Credo, About getting over setbacks- read pages 155-156 in the Divorce Remedy. Copy the paragraphs and post them to your refrigerator door or someplace where people can't see them. Take the advice to heart. Don't be hard on yourself, just pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start all over again. Don't get discouraged. You have to be kind to yourself. Michele
Canadian, Sorry things took a turn for the worse. I hope your session went well and that you received good advice about what to do next. Sounds like a cooling off period may not be a bad idea. You can't push her to talk if she doesn't want to. But I guess you know that too. Hope things are looking up by now. Michele
Wantittowork, You ask whether doing a 180 will lead to out of sight, out of mind. It totally depends on your particular situation. That's the point about all of the methods I write about. You try something, and you watch the results. If it isn't working, you switch gears. But doing the same old thing when it isn't working is the best way to create problems in your marriage.
So, try your 180 for a few weeks and see what happens.
Dear Hoping, I think it's a good sign that your h wants to have sex with you now since he wasn't interested before. That's certainly moving in the right direction.
As I read your post, I couldn't help but wonder, "Do you and your h talk about sex? HAve you asked him about his interest in only having oral sex? Have you tried initiating other things with him?"
Without knowing your h, it's difficult to tell what's going on in his head about sex. Sometimes people are hesitant to have intercourse for a variety of reasons, including fear of pregnancy.
So, if you haven't already, talk to him and see what he says. Michele
Golden, I know you say you've read my books and done other things to help your situation, but in your post, you write mostly about your h's state of mind and how you feel about it. What have you tried so far with what results? That's what being solution-oriented is all about. Michele
Pas, I don't know that I fully understand your 3 types of affairs. I'm not much into categorizing anyway. But since you ask, I'll take a stab at it. Bridge affairs, by your definition, are sure to end the marriage. However, I'm fairly certain that everyone on this board whose spouse is having an affair, and that's a lot of people, would define the affair as a bridge affair. Yet there certaintly have been those who have overcome the infidelity and gotten their marriages back on track.
So, I don't know how to respond to your question. Some people who think they're madly in love with their affairees, come to realize that things aren't quite what they seemed.
But this doesn't mean a thing to you if you're feeling hopeless. I know that. I just don't think that affairs or people fit into nice little boxes. Life would be so much more comfortable if they did. I wish things were different for you. Michele
Lan, If you've already written about this, forgive me, but have you written her a heartfelt letter about your feelings? Have you gotten angry at her recently? Does she really know how you're suffering with this or have you been totally understanding most of the time? Michele
Nicky, Why is your mother living with you? Parents who live with their grown childre, no matter how wonderful they might be, can put stress on the marriage. Your husband may feel left out of your close relationship with your mom and doesn't have a good way of talking to you about it. He might not even recognize it himself. He might just feel angry all the time and unfortunately, take it out on your mom.
quote: If you've already written about this, forgive me, but have you written her a heartfelt letter about your feelings?
Michele, I have written my wife a heartfelt letter about my feeling in the past for couple times. She knows how I feel and what I want but she just couldn’t forgive herself for what she has done. Maybe and just maybe it was at the wrong time when I wrote her those heartfelt letters. I have not written any letter to her for several months now. My wife has written me sets and sets of letters (not heartfelt letters) in the past to communicate with me. Each set contained at least 5 or more pages. The last time I received those letters was in May 2001. She wrote me a set of letters almost everyday for a week and the last two sets contained 39 pages mentioning the history of our marriage including the affair itself.
Michele, here is a timeline that my wife mentioned in one of her letters after I kept asking about what she meant when she said, “Give me time to heal”.
1. Stay as roommate (no physical) for 1 year starting May 2001 (our 15th anniversary) 2. Start dating each other again (for lunch and shopping only, no physical) beginning May 2002. 3. Exchange a new vow and “re-marry” on our 20th anniversary quietly between us (4 years after dating to perfect my love to her), and go to the honeymoon along with the kids but book separate room. Then start physical again.
During the 4-year dating, these are what I will have to do: Listen to her. Let her have her way. Do anything possible to keep her happy. Try not to upset her. Whatever she wants or wishes for, I will give it to her or make it happen for her (set my pride aside). Let her have her way and more importantly be willing to wait for her love no matter how long it would take even for the rest of my life if that’s the way it is.
Michele, whether I have gotten angry at her recently or not, it is hard to say. It is an on and off thing. Sometimes she still ticks me off, but I don’t say a word nowadays. The last time I was so angry at her was almost three months ago when I told her that I was not happy with the current arrangement or situation and wanted her to move out or separate. We talked for about two hours in circle and the next day when I returned home from work I thought I would get another set of letters but instead I got one post-it note that said, “Just hang in there. This difficult time will pass. I will try harder.” That was the last time I ever said anything to her about this whole thing. Since then she has been somewhat friendlier than before.
quote: Does she really know how you're suffering with this or have you been totally understanding most of the time?
Michele, I don’t really know how much she knows or feels about how I’m suffering with this life event. I believe she knows somewhat or how much it affects the kids. For some reason, her number one priority is still the kids. All the activities that we do together are still around the kids or sometimes around her side of family, especially her parents. If I were to prioritize her priority, it would go like this, our kids, her parents, her siblings, then me/her friends.
My wife knows that without me the family will suffer financially and domestically. My wife is still out of job right now and it has been since she quitted her job that she had for 15 years. One of the factors for her to quit the job was due to the OM works there.
Michele, I would love to follow the seven steps in your new book, but I just don’t know where to start with my current situation.
Thank you very much in advance for reading this.
LAN
[ October 11, 2001: Message edited by: LonelyAtNight ]
quote:Originally posted by Michele: Nicky, Why is your mother living with you? Parents who live with their grown childre, no matter how wonderful they might be, can put stress on the marriage. Your husband may feel left out of your close relationship with your mom and doesn't have a good way of talking to you about it. He might not even recognize it himself. He might just feel angry all the time and unfortunately, take it out on your mom.
Is there an alternative for your mother? Michele
Hi Michele-- thank you for the response. My mother is going through a period of financial problems-- she's legally disabled and on a very limited income and when she and her fiance broke up, she didn't have another place to go. She is currently saving money and trying to work with different assistance programs so that she can get a place of her own-- ETA right now is that she should be able to move by December.
I can understand that this is how he may be feeling, but that also really doesn't point to anything attractive about him emotionally because prior to my mother living with us, his younger sister and his mother lived with us... His mother lived with us for a little over three years and his sister lived with us until she finished college-- almost five years... and in his sister's case, he specifically told me that he was going to help his sister regardless of how I felt and that he would not ask her to look into finding a roommate or another housing option (and you have to understand that this "younger" sister is only a year younger than me-- so I wasn't being mean or anything, I just couldn't see why he expected more from me in regards to being responsible for myself, our family, my financial obligations for our family and attending college fulltime than he expected from a person only a year younger than me with no responsibilities to anyone but herself)... and also he didn't have any problems with his mom coming to live with us when she and her ex got divorced-- despite the fact that 2 out of 3 of those years she didn't work...
So I guess that's what makes this sitch between my H and my Mom so bad-- his family lived with us and really mooched and I still managed to treat them with respect and courtesy-- and this while they treated me completely disrespectful... but when it's my mom's turn to need help because she really can't do anything else, he's allowed to act pissy and mean? His behaviour isn't fair-- and it makes me extraordinarily angry with him... Both because he isn't willing to give what he expected from me and also because it puts me in a bad situation with my own family because he is in effect saying that I can't freely help my family when they need it unless it some how doesn't involve him at all, but when his family needs then WE have to rise to the occasion, no matter what sacrifices it calls for...
The one real positive about this is that he's been really putting forth an effort to work on the other problems we've had in our marriage... I just needed to learn the right way to approach him and to have some potential solutions available when we discussed the situations... I'd like to be able to do that in this case, but I'm afraid I don't know the right way to go about it without offending him or putting him on the defensive...
I mean I've been taking a look at my part in this situation and I can see several things I've done badly:
*When we were dating, I didn't actively encourage my mom and H (then boyfriend) spending time together to get to really know one another
*I've really bragged about my mom... not on purpose, but I can see how it would look that way to him based on the fact he doesn't have a great relationship with his own mother and knowing that she has been an undercover alcoholic for at least as long as he and I have known one another (11 years). And whenever we've had confrontations regarding our relatives, I've always compared his to mine unfavorably-- as in your mom does x and x to me, but my mom would never do that and has never done that to you... I know that this has caused him anger because he's taken to saying "Oh, so your mom is perfect?"
* He feels like he's always the bad guy because I call him on situations that she tells me about which occur when I'm not there... and he feels like I ALWAYS take her side because he never sees the times when I tell her that I disagree-- that I don't believe he was in the wrong and I believe she's expecting more than is fair to expect. The thing is, I used to always take his side because the things he did were usually done when I wasn't around and I just couldn't believe my H would be so callous--I just thought my mom was being extremely sensitive... it's only recently he hasn't really been able to hide that he really dislikes my mom and can't stand to be in the same room with her... he actually told my stepdaughter that her voice bothers him...
I just feel like we're at this horrible impasse... and I know I can't make him like my mom-- but it's so damn infuriating when there's no real reason for him to dislike her so intensely...
I'm sorry for venting so much-- I just strongly want to find a solution... and sometimes I have this overwhelming desire to tell my husband "oh grow up!" because his actions with my mom seem so childish to me... I mean, his mom has been flat out cruel to me but I realized that she's not going anywhere--she's his mom-- and that I need to be a bigger person because even if he and I broke up the children would need to be able to interact with their grandmother... and both grandmothers have long lives ahead of them since they're fairly young (43 and 45 respectively) so they'll be in our lives for a while to come.
I'm thinking about meeting with him to discuss the two of us creating boundaries about what is and is not acceptable behavior from our families... I'll go think some more about that on my own thread, but I'd love to hear advice from any body who might have ideas-- obviously I appreciate Michele's advice tremendously, but everyone on the board is an angel to me and has such tremendous wisdom...
