</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> Terminator: I have just read elsewhere that your OM would never even tell you he loved you. THAT was too special? I don't get it.... </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I responded to this on your thread. But I got to thinking about why you would ask this, and why you 'don't get it'.

What value is there in saying you love someone? I assume you have told your OW that you love her. What does that mean? Conversely, what does it mean when you (if you do) tell your wife you love her? Have you done so, in the term of your affair with OW?

Is love only a feeling, or is it also action? After you say it, does that mean you should do/be/commit to something? If so, what?

<small>[ November 23, 2003, 07:18 PM: Message edited by: terminator ]</small>

bumping this...if any answer is forthcoming, I'd sure like to read it!!!

Terminator:

I sent you an earlier response which somehow disappeared deep into the bowels of the internet. I can't again write so eloquently, but I will try to summarize my earlier thoughts.

Yes, love needs be more than mere words - it should also be backed up by both genuine emotion and, yes, something beyond just that nice feeling we associate with love. Love is a varied as the span of human experience: there is the love of a parent, the love of a friend, of a child, of a lover - nearly endless permutations because love is always a reflection of both the giver and the receiver. My love has to be something different than your love because we are different people.

I understand that love must be more than words, but speaking the words "I love you" are undeniably important. Your earlier post left me imagining a cold man, someone who withheld from you something very important - why did he refuse to state his feelings for you?

I have told my OW many, many times that I love her. I have told my wife, though not lately, that I love her too. My feelings for the two were never mutually exclusive, but I know now my focus on my lover slowly weakened the love I felt for my wife and its hold on me. That slipping away is at the root of my current struggle. Just now my strongest love is for my children and my lover. Those of you here know that is a terrible conflict. In the depths of my depression I scarcely know what to do.

In the depths of my depression I scarcely know what to do.

Choose

your depression is born of indecision

there is no peace until you choose

c_f,

As usual I have to agree with Pep--and I've lived what she spoke of--the torment that comes from staying in limbo or in a state that you know is wrong. I know peace now and I value it more than just about anything.

Not surprisingly, you didn't touch on action and character as a part of one's love. About my X-MM, you wrote:

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I understand that love must be more than words, but speaking the words "I love you" are undeniably important. Your earlier post left me imagining a cold man, someone who withheld from you something very important - why did he refuse to state his feelings for you? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Again, if I dwelt on that I would still be in the affair. I will say this though--he wasn't cold. He was passionate and conflicted and bright and funny and interesting and all that... never cold, though I think he was very self-protective. And, in a way, I think his not saying it has a funny kind of integrity. He must have felt that to say so meant a promise, a commitment, which he wasn't going to make. I also appreciate that he also didn't do all those things everyone else says their WH did--lie to me, complain about his wife, fantasize about being together, etc.

When I look back at certain things he said and did I don't doubt he had feelings for me. I don't need anything else. As I said, if I were still at a stage of emotional maturity where it mattered to me whether he loved me or not I would still be in the affair (and undifferentiated, Pep!!!)

I loved him, though, and told him so, and I consider getting him (and me) out of the affair the best proof of that there could ever be. It is an awful situation that nobody should get, be, or especially stay in.

Action and character. There was a time when everything in me - everything! - told me to stay with my wife, to not soothe my hurt by spreading pain to her, to my children, to my extended family. I am fully aware of that. That is what I would have defined as character. That is also what I thought before I came face to face with the very real possibility of losing someone very important to me. A man smarter than I am once wrote that it was no great feat to be brave away from the front, that courage was being brave right at that spot where the battle rages. In this particular instance, I don't know which is the more difficult course: staying in my marriage with all the security, comfort, respect, etc. or facing all that would come due should I leave.

I have faced many challenges in my life, but I don't know how to tell my children any of this. What a hellish existence I have created!!!!

As to integrity - it is not integrity to love someone but refuse to say for it fear of what it will bring. And why is it a sign of emotional maturity not to need/want to hear "I love you" ??? Some of what you write just doesn't make sense to me.

But, then again, hell - a lot of what I do doesn't make sense to me.

It's not the fact of needing/wanting to hear it at all--it's the fact of needing/wanting to hear it from a married person in an affair (when married oneself).

What could it be, except: "I love you, but..." (then I get to hear all about duty and responsibility and being torn--kinda the same rap we're doing here, with you and your OW.) I didn't wanna hear that. Better total silence than that, and I think he knew it.

Ya know?

Everyone's different, and especially men and women. For me, being able to walk away without it meant that I valued many other things more. For me, coming to a point of not wanting or needing it was significant because in my life I had wanted/needed it too much. Are you a religious person at all? Now might be a good time to take up praying.

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> As to integrity - it is not integrity to love someone but refuse to say for it fear of what it will bring. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">PS: c_f, we don't know if it was fear, and it's useless to speculate what it was that stopped him from saying it. Maybe he didn't love me. So what? What would the love of such a person mean? What could he do to show it?

(and undifferentiated, Pep!!!)

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Term, you are so right!

Have you read the chapter about "2 choice dilemma" yet?

I'm telling you Term, that chapter opened me up and could see my life's choices with new eyes. It is exciting information, isn't it?

I am so impressed with you Term.

Pep

What a hellish existence I have created!!!!

Yep. Unfortunately, you have a family who loves you... and needs you to be a man.

As to integrity - it is not integrity to love someone but refuse to say for it fear of what it will bring.

Huh? For fear it will bring "a hellish existance" .... is this what you are really saying about integrity? Saying "I love you" .... and with those words destroy innocent hearts and create your own hell on earth? Please explain what you mean, I'm pretty sure I don't get what you're saying.


And why is it a sign of emotional maturity not to need/want to hear "I love you" ???

Where is saying "I love you" to another man's wife emotionally mature? I don't get that either.... please 'splain.

I think you are thinking this:

If you love her .... then this affair isn't really adultry and a sin ... it's love.

You try to make something really ugly appear pretty with words of love.

As Tina Turner sang.... "What's love go to do with it?"

Pep

<small>[ November 24, 2003, 07:34 PM: Message edited by: Pepperband ]</small>

hey Pep--

Thanks for jumping into this thread...don't know who you rescued, probably both of us. (I was about to get nasty and mean with this person...he needs it, but I probably don't. I think this is the fog. In fact I know this is the fog! He doesn't get it that love is beside the point in these things.)

Yeah--Chapter 2 and every other chapter in that book...I was so impressed with this man's skill and clarity of purpose...the way he worked with people and wrote about it. Yes, the two-choice dilemma... (" and holding on to yourself", "self-soothing", "tolerating pain for growth", "taking the hit", even "****ing, doing and being done"...all of it.) That book has SO MUCH in it. I haven't read anything like it in a long time, maybe ever. The fact that it is about couples but really about self...I was fascinated with that whole concept of differentiation. Explains a lot of behavior. You were right, Pep--reading that book (and a few others, recently) changed all of the relationships in my life, starting the next day...in short it made it easier to be forgiving in a lot of matters.

The part I'll really never forget is when he was talking about the "place of integrity" in that abused woman--trying to appeal to it, get her to speak from that place in herself. Really really skilled therapy.

I was really bummed, tho, to get a copy of the book that had a missing section in the back (in the sex and death chapter), where one section was repeated (in the middle of the index!!!). A binding boo-boo...so I can't say that I have read it, all. :-(

<small>[ November 24, 2003, 07:57 PM: Message edited by: terminator ]</small>

Originally posted by terminator:

I was really bummed, tho, to get a copy of the book that had a missing section in the back (in the sex and death chapter), where one section was repeated (in the middle of the index!!!). A binding boo-boo...so I can't say that I have read it, all. :-(

If I were you, I'd call the publisher, and complain, I'll bet you they send a new copy!


Pep

my 2 cents

don't know Conflicted Father's thread but from what is written here:

seems to be trying to make right in his mind what he knows to be wrong.

it doesn't take a genius to know what is right or wrong in his situation - just a man that can do the right thing - doing what is right when it is much easier to do what is wrong - that's a real man (or woman).

choosing to get rid of OW, stay in marraige and make it work is the hard thing to do, but then it is the right thing to do. Too difficult for many

stayin' dark. DD

Originally posted by conflicted_father:
That is also what I thought before I came face to face with the very real possibility of losing someone very important to me.

Seems to me, the person you are losing is YOU


In this particular instance, I don't know which is the more difficult course: staying in my marriage with all the security, comfort, respect, etc. or facing all that would come due should I leave.

And I suggest to you ... that you must choose what you are willing to sacrifice. You cannot stay where you are, for you are sacrificing your soul in this quagmire. You are giving up your own sense of self and relying on "which woman should I choose" to create your identity.

THIS is an identity crisis .... and you should see it as such.

You never "stay" in a marriage ..... you grow with it.

I refuse to believe that you are as spiritually dense as you portray yourself with this nonsense.

And who gives a crap about which course is "more difficult"? Do you advise your children to always take the easier path?

Wake up and take a look at the man you are.

Who do you see?

<small>[ November 25, 2003, 10:54 AM: Message edited by: Pepperband ]</small>

Pep Term BB et al check the message Marked "Urgent" from Feeling Alone
H