Agree. Good call.

FM,
Great to hear that Mr. Agua removed his FB account. That was a good decision on his part.

I am in your husband's shoes. When my wife came back home after a year-long affair she asked me to get rid of FB. (She doesn't have an account and never has, btw). I did it for her, and was happy to do so because it meant that an EP was in place for BOTH OF US. Its not something that either of us have to worry about.

Yes, I miss FB, but I'll fill that time with other things and the threat of an "old friend" of the opposite sex asking to be added as a friend will never happen to either of us.

FM, how are you and Mr. Aqua doing?

Tonight we finished reading SAA. We are taking it day by day, for the most part things are going as well as could be expected. We had one difficult day this week but we identified the trigger (my reaction to being stressed was a love buster for him) we also identified that we were spending quantity time together rather than quality time and are trying to correct that. Monday we leave for vacation, which poses the challenge of how to get UA time in while meeting the obligations that come with taking a group vacation with family we see less than once a year. I think we are both putting a lot of pressure on this vacation to be a really great reconnecting experience for us and I am a little worried that the family stuff will interfere with that.

About the vacation. This is not a romantic get away, so go easy on yourselves and set the bar low. Try not to have too many expectations. Schedule your UA time as usual around family events with the added bonus of being away . Glad you are working through things!

Any updates? How's recovery going?

We made it through our vacation and have been home a week now. The trip went as well as could have been expected considering the circumstances but we both felt it sort of stalled our ability to work on the program. The group looked to us to handle everything from driving to reservations, to planning the day and rounding everyone up and keeping them on schedule. Stress we did not need to be taking on right now.
Also frustrating was that we hardly got any time alone together. Most activities were as a group and almost every time we tried to break away someone decided to invite themselves along. With the busy full days, by the time we had said goodnight for the evening to separate from the group we could barely keep our eyes open. So practically no ua time. Plus because it was a group, we both had to go along and do things that we didnt want to do without discussion, no poja.

But we're back now and trying to be more diligent with out MB work. Trying to work on quality ua time in addition to quantity ua time. Continuing to read the books. We need to work more on scheduling and evaluating our efforts but at least we have realized that. I think I can say we are officially in recovery

Yay! Proud of you, you came here all foggy and did a 180. Good work, I'll pray for your success.

I'm feeling a little frustrated and upset right now. I just spoke to my mom and experienced a complete lack of support in our recovery.
One of the conditions H gave in trying to continue our marriage was that I stopped my monthly trip to the casino with my mother and sister. He feels that it is a waste of money and I should not be taking time away from my work to gamble. I have not gone with them on their last two trips and today my mom asked me if I could go next month since it is my birthday month. I told her we had to discuss it and her response was "so what, do you need permission to go anywhere or do anything now?"
My parents have been married for 33 years but they are a huge example of independent behavior. They both do exactly what they want and usually don't even tell each other about it until after the fact. I can see that having that as an example I learned the same bad habits and now I feel like by taking H's opinions into consideration and following poja my mother is criticizing me for it.

That would be upsetting. But don't let her thinking influence yours! You are doing great by realizing you needed to POJA that with Mr.A. FM, you are now really an FWW in my books.

Good luck in your recovery!

Yeah Fluff! I have been thinking about the two of you and hoping that all was well. Keep reading the material and coming back to this site. It will help both of you continue on your journey.

Well... just shows that Mom has higher priorities in her life than your marriage.

Lots of us have acted selfishly at times, and age is no barrier whatsoever.

I wouldn't let it faze you. Not worth wasting a lot of your time on armchair-psychologist speculation as to why she's acting like that -- we could wonder, maybe she just wants to spend time with you, or maybe she unconsciously wants to prove to herself that she can still call the shots in your life, or maybe she sees you & DH building something better than what she's ever had & is acting out of envy ... who knows? But no matter.

You could choose to be frustrated... or you could handle it graciously by offering to let her buy you dinner for your birthday, or visiting a museum, or going to a rodeo or [whatever the heck else you and/or Mom and/or your sister might like to do together that your DH would also be happy with] and then everybody wins. Or, if Mom still says "Casino or bust!" & wants to pick a fight with you over this, then you could just give yourself a break from her until she wises up a bit. (Old as I am & dumb as I've been at times, I'm glad to know that it's never too late to wise up...)

Cleave to your husband on this one, as you've been doing. The investment in your marriage is no sacrifice.

I just spoke to my mom and experienced a complete lack of support in our recovery.

And now you (electronically) spoke to dozens of colleagues here who have nothing BUT support for your recovery.

Mommy intimates that you should not confer with you husband. How did that work for you previously?

We suggest that conferring with each other will tightly bind and strengthen your union. We KNOW how that will work for you going forward.

Besides, we got Mommy highly outnumbered!

You and your BH need to POJA this.

Sorry mom, but yes my marriage is my priority.

Tonight I am having a hard time and I could use some advice.

My closest friend and H's closest friend are married. They are currently having a hard time, it sounds to me like she is having an EA though she claims it is nothing. She recently confided in me and I was telling her about the MB principles. After the talk she asked me not to tell H but he wanted to know and in keeping with being completely open and honest with each other I told him but made it clear that I would only tell him if he did not tell his friend. He agreed but the next day he told a lot of what I told him to his friend. I was upset and expressed this to him. We had a long discussion about how I felt betrayed anyone of the biggest problems for me in our marriage before we started with MB was I felt that he put other people's feelings ahead of mine. He apologized for breaking my confidence but justified it by saying that he felt that telling him was the right thing to do.

Today he told me that he spoke to his friend and told him everything because he needed to know. After I just told him how betrayed I was that he told his friend any of what I told himinconfidence and how he should have discussed it with me first he did it again to an even greater degree. When I told him how upset I was that he again broke my confidence and put someone else above me he started yelling at me that it was e right thing to do and I'm the one who f---Ed him over so I didn't know how it felt so it was his call to stop it from happening to his friend.

My feelings are 1. He should have protected my feelings over his friend 2. If he felt that strongly about telling his friend we should have discussed it first 3. I feel like I never should have told him since he did break his word to not to tell so I feel like I can't trust him to keep my confidences and 4. When I tried to be open with my feelings and why I was upset he completely shut me down, yelled at me and said it was the right thing to do so he did it. End of story, he would do it again.

I understand his reasoning for wanting to tell his friend but I feel like the way it went down completely ignored everything we have learned so far I MB. He had a previous commitment to go help a friend this evening and the fight was on his way for work to his friend's house so we have not had achance to further discuss it yet and I don't know when he will be home tonight. Am I being completely unreasonable and blowing this out of proportion? Tonight feels like the same crappy relationship we had before any of this started.

Do the two of you understand POJA?

For want of a nail...

Well, your friend should've asked you beforehand. But you made a choice there: You made a commitment to conceal info from your husband. Especially info about an affair. Your concealing info about (even prospective) infidelity no doubt evokes a vicseral fear in him. He wants to believe that you have fundamentally changed, and that your ethical standards with respect to concealing possible infidelity are not situation-dependent. When you made a promise to conceal info from your husband, you in effect made him a little Poop-on-a-Triscuit hors d'houvre & handed it to him to swallow. Naturally, everything afterwards in this episode went downhill.

Hmmm, "betrayed"... maybe not the best choice of words there, FM, wouldn't you say? Your words should aim to express how you feel without being inflammatory, and I can think of few words that might be more inflammatory to a betrayed spouse's ear. How about just, you felt "hurt"? (Cuz, really: He knows how 'betrayed' feels in a way that hopefully you & I never will, right?)

I'm not justifying the making/breaking of commitments on his part, either, but the right thing to do is the right thing to do.

Instead, try, "I never should've promised to conceal info about his friend's wife's potential infidelity from my husband." You see how that would've prevented the problem? Do y'see how your first wish, in what you said, was to have avoided the consequence of a flawed decision? (A very human trait, by the way.) Ideally, our first instinct, at least in looking back post mortem, should be to have avoided making the decision that led to the consequence.

Nah. Nope. Stop with the making lists of wrongs. Ya don't wanna go there.

"Mrs. Pot? May I introduce to you Mr. Kettle."

Well, there's enough wrong here to go around. Neither of you POJA'd this very well. And you have an extra obligation (you volunteered for it) to be extra-attentive in following the Rule of Protection.

So going forward: Apologize to him for making a pledge that you should never have made, and express that you realize (and I hope you do) that that's how this whole kerfuffle started.

POJA takes practice. It's not something that you (as a couple) just read & assimilate flawlessly. It requires constant practice by you & him, together, in real-life circumstances.

Reductio ad absurdium, to build on GO's counsel:

My friend wanted to speak to one-half-of-our-marital-union,
and I unilaterally agreed to conceal it from the other half.
This friend told me that she was planning on poisoning her
spouse to collect his insurance. I kept my word to my friend,
and we attended her spouse's funeral today. My husband lost
a good friend, and now resents my actions.

And if you think "poisoning" is that much worse than "betraying",
Fluff, you have much more learning to do here.

A WW conspires to hide her firends at least EA at this point.

You take actions to coverup an affair.

You expect your BH to enable your lowlife actions.

You get mad that your BH will not sink to your level and stab his friend in the back and not tell him his WW is having an EA.



Anwser this:

When you were enjoying your affair did your friend know about the affair?

Did you tell this friend how the OM made you so happy?

Role model.

We understand it but it was completely ignored here.