Well, FB predates our M, too... we didn't go into our M like 99.999% of people with a formal sit-down to say, "ok, we're going to use MB principles in our M and that means we need to delete our FB accounts or drop all the OS friends." Honestly, zero of her friends on FB make me uncomfortable currently.


Fair enough. At this point, I do acknowledge we should really be doing more globally in our M to improve it. I would like to believe telling her that would be taken as a good thing. Why do I fear she'd react badly? That's just insane! I know she loves me! But... probably old fears are there, that if I start trying to make positive moves for our M, that's going to lead to its demise (again, from 1st M experience)! It's unreasonable, but many fears are not.


Oh boy, that statement made hairs on my neck stand up... wow. Could that be F? I wish I knew, but in absence of complete knowledge, the safest approach is to avoid, I agree.


The Plan A I refer to here is the Plan A I instituted in my 1st M, after the A was discovered. I considered it largely a change in my behaviors, plus a certain amount of EN meeting I could do for WW at the time (very little was allowed). My mantra was that the changes I'd made would be "changes for life" but require attention by me at times. I need to remind myself to for example be affectionate because it was never something that was big in my family. I find myself referring back to the top 10 EN list now and then - but in a better scenario, we'd both "check-in" with each other regularly to see how we're doing in the M, and so on... that's my ideal, but we've fallen down on that lately... and again, I have irrational fear that W would see my wanting to do that as a sign of weakness. Whereas in reality, it may be the very best place to start from, as early as this evening.

Feenix, you and your wife could greatly benefit from this program because I see you headed for a huge fall. Your marriage is an affair waiting to happen.

Not because your wife is loose, but because you BOTH have very poor boundaries for married people. You literally take no precautions against affairs and that is EXACTLY how affairs happen. Most people don't go looking for affairs, they just allow people outside of marriage to meet their emotional needs.

As soon as one emotional need is met outside of marriage the others are soon behind. In your wife's case, there are lots of opportunies for men to meet her needs. She has an easy going, overly friendly rapport with men in person and she has numerous male friends on facebook. She probably has others too, right?

I would share Dr Harleys article about opposite sex friendships with her and tell her you care for your marriage too much to let an affair happen. It is not a lack of trust that ruins marriages, but a lack of boundaries.

The ones who are usually the most vulnerable to affairs are the ones who say it would "never happen to them." They are vulnerable because they have no boundaries. They believe they are immune.

Love it. Problem is "giving me her best attention" would be hard with F so "on" and me so "off" yesterday. Didn't help that I'd had 3 hrs sleep night before, but still - I shut-down and feel like it only highlighted F's "superiority" - which is very caveman-y too I guess but that's just how I was feeling. I can do better tonight, I'm convinced, in having a 1:1 discussion.


This is so true and probably highlights the root of the problem... communication has declined too much and we're both just assuming things are fine, when even outside of this F experience, I could probably state some concern - the SF example, where I feel like my EN are not necessarily receiving the same attention they used to as well. But again, if we don't acknowledge a possible problem, it'll only get worse - perfect sense.


She's very easy going with her friends - anyone who's a friend. But I guess the thing is I see her language/behavior be like it was with women friends mainly and I've never seen it be quite so friendly with a guy friend. I have no idea if she's like that with guys who I don't see or have never met, of course. I figure there are some other cases like that which do exist, but she's never given me reason to believe we aren't anything but "solid", even to the extent we can talk about what it means to be honest and open... to an extent. I think we're missing some communication to reinforce some of that, so possibly that's what's due, is my just sucking it up about the girly-feelings-talk and realize it actually isn't that, it's just us talking like we have been known to in the past - frankly and openly. In the worst case scenario she says, "honey, I am actually attracted to F, I can't really help it, I was thinking about him all day". Best case she could say, "honey, I'm glad you're concerned about our M, and I want to do what it takes to make you feel safe and in love, like I am". Both scenarios give us something to work with and make progress, so I have to feel confident!


I'm formulating some ideas on what to say, and this is undoubtedly in scope.


Definitely agree here because 1st M was like that - no-one especially me saw it coming. Makes me want to be proactive even more.

I could see starting by asking her about her statement on the drive, that she tries to be open and honest with me about her feelings and such - get the discussion starting from that point, because it's actually quite relevant here. From that, move it onto the point of "you can tell me if you're attracted to anyone else" and the question as well if it's the case. It's a chance for her to acknowledge her feelings openly. Then from that either way, I think I have a point that "Well, subtle behavior from you made me wonder if that's the case with F. I could be way off base, but I want to acknowledge it crossed my mind." And I want to include the opportunity to express any dissatisfactions she may be having with me or anything else. And possibly get into the SF issue. And of course the entire conversation will go off in tangents I can't predict, but I have to accept that and roll with it. I plan on doing it after DD's bed time - usually we head down to the couch and are on computers or watching TV, but tonight I'll ask for some UA time. (In terms of how much we get a week - pretty much every Sat/Sun is mostly UA time, plus 30-60 min at least a weekday, usually during dinner.)

It would be tragic to risk what sounds to me like a very good marriage, but I see so many issues here. Not only with her opposite sex friendships, but with your level of openness and honesty and lack of UA time. Do you know it takes 15 hours of UA time per week just to maintain the romantic love in a marriage? If that is not being done on a daily basis, your love will erode.

And if you arent being honest about things that make you unhappy, pretty soon those things become an entrenched part of the marriage and incompatibility and unhappniness is created. All preventable since you have had full access to Marriage Builders!

Please pick up the book His Needs, Her Needs and start using this program. There is no reason you can't maintain a great marriage if you will use this program. Good marriages do not happen by accident or by cosmic maqic, they happen by DESIGN using a PLAN.

Just to clarify too, the UA time per week would be at about 25 hours... 10 hours Sat, 10 hours Sun, and 1 Mon - Fri. Roughly. With commute times and such, we're out the door around 7:30am, back home around 7:30pm weekdays. I'm not counting time like getting DD to bed and such, only counting time that we're together focused on some activity (on the weekends including DD obviously - we can't hand her off to grandma 100% of the time, although we do strive for 1:1 date nights at least monthly). Weekdays may actually be more than 1 hr - say the weekly range is 20-30 hours. Weekends are usually always together 100% of the time doing something.

We have HNHN, actually. We've gotten sloppy, I think. I will bring that up as well.

Another thing that concerns me is W has a way of kind of complaining at me, without doing it directly. Just for example, I was doing the BBQ hamburgers this weekend and forgot the cheese. She says, "I guess I'm not having cheese then" - which I suppose could be joking but the delivery wasn't with a laugh or smile, if you get the drift. Small thing, I know, but it's repeated in many different forms. It makes me wonder if she really does express her inner-most feelings to me, and if the downturn in SF is really a symptom of a much larger problem. I'm probably over-analyzing... but I'll try to address in our conversation later as well.

Try the radical honesty questionaire.

You both need to start dealing in the truth, straight out and respectfully, no pansying around.

Say Indie, I don't see the RH questionnaire from the questionnaire link - is it something new? Know where I can find? Thanks! Totally agree about just getting down to bare bones truth. My fearing it isn't very attractive, either, I would guess.

No it isn't! You get women

This won't cut it, I'm afraid, Feenix. Time spent with your daughter counts as family time, which is also important, but family time is not UA time. UA time should be like the time you spent when you were dating. You spent time alone together and you had intimate conversations, did enjoyable activities and were affectionate to the extent that you made enough deposits in each other's love banks to fall in love with each other.

Equally, it isn't UA time if you collapse on the sofa to watch TV after a long days commuting and working and cooking and washing up, and get up every so often to take the wet washing out of the machine. Couples don't fall in love watching TV and doing domestic chores!

Dr Harley urges a couple to get a babysitter and go on dates for most of the 15 hours UA time. He strongly urges them to get out of the house for most of the time. He tells them to find creative solutions to babysitting costs, such as swaps and overnights with other parents.

My younger child is nearly 16 and so my H and I can go out whenever we like at night, and also go for lunch when he is at school every day, so I know meeting the UA requirement is very easy for me and not easy for you, but I want to urge you to meet it for two weeks and see what happens. You won't want to stop, and it will transform your marriage. There is an entirely different feeling to being together when you put on some half-decent clothes and a lick of make up (well - not you! Your wife) and go right out of the house. We got for a 5 mile walk every weekend, and for lunches and to the pub (where we drink very little alcohol). The whole point is to do something that allows you to talk and be affectionate. We like going to see old films and to plays, too, but we deduct the time spent watching the event, because, like TV, this is not time spent focusing on each other. However, going to films and plays is great because they give you a lot to talk about in the pub or restaurant afterward. The goal is to talk to each other, which your wife will possibly enjoy a great deal.

This really feels like dating and makes an enormous difference to how humdrum the marriage feels. Yours possibly does not feel humdrum yet because it is quite new, but it will do after a time if you do not give each other romantic, dating, UA time.

How much real UA time do you get if you deduct weekends spent with your daughter, and evening spent watching TV or passing the odd comment while doing chores?

Now deduct any time that your child is with you or any time you are flopped in front of the TV exhausted frmo a long commute. What is your UA time?

A woman needs 2 things to desire sex: an emotional attachment to the man and the prospect of enjoyment. What typically happens is women start falling out of love around 5 years of marriage because the couple do nothing to sustain that love. It takes 5 years for a couple to fall out of love when they are not maintaining at least 15 per week of UA time. The first thing to go is the wife's desire to have sex.

Feenix, I guarantee that if you take your wife out for at least 15 hours every week (without your child!) you will get much more sex.

Ask me how I know.

Well, it's hard to calculate then... just as an example, the next weekend we have a family event on Sat eve to go to, Sat AM will probably be around the house, might go for a walk (but with DD in tow), Sun doesn't have anything specific scheduled so we might go shop (but again, DD in tow), etc. I get it. So really speaking of UA time that's purely 1:1, maybe 3-20 hours a week, depending on what's going down. Maybe an average of 10. So that's something else for me to cover in discussion as well... I know she enjoys dates. And I know that plenty of friends with similar situations are in similar straights with UA hours, I'm certain - and they *seem* to be doing well. But I get it, definitely and is something to respectfully request we do more of! We don't like to bombard grandma but maybe an alternate request could be to do 3 days of daycare and have grandma do a Saturday. We're also still doting on DD and I know we both want to see a lot of her. But spending more time as a couple I understand is in essence a gift for her as well.

Any of your friends who are not getting 15 hours of UA time per week will fall out of love eventually. They might even have a cordial relationship, but they won't be in love.

And keep in mind that most couples are not in love. Only 20% of married couples are in love because most couples REFUSE - I mean absolutely REFUSE - to put their marriage first. Everything else comes first: work, children, the laundry, shopping, house cleaning, etc.

So, if you are interested in maintaining the romantic love in your marriage you will have to spend 15 hours of UA time per week.

And the first sign that the love is eroding in your marriage is a waning interest in sex by the WIFE. She is the canary in the coal mine!

Good! Harley recommends 4 - 4 hour dates per week meeting the top 4 intimate emotional needs of sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship, affection and conversation. It should be spread out through the week.

Check out these articles: The Policy of Undivided Attention

Caring for Children Means Caring for Each Other

interestingly that wasn't true for 1st M... but then again SF was high on WxW's list of EN... for W, I think it started in the top 4 and is now somewhere in the middle! Still - it's a good analogy (canary in the coal mine) that I could even share with her, from the perspective of *why* I might be concerned we're not spending enough UA time together.

ok, I bite, how?

I was joking, Feenix - but I do have a habit of telling unfunny jokes. You were not supposed to ask!

I know because it happened to us! Okay? Do I have to spell it out more clearly? Because I'm not going to!

Be brutally honest in your calculations, Feenix. You are cheating nobody but yourselves if you inflate this figure.

Are you really getting 10 hours pers week to do touchy-feely, conversational, flirty things? Are you really doing those things and not doing ANY chores or domestic things at the same time? I really doubt that parents of a young child are getting 10 hours unless they are really working at those 10 hours, and until a few posts ago you didn't even really know what UA time involved, so I doubt if you've been working at it.

Please describe your 10 hours to me. (You can tell me to go away if I'm being too nosey.)