Acquaintance lost sensation after a V and can't make it happen fair enough?

Anyways times are good as I'm focused. One issue I am having is not reacting to lovebusters. To be intellectually honest I'm rarely disrespectful unless I've been disrespectful. I'm no saint, just extremely practical. The most common is my wife DJing me about anything and me letting it get to me and reacting to her. The mist common is me feeling offended and expressing my views.

I have that problem. It is extremely hard. Especially since I'm the kind of guy who was wired not to even see my own disrespect which I was offering in response.

But it's just got to be done if you want to get her motivated again. If you can encourage her to be open with you about your disrespect it will help. You can do this by telling her "I know that I have a problem with being really disrespectful to you. It is important to me not to do this, but I don't always recognize it. I appreciate it when you give me a list each week of the things I've said or done that you felt were disrespectful." And it's encouraging to her if you do the whole thing without mentioning her problem, even though her problem is extremely relevant, and it sure would help if she'd work on her end, too, you know? But she's not doing that, so you're really left with little other choice.

For Prisca it made a huge difference when she saw me not reacting with disrespect to her behavior. I became the kind of person who would focus on whatever problem she was talking about, without deflecting back to the problems that she was causing me. And after enough of this, she became motivated to work on the problems I had identified.

Incidentally, Dr. Harley says the normal tendency for anyone married to an abusive spouse is to become abusive themselves. So you are completely normal in this regard!

Thanks man. I feel normal! It is funny that I'm extremely disciplined in certain areas of my life almost to obsession yet I find myself compelled to respond to disrespect with more of the same. Don't do that Hill!

Exactly! It's as simple as that!

When you are used to thinking rationally and trying to put your emotions aside to make rational decisions, it's easy to miss it sometimes when you are failing to do that and instinct is taking over. We are all experts in self-deception.

I had to build the habit of "shutting up" before I could start to build more rational habits of response.

Every love buster you eliminate brings you one step closer to tipping past the romantic love threshold. Everything changes at that point. There will be no gradual changes leading up to it, few signs that you are making any progress. And then there will be a sudden change.

How are all of you? It's the legend of legend Hilltopper here! I would say Tgrace and I are agreeable most of the time. She doesn't like me being here which is why I've stayed away for so long. Anyway you slice it my wife is still not into me. Because of this I go through ups and downs. I try hard at times and other times I throw my hands up and tell myself what's the point? Tgrace denounces the forum and blames it for my accusing her of cheating and a number of other insults which all of you who know me know very well about. We get along pretty good and I would say our time here was well worth it. We still don't have a fruitful sex life. It is very infrequent and more than the sex it is more that she is just not into me. I don't feel loved like I once did. We can go to dinner and have a fabulous time and afterwards I feel great. It never turns into anything that makes me feel that she is interested in me. I realize after all of this that sex is the culmination of her being into me, but the overall feeling that I get from her backs up the no sex. Her body language is just not into me like it once was and I am lonely because of it. What IS she into? Honestly she never stops talking about what we need to buy for the house. After a long time of debt we are finally very comfortable and yet she seems obsessed with anything and everything that costs money. Every time it comes out of her mouth I feel this sense of disapproval which I know is judgmental and a DJ. Despite this I can't stand it. I figure out how to make money and she gets to figure out how to spend it and it is a problem. I told my wife about 10 months ago that I'd "move on" if things didn't get better. I'm conflicted. We fight about once a week instead of 3 times a day. We have sex about 1/10 days but it is a chore for her and that makes me not want it. Where do I go from here?

Hill

Hilltopper,

Welcome back!! Man, it's good to see you again.

I am so dead tired right now and probably need to get some sleep before I can post anything rational to you, but I think I've learned a whole lot in the last year about how to get marriages like yours and mine working better again. Would love to help you guys get to a place you like.

As far as telling your wife you'll move on, I made that mistake during an angry outburst last year, probably about the same time you did. One of the worst mistakes of my life, and I was on the radio show about it, and Dr. Harley told me to knock that off! It's still a traumatic memory for Prisca. Long and the short of it is, threats don't get what you want. The solution is to patiently, ever so patiently, follow the plan to get your wife to fall back in love with you again, addressing her complaints one by one.

We, too, have had a lot of trouble with money. Prisca has felt I was controlling about money for years. And she likes to buy things, too. We now have an arrangement where we plan purchases ahead of time, with mutual agreement, and she loves it. That has taken care of a lot for us. It takes away a lot of the money stresses for me, and with that emotional need met for her (financial support), she feels a lot better.

Oops, I said I need to go to bed instead of posting. I hope some of this reads rationally. It's two hours later here than it is there, if I recall correctly.

markos,

When was your call to the radio show?

(Oct 27, 2011)

Thanks. May I post it?

Absolutely.

I remember your call it helped me to learn to become more flexible.

Here they are.
Radio clip on anger
Segment #2
Segment #3

Good Morning Hilltopper! ... I was actually thinking of topping your thread and asking how you where doing the other day!

**edit**

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Also did Prisca ever follow with the Harleys and write them?

I am a little more awake now, I hope.

As you can guess I've listened to hundreds of hours of Marriage Builders radio since we talked last. What I've learned is that the case where the husband is on board with Marriage Builders and the wife is not is kind of a special case. Dr. Harley does talk about it on the radio from time to time.

When a wife has been presented with Marriage Builders and doesn't want to do it, she usually has beliefs that conflict. The belief is usually "I don't believe this can work." Sometimes it's "I don't believe marriage really needs to be like that" or "I don't believe it should take this much work" or "I believe it should come naturally, if it doesn't, maybe we're not right for each other."

But according to Dr. Harley, our beliefs actually tend to line up to match our feelings.

And her feelings are under her husband's direct influence.

It turns out that when someone's account in our Love Bank is above the romantic love threshold, our instincts start prompting us to want to meet their emotional needs. Husbands suddenly start to want to be affectionate and have conversation. Wives suddenly start to want to make love and be together for recreation. Dr. Harley says it is sudden, not gradual, and it comes without warning. And for awhile it can be rocky, as the feeling comes and goes suddenly while we bob over and under the surface of the romantic love threshold.

Dr. Harley says he's had men testify that it's like their wives suddenly took hormones or something.

I can testify that my marriage has been like this. Prisca's sex drive, as well as interest in meeting my emotional needs, and even her interest in having her own emotional needs met, has been NEGATIVE, and has been STRATOSPHERIC.

What it takes is a long LONG, patient deferment of gratification, making tons of love bank deposits, avoiding love busters like the plague, changing lots of habits PERMANENTLY in order to rise above the threshold and get way beyond it. Then suddenly there is a sudden change, and 80-90% of the marital problems seem to go away.

I have found that I have to follow this plan. It condenses a lot of what I've heard from Dr. Harley, and it works:
* If I am unsatisfied with something in my marriage,
* Ask myself: is my wife in love with me?
* If the answer is no, then, ask myself what her complaints are. Then ask myself what I can do to address them.
* If the answer is yes, then make a thoughtful request or respectfully complain. But in general if I am in this frame of mind, my wife is not in love with me.

I usually find that the complaints she has are things she's told me about and been waiting on awhile.

Sometimes I can turn into a disrespectful jerk in my thinking and think how long I've waited for some of my complaints to be addressed. But, if she's not in love with me, then she's not willing to address them, period, and there's only one way to change it. And if she is in love with me, usually I don't have any complaints! Almost all disrespect on her part disappears when she is in love with me, along with reluctance to be with me and other things that I have complained about in the past.

Another important thing in there is to ask her if she has any complaints. But usually I don't have to do this if we are that point. Usually, I already know, if I am honest with myself, and drop any kind of disrespectful rationalization about why she shouldn't feel that way, or shouldn't complain about that, or whatever.

The solution is single-minded devotion to getting real answers to her complaints, making the changes permanent, NEVER LOVE BUSTING FOR AN INSTANT because she has already been through far more and far worse than she deserves and can't take any more, and making the biggest love bank deposits she is willing for me to make.

Here's a new radio show for you to listen to, Hilltopper:

Let me boil that down to the good part:

A few months ago we bought Dr. Harley's Defending Traditional Marriage. I think it was the last Harley book we didn't have, other than some out of print ones.

I expected this book to veer off into politics and wasn't really sure what I was going to think.

What I found was a wealth of additional information in here about Dr. Harley's approach that I hadn't seen before. In particular, this book is a little bit like the counterpart to Buyers, Renters, and Freeloaders.

If you've read Buyers, Renters, and Freeloaders, you know the basic principle: the Buyers Agreement is the way people live when they expect to stay in the marriage for life and have to fix problems that are making one or both of them unhappy. If people will live this way, their marriages will be happy.

But in Defending Traditional Marriage, Dr. H talks from the perspective of a counselor, and he reveals another detail: his plan for getting people to adopt the Buyer's Agreement is 1) get them to fall in love with each other, 2) persuade them to adopt the agreement. If he can get them to try out the behaviors that lead to them falling in love, then once they do, they become open to living by the agreement that will keep them in love.

What seems to be necessary in a number of cases is a good deal of pump priming by the husband: eliminate the lifestyle choices and love busters that are sapping the love bank, sit their patiently waiting for the snail to appear, meet emotional needs with skill, finesse, and sophistication, and suddenly there is a wife who is willing to go all the way as a Buyer.

That is a lot to take in but it not only makes sense, I think I know all of this. There comes a time, and in my case probably multiple times, where you wonder when the light at the end of the tunnel is. I ask myself this all the time. "Am I willing to wait as long as it takes?" Being with someone else literally makes no sense. We have 3 incredible children together and honestly have a pretty good life. She seems quite content in fact which is something else that bothers me. I had an example of a marriage between my parents that I consider part of the 20% that Dr H mentions. Her folks on the other hand are officially married and he is absolutely miserable. I often wonder if her view of marriage has impacted what she expects out of one? Is her idea of marriage what we have whereas mine is one that expects greatness? I want to be madly in love. I want and desire to have a hard time keeping our hands off each other. I want her to hug me back like I hug her. I get none of that. She spends hours and hours worrying about what color to paint kitchen cabinets. I don't get it personally but I'm ok that this is one of her hobbies. What I don't get is why it is a priority well above our marriage. Not just slightly, I mean 10 to 1.
One more thing because SF is the most important thing to me and to most guys. I have an appt for getting a V tomorrow. What little sex we do have I want to be good for both of us mentally and physically. To be honest I expect nothing to change in that department but I'm doing it anyways. We'll see how it goes.

Oh yes, Mr Nice Guy, how are you???