I have a question and am unable to find an anwser or any good advice about my situation. I am a reovering WS. My wife and I are comming up on year one of discovery.
I am a busines traveler. My wife is fine with it and has been from the beginning. But one of the things that I am unsure of how to handle is that for ten plus years my wife has not cared if I travelled. Her attitude is that of whatever I want to do is fine. Even in recovery she does not care either way. When asked about it and why she does not care she said she did in the beginning but I do not think that is true. She mentioned the extra load she had to carry but never once that she missed me. Her excuse for never mentioning anything about not wanting me to travel is that she did not want me to feel bad. But for the first few years I travelled Monday through Friday every week. She also worked and was scheduled to work every Saturday. I would ask her to take a Saturday off but she would not for me. She was able to get off for other things but never for me. So I dont think she really missed me or cares one way or the other. I understand the indifference now after cheating but this was all before I cheated. I currently travel about 30-40%. There are other examples of actions I can point to.Then she wonders why I feel disconnected from her. It would be nice to be wanted. My real questions are. Is there hope for a real recovery if she does not care if I stay on the road or not? I have applied all of Dr. Harleys principles and she still does not care if I am gone. Is there hope for things getting better on this issue?

You have not applied all the principles if you still travel 30-40%.

If she doesn't care that you are gone, then I would say there is no hope for real recovery.

Welcome to MB.

I would stop traveling immediately.

Please read this Traveling Jobs

Very true. O guess I have not applied all of the principles if I am still travelling. I do have another question about it though.She says when I started travelling she thought things were good between us. Is that true or is she in denial if she did not care either way?

It may have been true, but when you're on the road as long as you are her LB$ is draining.

You aren't gettin 15-20 hours of UA to keep her balance above the romantic threshold.

When can you stop traveling?

Did you listen to the clips from Dr. H?

Yes, I have already been looking for another job. Hopefully soon.

You won't have a marriage under those conditions because creating an integrated, intimate marriage will be impossible. Even people in romantic, integrated marriages can't get away with skipping this step. It doesn't work.

If you will stop traveling and work on creating an integrated, romantic marriage, she will care.[20-25 hours per week of UA time] She doesn't care now because she is emotionally detached from you. You can change that if you change your lifestyle.

Good deal!!

Justphact, I don't know much about the circumstances of your affair -- how it happened, how it was found out, how it ended. Strikes me as kind of odd that your first post would be on a tech matter.

That said, it sounds like you haven't applied the single tool/concept/action-step which I found out was most crucial to rebuilding a marriage (once the first orders-of-business of ending the affair & cutting off all contact with the affair partner was handled) -- which is that you then need to spend significant time with your spouse on a sustained basis, giving one another your undivided attention, so that you can meet one another's emotional needs. NFW can you do this right if you're traveling 30-40% of the time. No way.

Now, maybe your wife doesn't show she cares whether you're gone. Maybe she's gotten conditioned to your not being around or available. Maybe she's built up an emotional wall of defense against being vulnerable to you. I'm no armchair pop-psychologist (nor any psychologist at all), so I don't wanna waste time speculating further along these lines. Better to focus on things over which you have more direct control.

In that regard, my main point is, if you don't attend to this problem of getting in enough time together & make it happen, indifference is indeed what you're going to get in your marriage. In hindsight, I definitely saw it myself in my own marriage, in the way my wife & I let things slide in our relationship before the affair, and I saw the difference it made afterwards when we made concerted efforts to change our old patterns; and over 5 years out, I can tell ya that I see clear-as-day that when our "UA" time together is high, we feel better & closer; and periodically when we let it ebb, things get kinda ragged-around-the-edges in not too long.

The way you've couched the problem above could be read to indicate that maybe you've been waiting for her to show she cares about your traveling, before you take proactive steps to curtail it. If so, my 2 cents for you is that marital recovery doesn't work well that way. You were the guy who went after some strange, and this early in recovery, you consequently bear an extra obligation to get off your buns and to lead on fixing things that helped lead to that situation. You need to take actions in order to overcome indifference; you can't hope to succeed doing it in a backwards sequence, where you'd wait for the indifference to magically disappear as a prerequisite before you take key actions.

Hopefully you're starting to get this & are on top of the job search in order to get your travel time way down. Again, you've got to lead on this.

Yes!

It is very common for a wife to detach from her husband who travels. But if you get a job that allows you to be home every night, you will be in a good position to win her back so that she DOES care again.

Have you read about Undivided Attention time? Your wife needs this time with you in order to be in love with you.

Here's another good read.
The Critical Importance of Undivided Attention