Some people you know, Prisca, have met my wife, spent time with my family and I and seen us interact. They can say whether or not I am or have been for ten years "very disrespectful of my wife". You have only my hurried dialog written as I also work.

And here is another statement you can critique; i am TIRED. It is always ME who has to do the intervention, avoid DJs in the face of DJs, offer respect in the face of contempt, meet ENs in the face of apathy in hope that she may respond. I'd quite like Squid to initiate something, Just once

Have you ever addressed a complaint like Dr. Harley suggests?

Have you thought about emailing him and being on the show?

markos is giving you excellent advice.

Disrespect is disrespect, Bob. I don't need to have met you and your wife in order to recognize it.

You don't HAVE to change anything if you don't want to. You don't HAVE to eliminate your DJs. But don't claim you've tried everything.

We used to go out 3 or 4 times per week for lunchtime dates, whenever I could arrange to work from home and at weekends. We had lovely times, and it didn't hurt us financially as so many lovely places have specials for Lunch !

So much of our early progress after the A took place over long lunches in a wonderful Thai restaurant we found locally.

One outcome of those discussions was that Squid hated and resented being SAHM. She gave up nursing to raise our kids but it was not fulfilling enough for her. It led to her hyper-investing in her sport and so to the affair.

In response to this I paid for Squid to be qualified as a driving instructor and bought her a car. She started up a driving school. She loves this and gives her the challenge and independence she craved. Trouble is we now almost never have time for dates. She works every lunchtime and it pooped most evenings. Hmm.... * strokes chin *

Not being picky Prisca but you have not witnessed a single interaction between my wife and I,only reportage of them. I am not sure how you can be so certain. I am not so careful to avoid Djs these days that much is true. The volume of disrespect i receive makes that difficult.

I know what you mean, Bob - that would be fantastic. But it is not very realistic.

I guess the question is, when she does damage to your marriage, is it a good idea for you to do further damage? When she makes a love bank withdrawal, does a love bank withdrawal on your part make her more, or less, likely to ever come around like she used to be?

My marriage did not improve until I committed to Dr. Harley's ideal which was that even when your spouse breaks the rules, you can't break the rules in return. Things continued to suck and life continued to be hell.

BH I know Bill quite well, and spoke with him a lot up to a few years ago.

Bob, I think everyone who has posted to you recently would be willing to help you step by step with your marriage and your interactions (or lack of them, sometimes) with your wife.

I think you would benefit from starting again, as if you hadn't bumped this old thread, and simply laying out the problems that you face. Your criticisms, her criticisms, each of your responses, her lack of affection towards you, your lack of interest in the TV programmes she watches...everything you have mentioned, and everything else.

I think you'd be amazed at the level of help that is given nowadays here. These forums have become much more like an academy in which we read Dr H's books and articles, write to and listen to the radio programme, and use our knowledge from the online course.

As far as I can see, most people here have identified situations that you should be handling differently. If you can commit to listening to feedback and not arguing with it (unless you genuinely think that it is a misinterpretation of Dr H), I think you could make a great difference in your marriage.

Bob, we have witnessed you writing disrespectful things about your wife in nearly every post you have made here the past few days.

I am not convinced that you have ever committed yourself to learning what disrespect is. It appears to me that you simply do not recognize it.

You continue to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in response to nuclear weapons. The result is mutually assured destruction.

We have watched you push the DJ button about your wife in nearly every post. I believe that if you went back and reread your posts you would find some of your disrespectful comments about your wife, but I don't think you would find a majority of them. I think you haven't learned how to tell what disrespect is. A great example was when you suggested that a comment you made about your wife wasn't disrespectful because your wife had said it about herself - that doesn't at all mean that your comment was not disrespectful. Those of us who have been working to apply these concepts in our marriage know this. I know you've been working hard, but your efforts must have been misdirected, because somehow you have really missed this lesson.

Bob, you do own the book Love Busters, don't you? The recent revised edition? (Year 2008 or 2009, I believe.) There is a lot more material in it than the older edition. If not, can I offer to buy you a copy and help you through it?

What we usually suggest to people is that they continue to contact Dr. Harley if things are not working.

I'm betting you've heard about Dr. Harley's "concentric circles" approach to problem solving. He suggests the simplest solution that could possibly work, and then if that doesn't work, he moves outward to increasingly complex and more-encompassing solutions until finding the solution that does work.

That's why it's vitally important to keep him up to date on what's going on - let him know that things aren't working, your marriage did not recover, and see what he suggests next.

It's not hard to see why things took a downturn .. the situation changed, the dates went away, and no new arrangements were made to get dates scheduled again.

This is something I would keep on the front burner. A year ago, Prisca did not want to have dates with me. And she even got mad at me when I brought it up. But I was not happy, and I spoke to her about it, and I backed away when the conversation got heated, and then brought it up again later.

What happens when you tell her "I would like to take you out alone - can we schedule some time for it?" What is her initial response?

Bob, did you listen to this?

Bob - your disrespect for your wife is very apparent to those of us in the third person, and the third person is really a much more reliable perspective to recognize disrespect from than the second person is. In other words, if I know you, I'm less likely to get it right.

I suspect that you have become very skilled at wrapping lovebusters in pretty packages. Your wife has no interest in working with you because there is nothing in it for her. She has had too many experiences with opening the box only to find a lovebuster inside. There is no surer way to turn a spouse off on using MB than to craft it into a club and keep hitting them over the head with it.

Now, I don't know you and I don't know exactly what is going on. I can only go with what I see. But I have to say, the disrespect you disclose here is considerable.

If I was in your shoes, here is what I would say.

"Squid. I love you very much and want nothing more than to have a loving, happy, mutually beneficial marriage with you. We certainly have a lot of history together and to fight for in this marriage. I want you to know that I am unhappy the way things are. However, I am willing to do my part to be the husband that you love and can respect. I know we can get there if we both make the effort.

How does the prospect of both of us being romantically in-love with each other sound to you? I truly believe that if we take another look at the Marriage Builders program we can both get what we want out of this marriage.

I cannot continue to go on the way we have been going. I fear that if we continue down this path, I will fall completely out of love with you and that scares me terribly. That is the last thing that I want. I want to spend the rest of my life with you, my wife, happily married.

I don't want to ever talk about what happened 10 years ago again. Never. What is in the past, is in the past. I am focused on today and the future. That is what we have control over.

I believe MB's can help both of us create the M we have always wanted. It can create a win-win for both of us!

Would you be willing to seriously consider looking at the MB program again? I am unsure exactly what your impression are of the program but if you are willing, we can tackle this thing together"

After I said this and if she was open to it, I would get HNHR and LB's out and read each book chapter by chapter out loud together.

I would then fill out the LB's questionnaire and the EN's questionnaire to pinpoint the exact areas to focus on.

Then have a minimum of 15hrs/wk of dates meeting each other's needs.

This would be a wonderful way to start your NEW M!.


This would be a fantastic way to start.

What good does it do today to discuss what you could have done differently 10 years ago?

None of that matters now. Not one bit. Living in the past will do you no good.

What you can control is today and tomorrow. That starts with making wise decisions starting today. January 16, 2014.

Bob, many of the women here know your wife. We know very well what it feels like to refuse to work on the marriage because we are withdrawn. However, there is probably nobody on the board who could help you more than Prisca. She has been where your wife is now, and she can tell you how markos turned that around and made her care about him and the marriage again.

I'll give you one example of something that might not seem significant to you but that might well feed into her distance from you: you mentioned not wanting to watch TV programmes that make your IQ bleed out onto the floor (or similar words).

I realise that you probably do not use those words to her, but do you say this in another way? Do you let her know that you find some of the stuff she watches pointless, or unintelligent, or mind-numbing? Do you ever pass comments about how programmes like hers appeal to the lowest common denominator? Do you say things like "OMG, not another cookery/home decorating/reality show!"?

If you say anything like that, this is probably being interpreted by her as insulting her intelligence and her taste. That would be a disrespectful judgement of her. If you've done this even sporadically over a long period of time it could be making her feel that you look down on her. That's a horrible feeling, and it doesn't make a woman want to be affectionate and friendly towards her husband.

You might not be doing that. I'm only asking you to consider it.

It is important to say that you don't want to watch a programme without expressing a judgement of your wife, who likes that kind of programme. If she ever asks you why you don't like home decorating shows or why you won't watch TV with her, you can say that you like reality shows when they involve wildlife. Don't demean the programmes she likes.

If you were going out on dates 4 times per week, you could build enough love units that it wouldn't matter if she sometimes watched her programmes while you did something else. You wouldn't feel that you never spend time together and that you have little in common when it comes to RC choices.

A couple should meet the intimate ENs mutually on and after dates, and avoids LBs in their daily interaction.

Bob, I've been making a list of additional things you can do that I think have a good chance of helping your marriage recover.

Would you like this list?

I have been reminded starkly on another thread that this site does not permit advocacy of any methodology but MB. I never dreamed that would also lead to a recommendation of love and grace being deleted by mods, but that is fair enough. This is no longer my house.

I do not think I have the calories to burn on only MB in my life now. All my fault. Thank you for your care. I shall seek another path. Be blessed.