Also joining in late. Just got my KINDLE version...

Here is what jumps off the page at me in this chapter:

"Most unfaithful spouses see an affair as enlightenment. They did not know what they were missing until the affair revealed to them."

That's almost exactly what my W said. It came in the form of "I didn't know what it felt like to be sexually attracted to someone. It had never happened before."

Yes. The perspective of someone with that new point of comparison is just - there's no word for it. Suddenly nothing was ever fun, the good memories are bad, life was horrible until this wonderful thing that was meant to be.

There's a letter in Dr. Harley's Q&A columns on this site from a woman going on and on about how her affair was meant to be because God willed it so and had given her and her affair partner to each other. They think of it like an actual religious experience!

You lucky newer Marriage Builders order your books and they arrive in seconds! In my day, we had to order by postal mail, and it took days to get here, and we had to trudge out to the mailbox.

Uh, in the snow, uphill both ways ...




(And we had to wait years for the revised SAA to come out, too.)

On one hand it is comforting to understand the psychology of it. On the other, it doesn't make it feel any better. It's that battle between the rational mind and the emotional mind.

Whatever... You make it sound like you are 80 years old!

I just got a "free" book back in Jan and it's already out of date.

P.S. It's nice to know that Dr Harley is still revising his works based on current feedback and new knowledge.

Reading Chapter 2 and how Sue and Greg were "starting their friendship" made all my alarms go off. It's interesting how much more educated we become after being on MB and reading Dr. Harley's articles and books.

When Sue and Jon were out on their anniversary and Sue wasn't RH with Jon you just knew where the train was going.

It's like watching a train wreck.

Exactly. In fact it's exactly the same as the classic tension between "do you want to know the truth, or do you want to be protected from truths that you find unpleasant?" Usually in the long term, the truth wins out.

By the way, I have seen posters here (usually women) get bogged down with wanting to ask questions over and over again to the effect of "How could you do this to me? What were you thinking? Did you have real feelings for her?" I'm amazed how many times this is the question women want to ask their wayward husbands down the road in recovery, when they really need to be not bringing the affair up again if they want to recover. Sometimes I see them post "I'm thinking of asking for some more information: should I?" and we ask what they want to know, and this turns out to be it.

They could save themselves a lot of grief because Dr. Harley can tell them in this chapter of SAA exactly what their wayward husbands were thinking and how they felt. And we usually repeat it to them here and urge them not to tear open their own wounds by bringing it up again. The rational mind can usually see the wisdom in this - but oh, the emotional mind! That's different.

Nah, I'm just a premature curmudgeon.


Yes it is. I've seen many cases where people here on the forum write him and he adjusts something. In particular some of his articles online date back to long ago and he has updated them based on feedback from posters who know what he says today has been improved over what he said in 1998 or so.

(That said, I've written to him about the friends and enemies of good conversation article, which doesn't quite match the current material on that subject in HNHN - no response yet that I know of. I'm sure he's been busy getting this book out the door instead.)

Yes, it is interesting how our brains change, isn't it? Things that our culture accepts as NORMAL, we marriage builders do not. We have become / are becoming part of a new culture that has different values and customs - and has good marriages.

This is going to relate to what you said - I promise. Bear with me.

My graduate studies were in machine learning. One subject that had always fascinated me was chess-playing programs. Chess is a very hard game for a computer program to play right. (Or it used to be. Computers are more powerful nowadays.) There is a striking difference between the way computers play chess and the way humans play chess.

A computer conducts a "search" through the space of possible chess moves to plot its next move from a given position. It looks at all the moves it could make and the consequences down the road for future moves and tries to pick the "best" one. This space is huge - not so long ago it was unrealistic for a computer to be able to search it all in a reasonable timeframe. Or even to be able to search enough of it to pick a good move. Good human chess players could beat computers all the time.

Why could humans beat computers? Humans did not exhaustively consider tens of millions of possible chess futures, so how did they do it?

The answer is pattern matching: a human chess player with extensive experience recognizes patterns in given chess situations. He has seen those patterns many times before and his experience tells him what the best move is. A portion of his brain has become a very specialized "computer" that is designed to match patterns on the board and return suggested moves. This pattern matching is very different from how computers work (or used to be) and is much better (or was). Many times the human does not even consciously think about all the details of the patterns he sees - he just knows the right move.

Now - a Marriage Builders poster like yourself, Brain, who has listened to Dr. Harley extensively, read the books, helped out marriages here on the board and watch them succeed or fail - has become a pattern matcher. He or she has trained part of his or her brain through extensive experience to hone in on specific details of a situation. He recognizes the patterns and knows what to recommend. He knows what details in a pattern call for exceptions to the basic pattern. He may not even realize this; he may think it's "gut feel."

I heard Dr. Harley recommend an extended Plan A for a woman a few weeks back on the show. He said it was an exception to his usual advice and mentioned we on the forum might actually take issue with him! He explained why it was an exception - I tried to remember that information, so I can refine my pattern matcher to recommend more accurate solutions if I ever see a situation like that in the future.

I imagine that Dr. Harley is the best pattern matcher for marriage problem solving in the entire world, through his vast experience and research and monitoring his success rate to provide feedback for his learning. (If not the best, certainly one of the best.) I'm sure that you are also pretty phenomenal at it, too, Brain, with all that radio listening. And there are lots of other posters here who I'm sure are great at this (MelodyLane comes to mind! But there are others.)

When you read Sue and Jon's situation, Brain, your pattern matcher immediately went to work. Red flag! You could tell what was going to happen. Prisca and I had the same feeling a couple weeks ago watching a movie. Staying late with OS friend after work - Red flag! Dinner together - red flag! Talking about marital issues with OS friend - red alert, klaxons blaring, holler warnings at the screen! It was painful to watch. It's even more painful in real life. But to a person who hasn't developed a pattern matcher like ours, there might have been nothing at all to tip them off that difficulty was ahead. Like an inexperienced chess player, falling for a common failing chess opening. Only the consequences are disastrous.

Our pattern matchers, more and more refined, should hopefully prove helpful to posters here and friends in real life. But they also should be extremely helpful for our own marriages, as we would have loud alarm bells going off in our minds for certain behaviors on the part of ourselves or our spouses.

(Yes, markos is a nerd in the extreme. I hope I didn't kill my own book club thread, here with that odd diversion...)

It's fine with me. I liked it. But I'm a software developer so.....

I like the pattern matcher discussion Markos. I have noticed that just being on the forum.

I agree that Dr. Harley is the best pattern matcher on marriages. It also shows me that there may be situations that Dr. Harley may actually advise something a little different than us here on the forum. That's why it is interesting to hear Dr. Harley's take on things. He may see something different in the situation or know something more that we here on the forum are not privy too.

The red flags and/or patterns of how an affair start do seem to still be pretty obvious. When you allow others to meet your ENs and make Love Bank deposits into your Love Bank you have a positive account for them.

I think that kind of relates to something else I read in this chapter. Sue described the A with Greg as feeling right because it wasn't planned. It "just happened".

But we know that it didn't "just happen", in fact it was very predictable if you know what you are looking for.

Exactly! Dr. H makes the comment that basically, people who know what we know could have easily predicted that Sue would have an affair with Greg.

We see this every day here - someone comes in, describes their situation, 9 out of 10 posters warn them of a possible affair or even state definitively: "S/he is having an affair." And they say "Oh, no, that's not the case. Please advise me without reference to an affair." At that point a lot of the truly good pattern matchers give up until the poster finds out the hard way.

The red flags of an affair are probably the easiest and most obvious pattern that we marriage builders posters have learned. And even still there are people who just don't believe it until it happens to them. "It could never happen to me." "I never saw it coming."

Another pattern in chapter 2 probably obvious to most of us: Jon and Sue decided to put up with not much time together in their marriage, and fell out of love.

I was thinking the same thing. They had hardly any UA time.

And they enthusiastically agreed to not have much UA time I might add!