wow. Take in all that Theoden has said: GAL and detach----expecting NOTHING from her (no texts, phone call, smile)will save your life. Yes it is counter intuitive! Keep memorizing and living out Sandi's37 rules but remember: you are still early into the game. I am still early into the game (4 months since DBing) Too early to lose hope and throw the dB book away. It ain't over till it's over and even without dB I know of several people in my life who made it through a hellish separation and are still together. It can happen just keep the "road home smoothed and paved" a dB saying for don't backslide and lose all those hard earned changes. People who have reverted back to their old ways, YES that happens But if you are working on yourself and those changes are for YOU and make you happier and everyone in your world happier, not just your WAW you will stay changed. And then everyone wins. Don't try to get comfort from this with family and friends: you get pity or "just move on" come here for support often. Fight with us who want our M back. I am with you man. Work on what you need to change. Be the man only a fool would leave!
Me 42 W:35 M: 14yrs T:15yrs D: 8yrs D:6yrs S:3yrs BD: "I want a D"09/03/14 Sep: 30/06/14
Don't give up when you still have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.
It hurts like hell, and you (like all of us) have racing thoughts and can't get yout spouse or their affair partner, or the whole bloody mess out of our mind. To tell you to try not to think about it is probably not too helpful: no one is THAT zen. ;-)
The reason people recommend "get a life" activity is to help you save yourself. Any activity that demands your full attention and helps you find flow (losing yourself in the activity) frees your mind from fixations on the affair. Sailing, martial arts, rock-climbing, painting, etc are all things that might help you regain balance AND give your mind a break. You can't really worry about your marriage when you are reaching for the next hand-hold as you scale the climbing wall or ducking someone's left hook in your kick-boxing class. Get in shape, give your mind some rest. Running on a treadmill won't help, it allows your mind to drift and you'll have racing thoughts. Pick something that really engages you.
On the positive side, you don't have kids. Sorry if that's cold-comfort right now, but this would be significantly worse if your kids had to go through this. You really have only ONE person to worry about protecting: YOU.
I'm not going to tell you to fix yourself or become a better person you so your wife can see the positive changes. That makes the next 6-24 mos of your life a miserable hell of walking on egg-shells and worrying if she's noticing your changes. Generally speaking, it doesn't really work. She knows your doing it to win her back so she's really suspicious and most people backslide from those changes. Lots of DB "champs" that mentored me THOUGHT they saved their marriages by becoming superman for 12 mos, 18 mos even 2 yrs. Eventually they slipped back into more usual behavior, and guess what? Yup. Their spouses ended up leaving them and cheating on them again. They are both divorced now. They used to have success stories posted on the DB boards.
Yes in THEORY if you, through some herculean effort, are able to change yourself significantly, and maintain those positive changes FOREVER, you might have a chance at attracting your wife back and keeping her. Michelle Weiner Davis says it's the hardest thing you'll ever do. In my opinion, you might have a better shot of making it through the Navy Seals training class. Heck...I believed it at first, and I SWORE I could change. Guess what? Didn't happen for me. I got exhausted. I forgot to grow a spine in the process and I didn't lay down healthy boundaries. In the end, the fact my wife didn't think her affair was wrong (even though she was open to reconciling)took the wind out of my sails. I couldn't stay married to someone who thought adultery was a viable, morally acceptable option.
For your marriage to be saved, you BOTH need to want to save it. DB-ing only gets their attention, but it doesn't really make them want to change themselves, or even experience remorse for cheating on you. That would take serious marriage counseling.
Here's my advice.
1. Don't pursue her. the more energy you put into the relationship NOW, the more she's going to pull back. If you give her space, she MIGHT be curious. Or then she might not. No guarantees here.
2. See a Lawyer and protect yourself/your assets. Know your options. Take steps to move on with your life. You can always stop the train, but getting it started means you are serious about caring for yourself. Right now you are acting like you are a footnote in your wife's story. Start acting like you are the main character in your own play. ;-)
3. If you have evidence of her affair you have to decide if you want to use it. You can wait a period of time and see how it plays out. Confronting her is only good if you give her an ultimatum. It's me or him. Decide now. Even Michelle Weiner Davis talks about ultimatums. They usually are only effective after the the Last Resort Technique and after going dark. In my opinion, your wife may have already decided. Ultimatums are, to some degree, a sign of strength - they show resolve and backbone, which is attractive. Unfortunately you only get to use them once and they don't always work out.
4. Give yourself a time-line. 3, 6 ,9 mos. Decide how long YOU are willing to leave the door open before you file for divorce. And stick to it. If it doesn't work out, at least you walk out with your dignity. Otherwise you'll be dragged in kicking and screaming through a divorce where you have lost all your power.
5. My personal experience though the whole process is this: the WORSE things I imagined would happen DID happen. And several years after the fact, I'm OK. I wasn't destroyed. The worst case scenario isn't going to destroy you. If I had that perspective then, perhaps I wouldn't have been so frozen in fear. What's the WORST thing that can happen? You lose your wife. And THEN what? Can your life still experience joy and meaning? Yes. Do we rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes? Yes. It's really hard to see that, but really, had I lost my fear, I might have been a bit more creative and, perhaps would have been able to f*ck with the OM in my situation, who happened to have been my best-friend.
6. Put on you inner Samurai. Suit up. Lock and Load. It's YOUR life.
Peace,
Theoden
Awesome, awesome post, Oden. Some real wisdom in there.
Any advice? Do I throw in the towel or hold out hope? We've had pretty much zero contact for the past three months since she left. There's been a little, but nothing that would allow her to see me in a positive light. Obviously she's not going to see a new me at the divorce proceedings. So do I just give her the divorce without a fight or do I try to drag it out a bit to see if the affair will end within the six month time frame?
M 16 T 17 W moved in w/ AP (OW) 5/14 ILYBNIL 5/14 A discovered 6/14 D papers served via USPS 8/14 Filed my response 9/14 D final 5/15...
It's hard to give advice when we've heard nothing from you since mid-July, nor did you even respond to the TON of advice you got from Theoden (and others) above.
Can you fill in the nearly 2-month gap with some sort of update, other than "well, she filed." ???
I came back to see if I could get help after she filed.
My efforts at reestablishing contact were not working, so in mid-July I did a targeted exposure of the affair (close friends and her family). She called me furious (first time she'd called me in two months). I told her I wanted to help her, because the affair was going to hurt her physically, emotionally and spiritually. She said she understood why I did it but that it was not helpful. She then reiterated that she wanted a divorce. I told her she would have to do that herself. Three weeks later, she filed.
What else would you like to know? There's really nothing else to update, because she refused to answer my calls or texts. She hasn't communicated with me since she filed. Some people are encouraging me to write her a letter, but I said everything I wanted to say to her when she called. She's still in the fog, so none of it registered. Writing a letter will fall on deaf ears (blind eyes?), too, I'm afraid.
Last edited by Cristy; 09/04/1406:54 PM.
M 16 T 17 W moved in w/ AP (OW) 5/14 ILYBNIL 5/14 A discovered 6/14 D papers served via USPS 8/14 Filed my response 9/14 D final 5/15...
My efforts at reestablishing contact were not working, so in mid-July I did a targeted exposure of the affair (close friends and her family). She called me furious (first time she'd called me in two months). I told her I wanted to help her, because the affair was going to hurt her physically, emotionally and spiritually. She said she understood why I did it but that it was not helpful. She then reiterated that she wanted a divorce. I told her she would have to do that herself. Three weeks later, she filed.
What did you expect her reaction to be?? Telling her all the ways her A is going to hurt her comes across as nothing but controlling. You would have been better served by stating your boundary (I will not live in an open marriage) as opposed to outing her, but what's done is done.
What did you expect her reaction to be?? Telling her all the ways her A is going to hurt her comes across as nothing but controlling. You would have been better served by stating your boundary (I will not live in an open marriage) as opposed to outing her, but what's done is done.
Are you still in coaching?
Yes, I know I shouldn't have gone into all that. But I figured it was probably the last chance I'd get to talk to her, so I wanted her to know that I cared about her. Controlling or not, I can't just sit by while the person I love more than anything in the world engages in self-destructive behavior.
I am not in coaching anymore, because I don't see what else there is to do. Nothing worked. I stuck with things for two weeks at a time trying to reach her, but she didn't respond to anything. She's deep in fog territory. I had hoped that her parents would be able to talk some sense into her. Her father told her to talk things over with me, but she refused.
M 16 T 17 W moved in w/ AP (OW) 5/14 ILYBNIL 5/14 A discovered 6/14 D papers served via USPS 8/14 Filed my response 9/14 D final 5/15...
