I was mentally ill.

A FR sends a very strong, clear message that the WS doesn't give a fig for the BS, his/her pain, the marriage and the couple's future together, or the kids and their future. Once the affair is known, if the WS would rather risk all they have now and could have in the future, then they do not love the BS or the kids much.

That's what a FR says.

It's very likely that her BS thinks that these statements are manipulative lies. The BS knows that she wanted to be only with OM, and hated being with her H, only months ago. As I said above, when the WS puts the BS through the knowing cruelty of a FR, the dislike of the BS is only confirmed and underscored. Statements such as "I really like it when we..." do not sound believable, and might actually annoy.

I once wrote this to a new FWW about the BW in her situation who discovered the FWW's affair with her H by text message, as I did:

"She found out in a text message that her H did not love her, was suffering seeing her face first thing every morning, was merely enduring her kisses as he left the house and returned from work, was hating lying next to her in bed and wishing you were there instead, was hating spending weekends with her when he could not escape to work and had longed for their last holiday to be over because he could not stand pretending to be happy for extended periods in her company. For some time now he had wanted to get away from her, her boring parents, the tedious get togethers with friends in which happiness was being faked, the hypocritical wedding anniversary dinner at a restaurant that he had had to pretend to enjoy, his having had to sign cards to her with "love you always, X" when he hadn't meant it... he had hated everything about his unhappy lie of a marriage to her. He had wanted to be far away from everything to do with her, except for their children. He loved his children enough to try and give them stable childhoods, but every day was torture, and she had not known this until that moment. However difficult things had grown to be between them, she had never realised that he must be feeling THAT BAD, and she saw it in that moment she picked up his phone. You cannot imagine how that felt, but I can, because that is what happened to me (D Day 2).

What your OMW went on to do was to listen to him ask her not to give up on the marriage, to his telling her that he loved her and always had done, that he had not stayed only for the children and would not be doing so now, if she gave the marriage another chance. She had not believed him and does not still, but she is prepared to put her children's needs above her own, for now, and so she is staying in the marriage. She is living with monumental unhappiness because she knows her children would be badly affected by divorce, and she cannot bear to put her happiness above theirs. I don't know what he told her about his feelings for you, about the depth of your involvement and about what he had actually told you about loving you and leaving her. Be assured, however, that if she is prepared to try again in this marriage, she is choking on her misery over how intimate he became with you. "

Wullfpack's BH went through that misery once, only to find out later that it all meant nothing to his WW.

He doesn't believe her when she says "I like it when we..."

If she wants to work on this marriage, she will have to understand the problem she has created by the affair and FR, and chip away steadily at it. What she (you; sorry wullfpack!) cannot do after 10 months is say that he should be more recovered than he is.

He is in a very bad mental state, and she needs to help him, if she is sincere about the marriage.

Great posts SC. You have said what I have been trying to say much better than I.

I was too, well said.

BTW, you all do know that being betrayed by your spouse has been compared by Dr. Harley to being raped, correct?

Would you all question a rape victim at only 10 months out and berate them for not "getting over it" and engaging in (fill in the blank activities)?

Most likely there would be a lot more compassion for that rape victim at the 10-month mark than there is on this thread for BHs who are stuck in the pain of being emotionally raped by their wives. And no one would question why the rape victim wants nothing to do with the rapist, yet no one here can understand why a BS is leery of the FWS???

I'm flabbergasted that so many of you aren't getting this. This is Betrayal 101 stuff, many of you have been here long enough to know this but suddenly you've (Warning: DJ alert) gone stupid on this thread.

My main concern is how this has played out. A lot of us have experience with "trickle truth" -- an unfortunate amount -- and it is very painful. Which is what this was for four months.

WPG, according to her story, maintained no-contact with the OM from D-Day until the day after the blow-up with her husband in January when he discovered the full extent of the affair. OM broke through no-contact in an attempt to get BH to stop calling him about the affair shortly after this revelation. That was, I am sure, painful contact for BH to learn about.

However, calling August through January a "false recovery" is not correct. If WPG is to be believed, she maintained no-contact as promised. OM violated it in response to BH's confrontation in January 2010, and OM emailed BH again later that spring.

I haven't heard the back-story behind whether BH asked WPG to write the email "blasting" OM for writing in the spring or not. Not certain on that bit.


The truth is, my wife slipped up in recovery, too. In December 2009 and January 2010, I discovered her hiding memorabilia about OM. She had not told me the truth about it, and it was then I became aware that she and OM had fondled and kissed each other, though it hadn't progressed further than that out of fear of getting caught because I kept popping in every few minutes the few days we'd spent camping in OM's RV. It didn't make August through January for us a "false recovery"... it was just the bumps and bruises of recovery, learning what "radical honesty" really means, and my FWW learning that she could trust me not to try to emotionally destroy her anymore every time I learned something new about her affair.

WPG lied about the affair going physical. This resulted in a second D-Day (though her BH calls it a "third" D-Day because he counts the round of revelations for the first D-week as two D-Days). It doesn't mean, however, that she was returning to the arms of OM while pretending to try to recover with her husband. She was maintaining no-contact, but lying about the extent of the affair for several months while in withdrawal.

Which is a pretty common, extremely typical experience early in recovery. Calling it a "false recovery" -- if WPG's story is believed -- is a false premise.

WPG did not have a "FR" exactly. She was not in contact with OM after she said she ended it, she just had no yet told her H that it was a PA instead of an EA.

I know the betrayal of being lied to for four months still adds greatly to her BH's pain, but she did not continue to engage in an active A after DDay.

I'm sorry about calling it a FR. I didn't have time to read all the details. I was going from this on the first page:

In your view, does that invalidate my comments about 10 months being a short time in recovery?

It was I who wrongly called it a FR, DNM, not MarriedForever.

Nope. I think any sort of contact resets the recovery clock, even if it was extremely hostile contact.

While I think about their recovery starting on August 25, 2009 -- which would put them about 15 months into recovery -- @wpg's most recent contact with OM was "in the spring" when OM wrote @broken2009 and @wpg responded "blasting" OM. Which means we're only, what, 7 months out from the most recent contact with OM? My wife's last contact was hiding OM's photos from me in January, and I was pretty bitter about that until around June of this year. She's gotta give @broken2009 more time meeting needs -- spending her 15+ hours meeting his non-intimate needs if he won't let her meet the intimate ones -- and refraining from Love Busters.

@broken2009's absolute refusal to do, well, *anything* despite page after page of encouragement is incredibly frustrating for everyone involved. Right now, @broken2009 isn't willing to do anything toward recovering, divorcing, or even talking with the Harleys, which they can clearly afford as @wpg has done so twice now. I think he's afraid, really: afraid that if he talks to Jennifer Chalmers, she'll motivate him to get involved in the marriage again, and he'll be hurt by some new revelation. That would suck, and I can understand where he's coming from, but I have trouble empathizing with someone choosing to live in long-term absolute indecision rather than pooping or getting off the pot.

I went through both. My H lied to me about the number of betrayals prior to DDay for a year after it happened. Then I found out that he had betrayed me after DDay as well. Finding out he did it again hurt worse than knowing he lied to me about the ones before DDay, for all the reasons you mentioned. He knew how much it hurt me, how devastated I was, yet he didnt care enough about me to stop doing it.

That being said, WPG's BH is not me, and he isnt in my situation. For him this is the most painful experience of his life, and that is all that he knows. She continued to betray him by lying to him after DDay, so he sees all of the effort and energy he put into that four months of recovery as being wasted. He does not view her as trustable, and I dont blame him for that at all.

So no I dont think that 10 months in this situation is very long into recovery. I thought it make a difference in the opinions of others though that the A wasnt ongoing during that time, thats all.