Wow. Go look up SELFISH DEMANDS, Hill.

Then call Steve.

I have a question about the run: did you tell her before she went that you didn't want her to go? Or did you say nothing and then punish her when she got back?

Punished later.

Well,
as I seem to be the only one who thinks to understand the wife's side, here goes: (my own very subjective opinion)

The wife is annoyed and irritated and doesn't feel her needs are being met. The husband: also annoyed and irritated and also feels his needs are not being met.

Hill, you remind me a bit of my husband (I know, subjectively)
You are obviously a person who thinks about things, and likes to analyze things, and you seem to be earnestly trying to understand her side as well. (which is good, but...)

On the other side, you seem to be telling your wife your take on things, and are telling her what she does wrong and what you are doing to improve things, while she isn't.
I know you are also aware of your own mistakes.

Your wife , on the other hand, seems to have zoned out, for whatever reason, may it be post-baby-stress (come on people, she has a 4-month old and on top of that a special needs kid), needs not met for a long time, broken nights, long-term stress, feeling the husband doesn't carry his weight, may it be true or not.

The sex thing:
I am going to point this out for you: l love sex. love it, love it love it, can't get enough of it. Cannot endure going without it for whatever time period. Period. Would love to do it 5 times a day and more, wherever, whenever, OK.

That's not the point. and I love my husband to bits. Cannot imagine a more perfect husband, honestly. And I never thought I would say something like this, but he is a person who likes to lecture. He can go on and on about things, and is always right, well, most of the time anyway and he is someeone who can see his own mistakes.

Well if we look at each other like 'that' as we often do, and go upstairs (or not) and he starts to lecture me, well I never thought I could be a person not to want to have sex, but it kills my mood. Really does. Instantly. And me being a person who is always in the mood. I have yet to refuse to have it, because I do not believe in that, but my enthousiasm needs time to bild up again. For me it maybe takes half an hour or a few minutes, or he is sorry, but now imagine I would not be such a sex freak......

Just hate to be lectured. Like he is my daddy, or teacher or something. Cannot stand it.

And eveything Hilltopper has said to this point, points out one thing. He is the lecturing type (subjective I know, forgive me when I am mistaken)

You cannot make a woman fall in love with you, by telling her what to feel, what to do, what she should have been doing all along and that she should not be feeling what she is feeling.

On top of that, from your responses, Hiltopper I get the impression, that your mood is a bit unstable at the moment. One moment you are full of hope, and everything is going in the right direction, and the other moment you want to quit marriagebuilding because it doesn't help.

Hold on a sec. You have a 4-month-old-baby too. You also have the broken nights and the stress and a stressed wife, as your wife has a stressed husband.

This will not work wonders whithin a week. Think long-term, and secondly, both of you need a break. It may not be possible now, but you have to have som other subject to talk about besides the marriage not going so smoothly at the moment.

Be realistic and if you are lecturing your wife, please stop it and let Steve H. lecture the both of you.

God bless, happyheart

Hey, Hill, ML is very right ... if you want a good marriage, if you want your wife to spend time with you, then you need to plan to work VERY hard to make that time enjoyable. You sound pretty sarcastic and frustrated here. I can empathize with frustration, and I enjoy a good bit of sarcasm, too, but sarcasm and frustration are not attractive. I strongly encourage you to work on putting a lid on this stuff and focusing on what you can DO to make yourself enjoyable to spend time with. When you are enjoyable enough to spend time with, you probably won't have to demand that your wife spend time with you, because she will WANT to!

I do encourage you to keep tabs on your wife enough to rule out any sort of an affair. Odds are, she just wants to get away from you because she perceives you as a demanding, sarcastic person who is no fun to be around. But if she's got a close male acquaintance out there he will make it impossible for you to be attractive to her, ever, by comparison.

HOWEVER, do NOT ever go confront your wife again about this without evidence, okay? NOBODY here will advise you to do this. This is just a way to become a jerk. And if you want to save your marriage, you are going to have to learn how to not be a jerk. IF you find evidence of an affair, please come back here and bring us what you have and ask for some help to figure out what to do, okay? Please rely on the good and helpful folks here instead of reacting to your emotions and rushing in without a plan and torpedoing your chances.

And tgrace, I know you may still be reading ... please start your own thread, okay? We know this isn't all on you and that your husband has a lot of work to do. He can be helped with that ... and you can do your part as well, but the first thing is probably going to be to make sure that you are open and transparent with him without fighting with him. Fights are absolutely detrimental to a marriage. (Ask me how I know. ) BOTH of you have some work to do to learn to eliminate fights, so I encourage both of you to stop spending time pointing fingers and start learning what you individually can do different to change the tenor in your marriage.

Great honesty, Hill! Let me encourage you to go put your arms around your wife (if she'll let you) and apologize. Plan on having a talk about her runs LATER, for now just focus on apologizing for punishing her.

Yeah, Hill, that was really unfair for you to withhold your feelings about the run until after she'd done it. I can kinda understand--you don't want to keep her from enjoyment, and maybe you didn't even realize how much it would bother you until she was gone. Here's how you can deal with that:

Recognize that she didn't do it to punish you. She didn't even know you wanted her to stay home.

When you did decide to tell her that it bothered you, BE KIND. "i know you love to run and i love for you to do it. I want you to be happy. I was a little more funked out than I expected when you left this morning. Can we talk about adjusting your running schedule so that I'm happy with it, too? I was thinking if I had another hour of your attention before you left, I'd be happy to deal with the kids when they got up. And if I could get a chat over coffee when you get back, I'd spend the entire time looking forward to it, rather than funked out and grumpy."

Is that doable, Hill, for the future? Regardless of her response? You need to be loving toward her, otherwise all you will get is her defensiveness, and you will never know what her rational response is. Like markos, ask me how I know.

Why do I keep agreeing with CWMI? Now only if she'll be enthusiastic about that loud Hawaiian shirt :p

I do like the way she worded about your wife's jogging habits. That is the first step toward becoming skilled at POJA. Hopefully she'll agree to chop off an hour so y'all can have an hour together and she'll still get an hour and a half running time.

Come to think of it, how exactly far is she jogging in 2.5 hours? That's a ton of road time.

I'm quite enthusiastic about bold clothing! I am not your wife, though...so...I don't think it matters. :p

(psst...one of the gals from our community group once commented on how my bold colored clothing was too 'look at me!'...right before booting me for not wanting to particiapte in GNO at bars, lol.)

Total chaos after the run this morning. Not sure I'm a mind reader, but I was on the receiving end of punishment. Just had an hour talk which seemed to really help. Thank goodness my head hurts!

Just an update to say I'll be starting my own thread tomorrow.

Please start that thread, grace. I'd like to reply as a fellow runner. I'll wait til you've put up your thread.

HIlltopper .. I just wanted to apologize if anything I said contributed to your feelings of craziness. I only offered you my opinion from my perspective on how I used marriage builders and what I did to win my wife back over. I also understand your frustrations towards your reluctant spouse. I gave examples and mentioned that this is not going to be a fast fix .. it took many years to get to here and it may take awhile to get back to the way you want things. I believe it was once said that this is a marathon, not a 50yard dash. I understand you have a 4 month old and a few other children .. and that is VERY taxing on your wife. So I understand that aswell and how that affects your wife .. she probably feels "touched out"

AFter reading your replies after my last post, especially after your frustrated blow up blaming post .. I began to wonder if what I had said had any value or impact at all.. I am kinda new to advice giving and can only provide you with my own point of view from my own experiences.

Vets: Thank you for saving this one ... I didnt even know how to respond at first, so I stayed away to think about it .. but you guys chimed in with all the right stuff ..so i am thankful of your awareness.

Hilltopper ... Its also great to see that your wife descided to post and is willing to start her own thread. Stay on track .. follow the MB plan. These hard times will eventually all be in the rearview mirror if you stay the course and follow the advice.

MNG

I do lecture, I fully admit that, big fault and LB of mine. I guess I get so frustrated at a lack of progress that I force the issue incorrectly. I know I can't lecture her into love. My mood unstable, how'd you guess? Its more than unstable, I'm a wreck. I go from hope to despair almost hourly. I'm gonna make an attempt to stop the lecturing stuff as I know it doesn't make this go any quicker.

No attempting. You just do it. If lecturing her is an LB (and to whom wouldn't it be) then stop.

Remember it's taken you two years to get to this state of conflict. It's going to take awhile to get out of it.

Stop the LBing completely. If your boat has holes, you're still sinking unless you plug them up. The LBs cause holes for her love towards you to sink out.

Go to your wife tonight and ask her nicely if you two can sit down and fill out the LB and EN sheet and talk about it. Tell her you're sorry for pushing things so hard, you just want the marriage to be great but you've been going about it the wrong way. Don't lecture her why she should be or why you two should be doing X and Y. Let her know you want to be a better husband, the husband she deserves but the only way you can do that is for her to tell you and show you what she needs/wants from you/from the marriage.

This is not a race; it's a journey.

Thanks for the kind words. Can I ask you all something? Have you seen so many thousands of posts where one spouse swears about not cheating only to come crashing down down the road? About 20% of you won't let this infidelity thing go? It keeps coming back over and over. This is a recurring problem and is not allowing my wife and I to move forward to some degree. The "keep tabs on your wife" thing keeps coming back repeatedly and it bothers both of us tremendously. My wife said nothing is going on, she was horrifically destroyed for having me even consider it and as a result we can't get past it. I have no proof nor do I believe anything of the sort is going on, but many of you keep bringing it up. At this point I have to wonder why, do some of you not believe my wife at all, if so why? No sex? Is it something she said? As we sit here now, my wife has asked me to do whatever I need to do to make myself feel secure that nothing is going on. She appears to have nothing to hide, no fear of anyone "finding out" anything at all. Can we leave it at that? I want to get to feeling hopeful more than one hour at a time ok? I would appreciate if the suggestions focus on this goal from here on out. I love my wife, I don't think she is cheating at all.

I stand corrected, no attempts just action. Thanks Kilt! I assume you're more fellow Scot?

To be honest before you told us that she freaked out and said she hated you for "not trusting her", I don't think that many people said anything about any affair outside of just to double check...which is prudent advice given your independent lifestyles and given that A's happen in over 60% of M, which probably is lower than the true # considering that many affairs go undiscovered.

But then after you told us of her reaction, I think it created some more interest because Dr Harley says that getting angry and offended when being questioned is typically a smokescreen of a cheating spouse.

Regardless, the answer is for you two to be transparent and to open all areas of your lives to each other and start spending more time together. It wouldn't matter if 100 people on this board started telling me that my H was cheating on me, it wouldn't upset me and I would feel confident that that wasn't possible because we spend all of our free time together and I have access to all areas of his life.

A bit. I have a lot more Irish in me. My grandfathers grandparents came from Ireland. The biggest deviation we have is my mother is Venezuala.

All (well almost all) are here because we had a lot of the same issues that you have in your marriage now that we have used this program and forum to help make things better...great.

The forums can be on the very honest side and it can be a bit abrasive to some because we don't like hearing what we're doign wrong. Both you and your wife are LBing each other like crazy. If you're LBing all the time, it's not going to do much to improve things by meeting ENs. So the LBs have to stop first.

Remember that we all want you to succeed. But we all use a thing called radical honesty.

ps ~ Conversely, if my H accused me of cheating or told me he didn't trust me, I would go to whatever lengths to show him that wasn't the case for as long as it took.

But again, he would most likely feel pretty confident that that wasn't possible because our lifestyles are so integrated and has access to every area of my life.

Wife is irritated again. I'll be honest as I just was with her, I'm kidding myself and all of you if I said I was 100% positive nothing outside of our marriage was going on. I apologize for choosing to defend my wife's feelings over telling you all how I really feel. I have no proof. All I can say is that she shows no affection to me at all and it hurts. I told her the "burden of proof" shouldn't be on me snooping around until I find something. The feeling of uncertainty should mostly go away when I see and feel affection and love. I don't right now so I consider the possibility despite the odds that something might be going on because I have no reason telling me otherwise. With a four month old, two children, no odd behavior on her part, all of it adds up to nothing. The one thing I base this off of is the fact that she shuts me out and has shown a pretty poor track record of improving this despite my clear cut communication that this is my most important EN. I asked her tonight if she would snuggle with me on the couch and she ignored it. She sent a text and did a couple of things on her phone. She said it "went over her head" which might actually be true. To her credit she also politely asked if I could ask that only after the baby goes to bed. Something like this spoke volumes about her effort to meet this EN of mine. Something this small is enough to make me consider the possibility of an affair. I don't know if it is worse to consider a spouse might be having an affair or to be a spouse that is not having an affair and knowing their husband doesn't fully believe them. Either way it sucks for both and one thing I know for sure, is we will not progress further until she puts this thought to rest. I freely admit to you all that we are not making progress. My wife did her first post and showed me one response. She said some things were helpful but that you all blasted her quite a bit too like you did to me. To her credit she is reading HNHN right now which is great. She definitely is curious at the replies in this forum but she also at this stage in the game told me that it just causes us to fight and is harmful. Tell me it gets better please.

Fact of the matter is, that if something doesn't change then the weakening of your marriage can lead to one or both of you falling into the trap of infidelity, or divorce.

I've been right where you are now, HT. And I didn't go looking for help, I just silently imploded.

It's not an easy thing to be prioritized at the bottom of our spouse's list of priorities. And the more we allow that to happen, the further down the list we can fall.

The sad truth of the matter is, that it is in the best interest of our children that we put our spouse first, so that they can be raised in a loving, supportive home.

The reason that your posts are causing fights is because you are taking these posts as an opportunity to educate each other.

KNOCK IT OFF.

If you can't handle implementing the concepts without using the advice of posters as fodder against each other, then go to individual phone coaching through the coaching center on this site.

Do not read each others threads, do not post on them. At this point you can hardly act like civilized human beings toward each other.

Each of you needs to understand that your threads are about you, and not the other spouse.