To me, the principles laid out on the MB web site make perfect sense and show how things can be improved from both sides of a relationship. I think my marriage could be saved if we could use the MB principles as at least a basis for discussion but this requires both parties to engage.

I have asked my wife to look at the web site and share her thoughts with me but it is clear that she has not read it in detail, if at all, despite claiming she has. It may be that she hasn�t found it easy to navigate through the content, hasn�t had the time/motivation or that she has seen aspects she doesn�t agree with and has therefore has rejected all of it.

Obviously, I can�t *make* her do anything and any attempt to do so would be counter-productive. I am not ready to give up yet, however, and would like to try again to engage her with this material, if only so she can explain to me what she thinks is wrong about it.

The question is how best to achieve this. I could, for example, give her one of the books and hope she finds that more accessible, though I�m not sure which would be the best to start with. I�m hoping that someone here has met this situation in the past and can tell me what worked and what didn�t.

Many thanks

Hello Alibies, welcome to Marriage Builders. What are the most critical areas needing improvement?

We have been together a long time but in the past little while she has been behaving increasingly independently, socialising with others in preference to me, taking unnecessary trips etc. While that can be healthy to some extent, after a point you can lose sight of a marriage entirely.
Of course, she knows that some things she arranges are inappropriate and so keeps them secret until they happen 'to avoid an argument'. Of course, that now generates two problems - the event and the dishonesty - as well as the purely practical issue of needing to know what's happening.
Of course, I can't claim to be completely perfect and can find it hard to suppress my frustration when these events occur (maybe every few weeks), leading to largely unproductive (or worse) arguments.
Somehow, we need to break this cycle. I'm trying very hard to contain my reaction but she can't see that there's anything wrong in what she does. She says she doesn't need my 'permission' to do anything. Of course that's true, but I have failed to persuade her that there's a difference between 'permission' (which sounds controlling) and 'agreement' (which seems healthy).
I feel that if she could see these issues in the way they are articulated so clearly in MB, then she might understand that my perspective isn't unique and we could start to negotiate instead of arguing.

Can you be more specific about what events she's arranging that are inappropriate?

Almost anything and everything actually. Cultural events (ballet, plays), dinners, trips abroad (2 one-week trips this year so far).
I wouldn't say that absolutely everything is inappropriate, though some are (like trips abroad), but the fact that she starts from the premise that I wouldn't want/be able to come along and therefore she should do it regardless of my views is certainly not an approach I would take with her. As I said, hiding these things until disclosing them becomes inevitable also compounds the tensions they cause.

Your marriage is in serious trouble.

Your wife is either having an affair, which is the 90% certainty, or she has mentally divorced you, and that is why she doesn't give a fig how you feel about her independent behaviour, and that is why she won't read the MB material. She's not interested in improving the marriage, and she doesn't care tuppence that you are unhappy in the marriage, because she has mentally checked out of it.

How did you come to be in the position where she has such an independent life from yours? Has the marriage always contained those elements, or has this suddenly emerged?

I have pretty much excluded the affair proposition, although I accept that could easily occur as a natural consequence of the current situation.

We both have fairly demanding jobs and during the parenting phase we of course had to do many things independently. The nest has been empty for 4/5 years now and that's not an easy time for everyone, so I haven't wanted to be too hard on her. This sort of thing happens incrementally and I'm sure I have been guilty of letting things go too far without looking for an effective response.

She set up her own business a few years ago and started to interact with a lot of 'women in business' types, who are all seem to subscribe to the idea that men will only hold them back (despite the fact that I underwrote her business!). Unsurprisingly, most of these women are divorced and, I suspect, would like nothing better than to welcome a new member into their sorority, so undoubtedly take any opportunity to persuade her of the benefits of sharing life with a bottle of vodka and a cat to validate their own positions.

I suspect that she has attended more than a few 'empowerment' seminars, which have made her more aggressive than assertive. A pscychologist I know is convinced that she has been exposed to neurolinguistic programming as part of this, which is another tricky thing to address as it has made her hypersensitive to the slightest criticism.

How, exactly?

The very first thing that you need to do is prove that your wife is not having an affair. Part of the Marriage Builders recovery plan involves becoming so close to your wife that she could not possibly be having an affair without your knowledge.

Dr. Harley would say you should never criticize your wife.

Well, I didn't say I was perfect - far from it - although what I meant there is that at times she will see criticism where none was intended, so it's tricky even to raise some topics without an immediate defensive response.

Anyway, I wonder if anyone has an answer to the initial question?

Any time you try to educate your spouse is a disrespectful judgement. Does not matter whether it is a criticism or a request to read MB material. So start by making yourself familiar with the methods here and then use them yourself. You can certainly tell her what you are doing but she should not be forced.

Want her to be open and honest? Start by handing her the passwords to your computer and phone. Tell her that, now you have started to learn about MB, you realise that it is important that nothing be kept from her.

Follow that with hard core negotiating about what you will do this weekend. Tell her you want to start doing more things with her. Find out what is on her wish list . Pay careful attention to what she says. You might find something that jumps out as appealing to you that you would never have thought of. That is how I had an amazing holiday last year.

Lead by example and keep asking for feedback.

At the same time, quietly snoop for a possible affair. Do not ask her. Is she glued to her phone and do you have the password? We can help you with that too.

They are gathering information to be able to do so.

Markos had a wife that was not interested in MB at all, and he brought her around.

How have you done this when she is taking international trips alone?

If you want to motivate your wife to do MB you'll need to learn what things you are doing that are demotivating and eliminate them.

As long as she feels criticized, she will not be interested in MB.

What topic is she defensive about?
How are you bringing those topics up?

NoA, here is what I think I would do in your situation. I'd work on all of these:

1. First off, I would get close enough to my wife and know enough about her she couldn't possibly be having an affair without my knowledge. Snoop and investigate and find out who the men in her life are.
2. I would tell my wife that I am very lonely and want to have a close and intimate relationship with her. I would start inviting her on dates. She might not accept, but I would keep inviting.
3. I would ask my wife not to spend the night apart from me ever again and pledge to do the same.
4. I would start working hard to make love bank deposits in my account in my wife's love bank and avoid making love bank withdrawals. I would focus primarily on conversation and affection because those make much bigger love bank deposits than the other emotional needs. I would strive to become practiced and skilled at these.

If you want your wife to follow Marriage Builders, the recipe is simple: enter her life, disrupt any affair she might be having, and get her to fall in love with you again.

I'm not sure I am trying to educate her in that Stalinist sense. What I would like is for her to engage with the material so that we can have a mutually informed discussion. I happen (as most people here probably do) to think the reasoning and principles expounded are articulated well here, but others may well differ and we should all be open to persuasion when there is more than one possible version of 'right'.
She knows my phone password. If it weren't a requirement, it wouldn't have a password. My computer is open to anyone with no password required.
I ask every weekend what she would like to do and I am open to anything. Perhaps tomorrow night when I see her (she's away for work just now) we will agree on something or perhaps she will announce that she has something arranged already that she hasn't told me about. That, of course, is the core of the problem.
I don't have the PW to her phone but can't help feeling it would be equally disrespectful to ask for it. As it's an iPhone, I don't have the $1.3m the FBI can afford to access it without a PW (!)

These are all the things I'm doing based on advice here after asking for help with a H who is neglectful and engaged in IB. I didn't know how to get him to "do MB" either without trying to educate him, so the advice was to do the 3 things above. So far, it's going great for us and changes have already been made.

If you want help, listen to the advice here.

Markos has given you a very well written plan to accomplish that.

It is not disrespectful to ask for a transparent marriage.
You could MAKE it disrespectful if you called her names, or acted like she was a horrible person for not giving you her passwords.
But simply asking for them is not showing disrespect.

That's not the same as coming up with ideas and inviting her though, is it? For a woman it usually makes love bank deposits for her husband to take the initiative in planning the date, at least at first.