Quick update: I looked at her phone, and as she said she had been talking about me to her friend but nothing more. I didn't exhaustively examine every last text message but nothing leaped out at me. She agreed to remove the password from her phone so I should be able to inspect it at will. I looked at her email and there was no evidence of anything suspicious. I will be pondering this all and will update again soon.

Happyheart: Good advice. Fortunately she wasn't too concerned about info security. We have agreed to get help. She wants to meet with the counselor that helped our daughter a while back. She was a very nice lady - a Christian. I proposed getting the phone counseling session with Dr. Harley in addition to this. Couldn't hurt to have multiple perspectives. .

Oh my goodness....OK guys...I'm really in shock. Need major help. I followed everyone's advice. Though I couldn't get into my wife's phone, I was able to log into her twitter account. She was posting things about masturbation and such.

she never really loved me. She just married me because we had had sex before marriage and she thought she had to do it. She said she is NOT attracted to me. We both cried together. She said she kissed another man while vacationing in the Dominican

I hear everyone's advice about traditional marriage counselors versus MarriageBuilders, but I can't force her to participate in something that she doesn't want to participate in. If I can get her to participate in the MarriageBuilders conference call in exchange for seeing the other counselor as well, that seems like a good deal.

M
RE what I want: I desperately want to save the marriage - I have a lot of feelings for my wife still plus my faith doesn't support divorce and we have five kids. However I feel somewhat hostage to my wife's arbitrary feelings (or lack thereof) for me - I feel helpless. Thus I don't know if I can become attractive to her again. Dr. Harley's literature seems to indicate that couples can fall back in love again if they meet each others' needs and such so I'm hoping we can go down that road.

One thing I said to her moved her - the idea that if in the end things don't work out, we have to be able to tell the kids we did absolutely everything we could to save the marriage.

I give you this advice because I want you and your spouse to be in love with each other, and I'm sure that you want that, too. But most marital therapists disagree with me on this issue. Because their advice is so pervasive, and so destructive to the love of couples that follow it, I use whatever opportunity I have to defend this crucial position.

The difference between my approach to saving marriages, and the approach of most other therapists, is that I focus on building romantic love (being "in love") between spouses, rather than simply focusing on conflict resolution. As it turns out, I also address conflict resolution, but I do it in a way that builds love between spouses.

Since most marital therapists fail to address the romantic love issue when they try to help couples, their approach to conflict resolution usually fails to build love, and as a result, the couples divorce, even after "resolving" some of their conflicts.

An example of this current effort to "resolve" marital conflicts is found in a book by Jacobson and Christensen, Integrative Couples Therapy (Norton, 1996). In this training manual for marital therapists, couples are to be encouraged by their therapists to lower their marital expectations by becoming more understanding of each other's dysfunctional background. Irreparable wounds inflicted during childhood should inspire empathy toward a thoughtless spouse, not disappointment. Awareness of each other's limitations should lead to acceptance of each other's behavior and a willingness to meet one's own needs, instead of expecting each other to meet those needs. The suggested goal of therapy is to teach each spouse to make themselves happy, and not look to each other for their happiness. While this approach to therapy may resolve a couple's conflict, it most certainly will not lead to love. When couples follow this advice, few love units are deposited and many are withdrawn. In the end, the couple is likely to divorce.

The same sort of advice is given in Getting the Love You Want by Hendrix (Holt Rinehart, & Winston, 1988). While the book title seems to address the issue of romantic love in marriage, the author's strategy for couples is to learn to accept each other's marital failures, rather than doing anything to overcome them. I guarantee you, if you follow this strategy, you will NOT get the love you want.

My experience, and the experience of a few others who are carefully studying what it takes for a couple to be satisfied with their marriage, proves the opposite of what is currently being popularly recommended. Instead of spouses trying to lower their expectations, I believe that they should raise them. Instead of spouses learning to meet their own emotional needs, I believe that they should expect to have them met by each other, and met in a professional manner. Why? Because that's what it takes for a couple to be in love and stay in love. Furthermore, couples should not waste their time trying to "understand" each other's failures, but rather, they should try to overcome them as quickly as possible so the issue does not have time to drain their Love Banks.

In a great, but mind-numbing, article entitled "The Mathematics of Marital Conflict: Dynamic Mathematical Nonlinear Modeling of Newlywed Marital Interaction" (Gottman, Swanson and Murray. J. of Family Psychology, 1999, Vol. 13, No.1, 3-19), the authors provide evidence that couples should not "let things ride and have a chance to build up" (p. 17). Instead, couples should address any conflict as soon as it arises, and resolve it quickly. The authors indicate that the biblical principle from Ephesians (4:26), may be helpful in marriage, "Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry."

In this study, newlyweds who divorced within 6 years were compared with those who remained married during those years. It was found that the divorced couples tended not to respond to each other's complaints as quickly as those who remained married. These divorced couples ignored each other's complaints until they became intensely negative. Those who remained married, on the other hand, went to work addressing each other's complaints soon after they were mentioned, not giving the complaint a chance to build up.

My experience with couples agrees with the results of this study. In successful marriages, spouses expect to change to accommodate each other's needs, so when a spouse registers a complaint, it's a signal for action. In failed marriages, on the other hand, spouses expect to be accepted as they are, without change. A complaint is interpreted as an unwillingness to love unconditionally, a failure of the complaining spouse. So instead of adjusting to the complaint, the defense is offered, "if you really loved me, you would not try to change me. You would let me continue to do whatever it is I'm doing."

Pius, to whom was she posting things about masturbation? And what kinds of things were they?


I hate to tell you this, but these types of comments are indicative of an affair. I would make plans to do some super sleuthing on her.


It's really not because going to a traditional counselor could be disastrous to your marriage. Marriage counselors are little more than divorce facilitators. What will you do if the MC recommends a divorce? That is pretty typical advice when one spouse they have fallen out of love.

Are you ok with that?

She was posting the things about masturbation to her friends on her twitter feed which are mostly women. There was also a guy on there but I didn't see any significant interaction between them. Occasionally he would make a comment.

I think my wife and I are in agreement that we are going to try to save the marriage, and this other counselor is a Christian, so hopefully the advice won't be to just get a divorce.

Basically she said throughout the 15 years of our marriage she never really loved me. She just married me because we had had sex before marriage and she thought she had to do it. She said she is NOT attracted to me.

She said she kissed another man while vacationing in the Dominican.