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#2876054 12/13/19 04:47 PM
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Hi There,

This seems trivial, but I dont know how to proceed. For those that read my story, in May, H did the BD. He then left the country for work for 3 months. When he came back, he did not empty suitcases right away and he has traveled to see OW a few times since. HOWEVER, he has worn clothes and throws them in the hamper. I let them sit there at least a month before I approach and asked him if he wanted his clothes washed. He is putting clothes there again. Now, I do laundry anyway, but I am really annoyed since he does not speak to me. Yet, I do not want an overflowing hamper either. When I went a month, he literally went and bought underwear and socks. This is not cost effective. What would you do?
We have not had any discussion about our R since that day. I pretty much left him alone after the BD then he left the country, so I learned how to live alone.

Thank you

Link to PLC's Thread on Newcomers':

New to the board MLC

Last edited by job; 12/13/19 08:50 PM. Reason: added a link to another thread
PLC #2876080 12/13/19 08:37 PM
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It is not trivial in the least. It's the nitty gritty of standing when your MLCer hasn't or won't leave.

Take it from me. I am an expert after seven years of that. Or read HaWho's threads.

You could also title your thread, "LBS Navigates Daily Life With In-House MLCer" (or in Rejoice-Speak, Stander and Prodigal) because these kinds of questions about daily life come up constantly when your MLCer is in house. Mine included cleaning toilets several times a day because my H is addicted to diuretics.

If you ever have the chance to slog through my threads, I wrote about laundry fairly often!

Based on seven years of in-house MLCer and a love of doing laundry and a hatred of hamper piling up and a Christian desire to be kind to my H in whatever way I could, here is my answer --

Do his laundry because you want to, if you want to. If you are a person of faith, do his laundry for God,if you want to do his laundry for God, and then while you do it, thank God for this grace of learning patience and humility and a way to express prayers for your enemy. If you are doing it because you hate an overflowing hamper, do it if you want an empty hamper. If you are doing it because you have no way to be kind to H except that, do it if you want to be kind to him.

DO NOT DO HIS LAUNDRY to affect him or his behavior in any way. It won't affect him or his behavior in any way. Or it might affect him one day and another day not affect him. He might say thank you one day and tell you you shrank his favorite sweater and have to buy him a new one on another day. Most days he won't notice. He'll just use the clean laundry without any thought of how it got there.

You can insert other domestic duties/verbs in here. Including, "empty his 4-5 wine bottles out of the recycling every three days," "raise his children" and "continue to love his mother and send her birthday gifts" and "replace the money he stole out of D8's wallet." As long as you also insert into your brain/heart the second paragraph about whatever you do having no affect on him.

And after seven years of your doing that, and the eighteen years before that when you were a happy family with a good MIL relationship, you may get a letter from MIL telling you she wants nothing to do with you and your "self-made" problems. Whoops -- did you have an expectation of her too?

The love you show is a victory. Not against H or MIL or anyone else. It's a victory in the battle against evil. It's light. As long as you don't do it to get something -- e.g., your H back. Or his gratitude. Or a change in his behavior. And you might learn that kicking him out is the best way to show the real him, the one from before, love, because you realized that the man you once knew will never climb out of MLC if you keep showing the Alien in His Body any wifely love or even the chance to live under your roof. But it might also be that your love does slowly affect him, I have read those stories here too. And sometimes that happened to me in drips and drabs along the way.

Likewise do not ask him to do his laundry or anything else, at least not with an expectation that he'll do it. You could tell him you can't do it anymore, but see paragraph above on expectations if you do.

Again, do it because you want to, and not because you expect any outcome.

If you take all the clothes and dump them in the basement without cleaning then,or in his car, or at the OW's house or if you take the clothes to a mudpit where pigs are living and pooping, stomp on the clothes for a while, put the now-pig-penned clothes in a shopping cart, break into his office at night and leave the clothes there so that the whole office will stink by the morning, you may get no response, a spew, a call from a lawyer or an apology and a request to be your H again. Or all of the above. (I didn't do any of those things but I am just imagining.)

This is MLC, my friend. Choose who you want to be, and how you want to be it. And forgive yourself for everything everything everything that happens after that.


Last edited by Gerda; 12/13/19 08:40 PM.

I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord with courage.
Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
Gerda #2876087 12/13/19 08:58 PM
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BTW, we have a current poster who has a happy ending recently...Westo. She worked very hard and that hard work paid off. You may want to read her threads.

HaWho had a man/child living in his little "dorm room" in the basement for quite some time, but he's now off in the cold, cruel world and still making life just a little tad nutty for HaWho, Unfortunately, this relation went south, but HaWho did the hard, necessary work on herself and for her children and she's one of our brightest stars in surviving and making a new life for herself.

Try to remember that success stories don't necessarily mean marriages/relationships survive. Success stories are also about the posters learning and growing and rediscovering themselves along the way and coming out the other side of the crisis far, far better than when they were in the eye of the crisis.


Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to.
The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
PLC #2876138 12/14/19 03:32 PM
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Speaking of success stories, Gordie went through h@ll and back for his W and last we heard they were doing fairly well. His threads are on the MLC board I believe.


On BD
H52, W50
T27, M26
S21, D23
BD-9-Mar-16
D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18
I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good.
But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
PLC #2876163 12/14/19 07:28 PM
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Thank you all that chimed in. I definitely need to seek out success threads. I still have hope and I know that is important.
As for the laundry, it will calm me down anxiety wise to not have a pile of unwashed work clothes in the hamper. This is for me. If he wants laundry done on a different time table, we will deal with that then. I do feel like I am living with a sulky fifteen year old boy. (Don’t mean to offend and 15yo boys) but right now he is sitting in the dark living room on his “bed couch”. I am going to go do fun things with my day. Whatever he is dealing with-be the OW is not going well or the holidays are creeping up, he prefers to be in his “little black hole” I know I can’t do anything-so I do something for me! I will post on some of the other threads after I get a chance to read. This forum is a god-send!

PLC #2876214 12/15/19 01:19 PM
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OMG! may22 and I were just talking about laundry in the Newcomers forum. I'm glad I'm not alone lol!!!!

Gerda- I appreciate your response, it was very helpful to me as well.

PLC - I've decided to keep doing my H's laundry for the time-being. my H hasn't completely moved out but pretty much does not live here anymore, but he still throws stuff in the hamper. He will help me fold though if he happens to be here when I'm folding clothes. Like Gerda said, I have no expectations nor resentment in doing his laundry. That's funny, I think if I really do stop doing his laundry he might really just go out and get new clothes.


BD: Sep 2019
D in progress
wooba #2876219 12/15/19 01:57 PM
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Woosa-This is interesting, who would have thought laundry would be such a commonality? Glad I have a friend dealing with this same issue.

PLC #2876227 12/15/19 02:59 PM
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He’s abusing you and you are doing his laundry?

I do not understand why we encourage people to be masochists here. I do not know why we perpetuate abuse. Cheating is abuse. It will destroy you. He’s a cancer that you are not getting rid of. In fact, I know tons of people that are in these relationships that end up with cancer. I got diagnosed with it when I was pregnant and I see a connection between our health and the relationships we choose to be in.

Adult love is not unconditional. Stop letting him cake eat and kick him out. If he has to live with you for legal reasons, put his laundry in the garage.

You alone cannot save a marriage or create a partnership. It takes two invested people for it to work. It gets to the point where you have to learn to love yourself more and say no to disrespectful treatment. Loving yourself and not allowing someone to hurt and abuse you is more godly then continually allowing someone to disrespect you and your marriage in the name of religion. You deserve better. And there is better out there.

You can’t control him or his actions. Doing his laundry isn’t gonna make him realize what a wonderful person he’s giving up. Neither is being some light house “shining the way for him to return”.

What you can control is how you live your life. Living for you, and your health and learning when to let go. You have the choice to say “this isn’t good or healthy for me”.

Job- there aren’t many success stories on here. Most of our exes were abusers. Mine was an addict. I see more posters that contracted serious stds then that revived their marriages. My ex was a secret addict. Would have destroyed me even more financially had I saved our marriage. Or god knows what I could have contracted. And then there are the people that revive their marriages only to be back on here older because their spouse did it again. (Oops). And the walking on egg shells that goes with it isn’t right. It really isn’t. I have seen a lot of walking on eggshells shells from the posters that’s husbands come back. It’s heart breaking. I read the same posts.

I think the real test in all this is learning how to stand up for ourselves and earn back dignity and respect.


M: 42
H: 43
Twins age 5
WAH in summer
JujuB #2876242 12/15/19 04:52 PM
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PLC et al -- I think the purpose of this forum is to support those who choose to stand and to support those who choose to stop standing. The site is called, "Divorcebusting," not "Faith/Hopebusting." There were many times I came to this board looking for ways to keep standing and got a really harsh message. All that those messages did was to scare me away for months and make me lonelier. Even now I am sometimes "walk on eggshells" when I post to avoid getting messages like that!

Originally Posted by JujuB
Loving yourself and not allowing someone to hurt and abuse you is more godly then continually allowing someone to disrespect you and your marriage in the name of religion. ...

I think the real test in all this is learning how to stand up for ourselves and earn back dignity and respect.


Juju, I would never try to convince you to believe in God, and likewise I don't think you should use God in an argument against what our faith teaches us. In fact that God that I believe in allowed everyone to disrespect him and in fact to kill him out of love for me -- and even for you or anyone else who doesn't believe that. We can walk in dignity and love through the darkest of struggles. God is present with us, helping us walk, during all the other horrible things we humans do to each other -- wars, disease, poverty, abuse, addiction. If you are not a person of faith, there is no way you are going to understand that. But standing in humility for a broken marriage, if done out of faith, is an act of great love, even if it doesn't "work." Some of us are not doing it to get our spouse back. We are doing it to grow in faith and get closer to God.

You can read many testimonies of marriages restored out of abuse, addiction, etc., on faith-based sites, and you can find them here as well. You can read stories of marriages that were never restored but of a spouse who grew into joy, with or without a new partner. You can find stories with the ending we don't wish for and an LBS who is bitter or an LBS who is joyful. I don't plan to remarry but I see my stand as what I do for my children, even if I begin to doubt my husband could ever be healed. Saying that we should not stand because so many marriages don't make it out of MLC is like saying we should never get married because so many marriages end in divorce.

I wish I had made stronger boundaries a lot earlier in my stand but I had to get to that place via experience. And it could have gone either way; I know many people who have restored marriages out of dead, awful, impossible circumstances. I think the point of this forum is to help each person find his/her own path out of the destruction of MLC, and we have to tread lightly when we come from different foundations of belief.

Last edited by Gerda; 12/15/19 04:53 PM.

I believe I will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living.
Wait for the Lord with courage.
Be stouthearted, and wait for the Lord.
PLC #2876243 12/15/19 04:54 PM
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As I mentioned, it causes anxiety to let the laundry sit there. I don’t have a garage to throw it in. I will do it on my timetable, maybe once a month or so. This is for me. I don’t put it away. Just wash and dry. He can put it away. I don’t expect anything from him. At this point, the marriage we had is over. I still have hope and am standing. That does not mean that if I do laundry a light will go off and he will realize I am what he needs. I feel I have been living on my own and I am enjoying things while he sulks in the dark. He’s not asking me for anything, doesn’t eat what I cook and basically is a boarder in our home that takes a shower and sleeps in.

My thoughts may change, this is seven months in, not seven years. I understand what you are saying, this is not eating at me. It is hurtful, but I am not letting that define me. As this progresses I will continue to learn.

Last edited by job; 12/15/19 04:58 PM. Reason: added spacing between paragraphs
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