Why did you tell him to leave for one night?? You need to pack his bags and move him out. You are not "indifferent" to him. He will wreck your health if you don't get him out.

Wow, this is really heartless of this man. In my case, my husband typically is not one to show empathy and compassion even when he used to claim he loved me. There have been many situations in which he did not show any empathy for me. So it makes much sense for him to not be moved by my emotional pain. I am not surprised by this. I did expose the affair as soon as I found out which was about 5 months into the affair already. He actively tried to get her pregnant after I found out and exposed the affair and demanded him to stop it. He started saying he was done as soon as I found out the affair and exposed to family and friends. Just like you said "he was already done in his mind long before you found out" - yes, he told me that he already thought about divorcing me last year. I guess once he came back home he could have possibly come out of this state but he did not. I think him separating from the AP made things worse. He was much more drawn to her.

What I meant was if there was anything I could have done after I found out about the affair to prevent the divorce? I did everything possible to stop the affair and as it just happens the AP did him wrong and so he claims to be done with her.

He already packed, he is leaving tomorrow. He does not want to stay here. He wants to leave asap. We just need to take care of some documents tomorrow, that's why he is still here. Otherwise, he would have left already. Even the first night, he left to stay at a hotel because I kept asking him a lot of questions and he did not want to discuss anything with me.

I'm glad he left. Once again you need to go to plan B. Your husband has acted with contempt towards you. He's made you the enemy. A military tactic. You can't want him either if you have any self respect. Once the divorce happens you need to protect yourself due to his instability. You need to heal and go forward. He's no longer welcome in your home. You are no longer his helper to coordinate personal affairs or take orders from. His helpful counsel to you is fog babble. Go dark. He hasn't crashed yet. Have you seen your doctor?

I'm not sure you got my point. I did not tell you this story just to tell you about a heartless man. I told you this because I think Dr Harley's advice to that woman would be the same to you; just let him go. He is not rescuable.

Your question was whether you could have done anything differently. My answer was intended to show that nothing you could have done would have made a difference. Your H was set on going and nothing could have stopped him. The situations are similar, in that the deployment took him away from home and you only saw each other every couple of months, as with my daughter's friend's situation. In both cases, there was an enormous emotional distance between the spouses, cause by them living apart. It was easy in both cases for one spouse to form a deep emotional attachment with someone else, with the other spouse completely unaware that this was going on. In both cases, that deep connection went on for so long that the faithful spouse was completely out of the frame by the time she found out about the affair. There was no way to bring the unfaithful spouse back to the marriage. That is what I was trying to tell you.

Dr Harley does not have much success with military marriages where one spouse is deployed, and this is because it is impossible to create a romantic, integrated marriage when the two spouses live completely separate, independent lives.

You have been given some good advice. I agree that there is nothing you could have done differently. He should move out now. Take care of yourself legally and financially. And you should never see or speak to him again.

Sadly, it is true about lack of success with military marriages and deployments. The couple ends up living independent lives out of necessity and it is hugely difficult to have a romantic marriage. In the old days, there were few married military couples and there was a saying that "If the Army (Marines, whatever service) had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued one". There was some wisdom to that. And I know I sound very old fashioned, especially in that I myself had a 28 year long Army career and retired as a Colonel. My husband and I have been married 34 years and had a great marriage until separations from the deployments became more and more frequent.

You have lots going you. You have the potential to have a great marriage with someone else.

AM

I did get your point. Thanks, SugarCane.

I have heard that saying. The thing is I know what I signed up for when I married him. I have been with my husband for 13 years out of which he has been in the military for 9 years. If I did not think I could have stayed with him despite being separated I would not have married him in the first place. I knew I had to make this sacrifice. It turns out, he is the one that is being bothered by the separation much more than I. He should not be in the military then. His contract ends next year and he could get out if he is so much bothered by being separated from each other. By then, I would have finished with school and again we could have moved in together. We have been able to stay together all these years. I just can't follow his thinking process and understand why he wanted a divorce. I told him if he does not love me, then he can give us time to address whatever issues we have to make love present again in this relationship. He did not want that. This is what has been bothering me - that he did not even want to give us time and try to address the issues.

But did you know that divorce was the most likely outcome? Divorce is epidemic in the military and Dr. Harley has never figured out to overcome the damage caused to the marriage by deployment separations. You might have wanted to stay together, but that agreement is not worth much when the couple falls out of love. When the couple falls out of love, due to the emotional detachment caused by separation, the marriage will always be at high risk. Just an agreement to stay married is not enough to hold a marriage together.

Dr Harley did identify many marriages that did - miraculously - stay together through deployment, but he could find none who were in love.

Of course, there is damage to the marriage due to deployments. Falling out of love is not an excuse to me. Any adult realizes that he or she will fall out of love. I managed to survive after all these deployments and separations because I can function on my own and be happy on my own and still keep the love for him. It is called you choose to love someone and take action to love someone and you make arrangements in your life to make things work. In his case, he might have been unhappy because we have been separated and he never raised the issue and let me know that it has been bothering him to such an extent that he wanted a divorce. I have never pressured him, always gave him freedom to do whatever he wanted, and have always supported him and encouraged him to try different things. I am far from being a high maintenance woman. I am a thinking person. If he told me something was wrong, I would have addressed it. He basically gave me no warning and time so I can possibly do something about it. He has no regards to me and no commitment to our marriage. This is pure selfishness on his part. He obviously managed so many years to deal with it. What happened this time? He found someone else. No excuses for his stupid actions. If he so much wanted to live with me, he could have waited for his contract to end next year and come back home so we can live together. Besides, I really am not sure if he is still with this woman. I have a feeling he still is. This American society (yes, I am a native of another country) thrives on selfishness. I am so sick of it. American Motto: "I will do what makes ME and only ME happy." How ridiculous!

Most marriages don't stay together once they fall out of love, though. So the key is to maintain the romantic love in the marriage. That is what this program does. Once a couple falls out of love, they are vulnerable to affairs and eventually divorce.

My suggestion to you would be to read the book Surviving an Affair so you can understand what happened here so you can avoid this in the future. If you get married again, you will likely be facing this same situation all over again unless you make some critical changes in your approach to marriage.

That is human nature that is not unique to Americans. People get married to be happy. They don't get married to be alone. And believe me that is the case with people in foreign countries. The bottom line is that living apart will destroy most marriages. This is why Dr Harley counsels couples to never spend the night apart.

He said to me yesterday all the colorful disrespectful words one can possibly think of, made a monster out of me and tried to make me feel guilty of so many things, and then before he left he came and hugged me a couple of times and told me "I am sorry for what has happened these past few days, I don't want us to stay enemies." To me, the is the most devaluing and damaging thing he could do to me and tell me. I'd rather leave it on bad terms. It would be so much easier to me to forget he ever existed.

Yes, they don't stay together because they choose not to do work to improve the marriage. This is the case with my husband - he has always put minimum effort into doing whatever it is he is doing, if something is too time consuming he would not even try it, he puts up with nothing that requires a little bit of patience, and if something requires some work he won't even attempt it.

What critical changes should I be making? I believe every one in a marriage should be who she or he wants to be, free, and your spouse should add to who you are. Like I said, since my husband decided to be in the military he should be the one to know whether he is capable of living separated from me or not. This is not my responsibility. I can only trust him. I know that I can do it and that's why I have stayed married to him. He is active duty now. Why does he think that even if he were to get a housewife, he would be spending more time with her than with me and will not be separated. Once I am done with school I will have a regular job like most people in this universe. How does that make me different from any other spouse he could possible have?

But none of that will keep a person in a marriage. You seem to think that an obligation will keep a person in a marriage and that is not true. People get married to be happy. When that is not the case, they get divorced. You have learned this lesson the hard way.


And look where that belief got you? My suggestion is to put aside your own failed ideas and learn how to create a great marriage. Surely you don't want to go through this again?

When I got married, I did not get married to be happy because I was already happy on my own. I married because I loved my husband and wanted him to be in my life and share my life with him. If you are unhappy and get married in order to become happy, that is the wrong approach to marriage because only then it will end in a divorce because you obviously are not happy with yourself and finally realize marriage does not make you happy.

But your marriage is ending in divorce. I am just pointing out that your ideas have not worked for you and you might want to rethink them. Your own approach to marriage has not worked for you and will not work for others.

Before I was married, I was unhappy because I wasn't married. Everything else in my life was lined up just fine,and I had huge, exotic plans, but I was unhappy. Of COURSE I got married to be happy (and I gladly gave up my exotic plans to do it!). I certainly didn't get married to BE UNHAPPY. Marriage completed me. And that's okay.

And you're the one getting a divorce, not me. Maybe you should stay away from the anecdotal evidence and learn the plan that works.

That belief is detrimental to marriages. It is not a given that you WILL fall out of love.

You realize the world thrived on selfishness before America was even around, right? We didn't invent the concept.