Dr Harley says that Plan A works to end an affair that does not end on D Day only 15% of the time.

Some affairs will will end on D Day, for various reasons.

The affair might be a "fling" that the WS hoped to get away with, never having intended to end their marriage.

The affair might be a "fling' that the OP hoped to get away with, never having intended to end THEIR marriage.

Exposure might well act to take the gloss off the affair and show it for the dirty act it is. It might wake up the WS to how unacceptable the affair is in other people's eyes. For these and other reasons, the affair might end on D Day.

But when an affair does not end on D Day, Dr Harley recommends Plan A for the BS who wants to save the marriage.

Plan A has been shown to end an active affair and make the WS choose the marriage in only 15% of cases (where the affair did not end on D Day). So, why does Dr Harley recommend this seemingly ineffective measure?

He recognises that the majority of affairs will end within six months from exposure, and almost all will end within two years of exposure, regardless of anything the BS does or doesn't do. That means that a BS could just wait for an affair to end it will end without their input.

However, if a couple goes as far as separating, there is a chance that they will not get back together even after the affair ends. Either of them might move on by the time it ends.

If the BS wants to increase the possibility that the WS will return when the affair ends, then a marriage that was made to look attractive offers the best chance of return.

Unless plan A leaves the wayward spouse with the impression that returning home is an attractive choice, separation can become permanent. So before implementing plan B, you want to be sure that the last thing your spouse remembers about you is the care and thoughtfulness you offered in plan A. That way, the separation can help create, "absence makes the heart grow fonder."

I don't see that Dr Harley specifically advises a BS to plan A himself into financial ruin. I do think think, though, that his Plan A advice would benefit from warning the BS against allowing the WS to take advantage financially. My reading shows me financial ruin can happen to BWs as much as to BHs. A WH can spend family money on the affair by leasing apartments, paying for hotels and goodness knows that else, to the point where a BW and her children can lose their home.

I see sense in Dr Harley's advice to carry out Plan A. For the 85% who do not manage to end an ongoing affair during Plan A, the plan will make them an attractive choice SHOULD THE BS WANT THEM BACK when the affair ends.

If your response, on D Day, or when you realise that the affair is continuing, is to reject the WS, then you don't need Dr Harley's advice to recover your marriage. If you feel that you want to give recovery a chance, then Plan A followed by Plan B is the best way to encourage your spouse back to you at some point in the future when you are separated.

There is no need to lose your house, money and children because of Plan A. Plan A does not suggest that you gamble with those things.

What are Plan A and Plan B?

I'll try to do some research and maybe even write Dr. Harley about the famous 15% figure but my take on it is:

-It's 15% of Plan A's are successful in breaking up the affair AND resulting in a reconciliation.

-It does not indicate that 85% of BH's (or BW's) fail (divorce) as MANY of them [affairs] ended on or even long before D-day and many others end in Plan B (again...the 15% figure is, I'm guessing, the best ESTIMATE Dr. Harley gives as to how often a Plan A will work to bust up the affair that continues after D-day).

-Under the MB plan - divorce isn't failure


If you are resentful, which I think is what I'm reading, your resentment would be more properly placed upon the judge that decided your case and/or the attorney that represented you. Perhaps your states laws as well. But the MB plan, as I see it advised on the board includes fighting for the marriage AND backside legal preparations to insure the best custody and financial outcomes.

With BH's I also attempt to clearly indicate that there is marriage saving advice and legal advice and they SOMETIMES conflict. By fighting for your marriage you may very well be risking what could be a better divorce (financial and custodial) settlement.

[wayward spouses will sometimes give up a lot to settle quickly and quietly in order to be with their soulmate with as few people knowing as possible...however, their "entitlement" is very often systemic and they try to take it all regardless]

To me...the risk/reward is worth it.
To you...it's not

No biggie.

Regardless...it is my contention that the MB program for busting up affairs and saving marriages OR saving the sanity and integrity of destroyed persons as they process things on their way to divorce is successful 98% of the time.

ON YOUR OWN THREAD MAYBE: Are you in that 2%? Do you regret even trying or do you wish you had tried AND protected your backside better? Absent MB would you have won more custody? Did MB help you at all?

Mr. W

Edit - sorry pep, I was drafting this at work over the course of several hours

I feel that EE has never posted on the basis stated above - that most affairs end without Plan A being necessary. Almost all affairs end within two years of exposure, and many of them end within six months of exposure.

To my reading, EE has always posted on the basis that only 15% of marriages are restored by the implementation of Plan A. The remaining 85% of the time, the marriage is not restored.

That is not what Dr Harley writes.

I think that's the majority who are here contemplating plan A. After all, if they are contemplating recovery, then it's another questino.
I understand. So how many end with exposure and the legitimate demand to end the affair?
Isn't that how most WW conduct their affairs? They've either moved out, or tried to move out their BH? What is the typical mode of the WW? Is she at home, or has she moved out, or moved out the BH?

So again, what does the BH do when the WW has essentially already emotionally separated herself from her husband, not to mention is in her affair.

I've asked the legitimate question, how does the BH effectively meet the EN's of the WW when she is unwilling to even be in the same home with him?

This gets back to what is the typical WW? Is she open to his meeting her needs, or are his attempts to even meet his needs treated as love busters?

If that's the case, then is it any wonder that the plans are only effective 15% of the time for a BH?

No you lose them because the court doesn't ask about marital fidelity and chooses to give custody and assets to the WW, regardless what plan the BH used.

The whole thing stinks and so far, I've not seen anyone present ideas that would provide a greater than 15% success rate for the BH.

Maybe I have the numbers all wrong. I've asked Dr H to provide specifics regarding the numbers. What is the percentage of marriages saved when there is a BH following the plans? What is the percentage when it's a BW?

If different, why are BW's or BH's more successful? Is it due to the actions of the betrayed spouse or the nature of the respective WS's?

But so far, I've not seen Dr H sit down and discuss these questions.

Maybe I'm all wet. It wouldn't be the first time I've misunderstood something. But given what I've experienced and what I believe I understand, I really don't see the value of trying to win back a WW.

Perhaps if I had prevailed with MB, I'd see otherwise. I'm not saying MB is a bad way to run your marriage, I think it's the way to go.

But winning back a wayward spouse, I'm not convinced, and I was a paying customer.

EE, I can't answer everything you have raised in the post above. I get all muddled up if I try to do that.

Can I ask about finances just for now:

Do you think that having done Plan A made your financial and custody settlements worse than if you'd gone straight for divorce?

Do you think that having done Plan A made no difference your financial and custody settlements?

I hardly think, given what you write, that having done Plan A made them better, but please let me know if they did.

So then don't do it. That's fine for you.

But this plan is here for people who do want to try. This is what Dr. Harley recommends if the BS wants to save their marriage.

Why do you have such a hard time with someone else following the plan just because it didn't work for you and you personally wouldn't try it again?

I have written Dr H, several times. Exactly ZERO responses, what now. Perhaps I have an entirely resistible personality, LOL.

So what percentage of those who confront on D-day have success? Given what writer1 says, I doubt she would think it's even as high as 15%.

Yet yours is a legitimate question. Is the rate 15% of plan A's or 15% of those who try the entire program, which is from discovery until recovery or divorce.

I think that's a convenient definition. It's like saying if you don't end up dead, then the earthquake wasn't fatal.

I do understand the idea behind that, that you don't want to be married to someone who would hurt you time and time again.

However, I wouldn't call it a MB success to be divorced and a visitor to your child either.
The mistake I made was allowing my WW to take my child out of the marital home. That was before I knew of the affair. I'm wiser now, I wouldn't let a wife do that, not to mention I went ahead and made sure I wouldn't father any more children unless there was some sort of divine intervention.

As I've said all along, the problem is we tolerate Wayward Spouses. Our courts are so politically correct that we can't ask if the one who wants the divorce is having an affair with someone else. Nor can we base property and custody decisions on that information.

It's not my lawyers fault or the judges fault. They have to deal with the laws as they are. So the working dad will lose to the unfaithful stay at home mom every day.

Why? Precedence. She took care of the child before she had her affair, so she should be the primary caretaker after she has her affair.

BS!
This is why, given the low probability of actually saving the marriage, that I tend to err on the side of making the strongest legal position possible. Don't leave the home, don't allow the WW unsupervised visits with your children, seek to file for cause rather than no-fault if your venue supports that.
Their entitlement can be systemic in multiple senses. Waywards are selfish, so they will "feel" entitled to stuff and the kids.

But also, in cases like mine where she was largely a stay at home mom and I worked so she could be a stay at home mom, she has the advantage of precedence. Add in that our state supreme courts has ruled that infidelity is NOT to be considered in custody decisions, the wayward will be the primary custodian 99 and 44/100ths percent of the time.
Well of course, you won your wife back, me, executing the very same plan didn't. You were not turned into a visitor to your child by the decisions of others. Would you expect any different?

I believe it helped me be a better man. I don't think I could have protected my backside or my family any better. The cards I was dealt were a losing hand. There was no way to play it to a winning hand given what I knew.

The only thing I regret is allowing my WW who I did not yet know was wayward to take my child out of the marital home.

Perhaps I could have continued with criminal charges when she assaulted me, but I don't think it really would have made any difference and simply prolonged the agony.

But given that things were so stacked against me, I do believe it was largely wasted time to try to win her back. I think I should have just filed for divorce when she was talking of moving out and filed to have my child ordered to remain in the marital home.

But how can one know their spouse is having an affair when they've not experienced that before? How many BH's like me come here not even believing their wife is wayward and only learning months after the fact that she is in fact, wayward?

Now I know the signs and I simply won't tolerate that sort of abuse a second time.

It certainly cost me almost as much for an hour of Steve Harley's time as it did for an hour with my lawyer, so I'm not sure that it was an effective use of my resources to spend time being coached by Steve H, especially given the outcome.

He certainly did not advise me to ensure that my wife (didn't know she was wayward) didn't take our child with her. Not that I expected to get legal advice, but he had to suspect that she was having an affair, after all, everyone else on the boards said so, yet no such advice from him. So I'm thinking at the very least a warning that she may be in an affair, that it looks like it's an affair, so protect your family, etc...

So from that perspective, at the very least the coaching did not help me retain a position where I would be the primary custodian of my child.
See above. It certainly did not help. Perhaps if I got a warning from a professional, I would have taken different legal steps. I took no steps. Perhaps even the advice to seek counsel to protect your parental rights would have been a good idea.

I don't recall such advice being presented.


Nope, it just added to the marital debt that was split 1/3rd for her and 2/3rds for me.

What I think it did was to prevent me from filing for divorce. I may have had an advantage if I were the one who chose the action and she had to respond based on my timing. She would have had to respond to my requests for custody, child support, etc, instead of it being the other way around.

I think there is a tendency to find a reason to say yes rather than deny the request. So if I initiated the action, I had first say over what was requested and the timeline.

Plan A delayed that and she filed, etc.

Just want to testify on this. I had no freaking idea what Plan A was, no idea about MB when Pearl Harbor was bombed... but what I implemented in the smoke and ashes of ILYBINILWY was, to the letter, Plan A.

Was she happy? He77 no. What she was engaged in was a "kick-her-to-the-curb" situation - and I unknowingly dropped her off each day to work with her AP for 2 or 3 weeks.

Plan A temporarily breaks the fog of self-entitlement - you are doing the opposite of the mental justifications WW has developed for her actions.

She doesn't believe it, views it as temporary, and keeps trucking.

The longer this goes on, the thinner the justifications get, the angrier the WW.

That's not to say that they won't selfishly soak it up like a sponge the entire time.

You CAN'T guage by her actions for several reasons;

1) she is going to pull off mental gymnastics to continue to justify an active A, and may approach you with a "don't matter" attitude.

2) she may be cake-eating entirely. You will get waivering and waffling comments and responses from a WW if you slip in your Plan A. Having their needs met by two men is the goal. Those aren't "little glimpses of hope," gentleman. They are tugs on the pole to make sure the hook is set so they can continue keeping you on the line.

3) a perpetual Plan A is a marriage with 3 people. If it doesn't break the A, eventually it will simply build her self-entitlement.

As the BS, you will always be better supplied than the AP. You are the spouse, you have the time and the memories, YOU SHOULD HAVE THE GD HOUSE, you are the father of the children. All the AP has is a fantasy that cannot support itself without all that you provide.

Dr. Harley states that affair-based relationships statistically have a lifespan of 3 years before their rotten foundation fails them. That's a MAXIMUM, not a minimum.

This is the entire logic behind the Plan A ---> Plan B approach.

Offer the cake eater a sweeter-tasting cake, let them gorge for a bit... then yank that SOB off the table. The worm-bread they are left to eat won't seem so great then.

EE, are you saying that people on the board warned you that she was having an affair?

Did you ever directly ask Steve about this possibility? Did you ever tell him that people here were saying that it was an affair, or did you ever in any way directly raise the possibility of one with him?

I don't recall ever saying anything about this at all. I have no idea what the statistics are regarding this. I have heard of quite a few others having success with ending the A on D-day, mostly thanks to nuclear exposure.

No, my A didn't end on D-day, but then my H didn't do a nuclear exposure either. The A may well have ended much sooner if he had. I don't know. I imagine it certainly would have put a lot more pressure on me, especially if he had exposed to our teenaged children.

SugarCane,

Let me see if I understand. Are you saying most affairs end on D day, when the BH confronts the WW, she just up and ends her affair more than 50% of the time?

Or is it just the WS?

Are the results the same for a BH or a BW. Do WH's end their affairs more than BW's at this point?

I think the number who actually end their affairs on D-day is remarkably small, especially when we are talking about the WW. Given what we've read about WW's, I think that number is even smaller than the 15% who end their affairs as a result of the BH's plan A.

But again, let's put the question of numbers to Dr Harley. I've asked before. Perhaps if someone else were to ask we could get some real, concrete numbers.

How often do affairs end on D-Day? Are the figures different for WW ending their affairs vs WH's.

Ditto for the effectiveness of the MB program in restoring a marriage? Do the figures for WH and WW's match. Does a BH or BW have any advantage one over the other relative to the overall outcome.

How can a BH protect his parental rights when faced with a WW and still effectively seek to win back his WW?

Those are all good questions and I hope Dr H shows up soon and gives concrete answers to every last one of them and more.

MANY come here CLUELESS of whether their spouse is cheating and, even if they do know, have not a clue what to do about it?

We can't predict their outcome...all we can hope to do is coach them along the way. We may be coaching as gigantic underdogs but like it or not the game is being played. They can play it alone or they can seek and obtain advice from professionals and persons like you and me that have gone before them. Hopefully, we can tick up their liklihood of "success" [reconciliation or minimized regretful divorce] a bit but most assuredly we can support them down this unknown road of infidelity/divorce or infidelity/reconciliation.

I do my best. If I didn't think there was hope for success (divorce or reconciliation), I would not waste my time.

Everyone....can be successful here.

I, like everyone else here on MB are sincerely sympathetic to how much your ex-wife screwed you. I think that even if the "ODDS" given on MB were 5% you and I would have still tried. It's NOT the odds. Back in 2005 scouring the web looking for "hope" and someone to tell me it was going to be OK. I don't think it's our place as COACHES to kill a persons hope. We can attempt to direct them down the path towards acceptance that there is little (and eventually no) hope but it's still their call.

Mr. W

He asked me. I said I didn't think an affair was something she could do.

He proceeded from there. He had the same information, the e-mails, everything.

If nothing else, he could have said anyone is capable of having an affair (after all, isn't that in several of the books?) and we shouldn't rule out that possibility yet, so protect yourself, your family, etc.

Nope, his focus was on filling out questionnaires and seeing if I could get her to fill them out, get her to join the phone call, getting me to think of what I might think her complaints about LB's might be, what EN's I might be able to meet, if I even knew what they were.

When I did find out about the affair and I exposed it, it seems he was disappointed that I exposed the affair.

She certainly didn't end it. It was still on-going about two years later when she finally got the divorce she wanted.

I sure didn't want to be married to her anymore, so that part of the plan was a success.

But I'll never call being a visitor to my child a success by any stretch of the imagination. So please, don't peddle the outcome as any measure of success. It's just insensitive.

But understand, a BS being the visitor to his child is never going to be defined as success in my book.

Success may not take a restored marriage. But if the BH isn't the primary custodian of his child, then I call it failure.

In fact, I even gave Steve Harley the name of the man she was having an affair with. She said he was "a friend."

No sounding of the alarm by him was made.

Why? (I know you can't answer, but I'm asking.)

EE, I am not saying anything at all. I wouldn't dare. I have no expertise in this area.

I am summarising what Dr Harley says:

As it turns out, most affairs end within six months of their seeing the light of day (being revealed to their family and friends), and almost all affairs end without leading to marriage. Even those few that end in marriage have only a 25% rate of success. That's because affairs are based on dishonesty and thoughtlessness for the feelings of others. That same dishonesty and thoughtlessness eventually turns on the lovers themselves, and the affair is destroyed by those same flaws that made it possible in the first place. What drives affairs is passion, not commitment, and once the passion wanes, there is nothing to help the lovers restore their passion. Marriage, on the other hand, especially with children, has many factors that motivate couples to restore their passion for each other after passion has waned. So when passion is gone from an affair, a wayward spouse is usually motivated to return to the betrayed spouse by all of these other factors. For most, it's a logical choice.

Dr Harley says that "most" affairs end within 6 months, and that most of those that continue end without leading to marriage.

You say that YOU THINK "the number who actually end their affair on -day is remarkably small, especially when talking about the WW".

Well, if you are going to reject Dr Harley's findings, you are always going to prove yourself right. Most WWs leave, because you says so, regardless of what Dr Harley has found.

5000 posts EE..

Everybody Wang Chung Tonight

EE, this is a horrible story. I am so sorry about what happened.

But you were not really doing Plan A, were you, if you were acting on the basis that there was no affair? Properly used, you would have attempted to meet the ENs that she would allow you to meet, while negotiating the end of the affair. When the affair did not end within a reasonable time - say, six months - you would have gone to Plan B, having laid the groundwork for her return should the affair end. You would have told her why you could not continue being hurt by her affair, you would have given her a Plan B letter with the conditions for her return, and you have made it clear that the door back to the marriage was still open - for now.

Plan A would have been carried out with the strategic intention of either ending her affair, or making you an attractive husband to return to after Plan B. Plan A was never done.

How can you criticise Plan A for failing you, when you were not in fact using it to fight an affair?