SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I'm sorry that things aren't going great with your wife, but they seem to be on the right track for your healing.

Disclaimer: I skimmed this thread because it's really long.

Your wife's mopey birthday conversation reminds me of my boss, who has the emotional IQ of a doorknob. 95% of the time, if he asks us about anything personal it's because he wants to use it to segue into talking about himself. She probably didn't give two hoots about your issues; my guess is that she wanted to use that to manipulate you into feeling some kind of way about her. Guilt, probably.

Also, I'd set a boundary that I will not engage in any more conversations like that during IHS, and that holiday celebrations are strictly for the kids. I think you need your space to process and work on yourself without interference from her about her stuff. I saw that you're reading Codep No More and I hope you keep that up.

I think it's kind of strange that she seems to be anxious about where you stand, yet you don't think she reads here. It's a public forum. Have you asked her to stay away?

I am growing resentful that nothing comparable is coming back my way, even when requested. It seems like she thinks she should only do what is fully authentic.

If she wanted to try faking it until she makes it, she would. She doesn't want to. (I'm not about that either, so I get it.) She's giving you what she wants to give you and it's entirely up to you to do with that what you will. (If that doesn't sit well, keep reading Codep No More.)

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 9:35 PM, Wednesday, January 31st]

I think it's kind of strange that she seems to be anxious about where you stand, yet you don't think she reads here.

This also baffles me. I sort of understand if InkHulk had asked her not to because of how it went down previously, but I cannot imagine not using absolutely every tool available to me if I really believed I was at risk of losing my marriage.

OTOSH

His response was finally, because this is me. Yes, I figured HER out, how to keep her happy and quiet through inauthenticity and lies. Is that what you want? Me being someone I am not? Then he went on to list things he does and says to me that he sees as acts of love and devotion. Things he never did for her. Things I never really considered as a big deal, but they were to him.

Whether your husband was "authentic" or not, he made the effort to make the OW happy in the ways that made her happy. In contrast, the fact that he did things for you that he considered a big deal to him but weren't a big deal for you just goes to show that he was wasn't thinking about showing love and effort in ways that you would appreciate; he did things for you that he found validating to himself.

Your post reminded me of a recent argument that my friend, a stay-at-home mother, had with her husband. She desperately wants their dilapidated kitchen remodeled but he keeps telling her it's too expensive. But he frequently spends thousands of dollars buying her expensive, designer shoes and purses. During their last blow up about the kitchen, he said he doesn't care about the kitchen because he rarely cooks and not very many people will see the it anyway... but he likes how she looks in sexy heels and showing off his wife decked in designer swag whenever they go out together.

This is a perfect example of someone whose expressions of love and generosity were really about making himself feel good, not about his partner.

So how does this relate to you, InkHulk?

You asked me in an earlier comment about what's something "quantifiable" for which you could measure your wife's progress. One answer to that question to that would be how often she makes an effort to express her love for you in ways that are important and meaningful to you. This should not be rocket science; she's been married to you for long enough to have a pretty good idea of what you like and what makes you happy. But even if she gets it wrong sometimes, the fact that she continually tries is, in itself, a demonstration of love.

Of course, you'll have to be understanding of her limitations. To use a silly example, perhaps you would love to be serenaded, but your wife hates the sound of her own voice. So instead of singing to you, she impromptu puts on your favorite love song and invites you to slow dance with her. Is this the sort of "creative effort" you would like to see in your marriage?

You also asked before that how would you know she was being genuine in what because she's such a good liar. The simple answer to that is to observe whether her actions match her words. If she tells you that she's deeply committed to the marriage and is willing to do anything to make it work, but all you see is her focusing on herself and shutting you down, then you know she's full of shit.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 10:16 PM, Wednesday, January 31st]

I’m a bit late to this thread, and as Sacred posted, I read through the first 3 pages but then started skimming. I think InkHulk and I need to go have a beer. My recent IC sessions using a mild form of EMDR has gotten me back to sleeping pad 3 am, being less codependent, and sort of visualizing a future without my wife. It sucks but I’m feeling much better about either way things turn out. Hang in there Ink, I thing we are sharing an oar in the same damn boat! 🙂

Bluer than Blue, my post was about my marriage shared as a perspective to possibly help IH. Please refrain from commenting on my husband, his actions, and intentions when you know nothing about him. I know nothing about your spouse or their intentions other than what you’d choose to share and I’d believe you. My husband does not show love to validate himself. That’s insulting. Nor did he do anything authentically loving to make the other woman happy. He did it to as a transaction to buy her admiration and keep her quiet. Yes, he could do inauthentic crap for me, but I’d much prefer the real, honest him. I like the man he is now and I appreciate his way of showing love now that I recognize it. If lies and fantasy bullshit would make me happy I could have an affair of my own. Either way, my post was not an invitation for you or anyone to make an assumption about my marriage.

FWIW, every single thing that anyone does is always about themselves and how it makes them feel. Even the most seemingly selfless actions are done because it makes the doer feel good.

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 11:08 PM, Wednesday, January 31st]

Meant to add to bluer than Blue that had my husband really made her happy and given her what she really wanted he’d be married to her and feathering her nest. 🤷‍♀️ anyways, IH I only posted a bit of my story as a perspective to think about. I generally try to never make assumptions about others marriages, spouses, and certainly intentions. People are all so different it would be asinine to assume anything about an internet stranger’s marriage or spouse. All we can really do is tell our stories. What helped us, what worked, what was a disaster etc. I do hope you find your way forward one way or the other soon. For me, deciding what path to take was the hardest part even though I knew I could turn around anytime. I also knew though, that a real commitment to staying to going was the only way for me to be healthy again. Notice I said ME as we are all so unique.

I'm sorry that things aren't going great with your wife, but they seem to be on the right track for your healing.

Thanks for the sympathy, and yes, my healing is coming along pretty well. Codependent No More has been a good read, I’ve had some significant self learning coming out of it. I’m a Caretaker, I put it on myself to take care of people even if they don’t need it. BTB is zero percent surprised.

Disclaimer: I skimmed this thread because it's really long.

Gotta keep up, OG

FWIW, every single thing that anyone does is always about themselves and how it makes them feel. Even the most selfless actions are done because it makes the doer feel good.

Quickly, I do agree with this. I gave up on altruism as a virtue a long time ago. People who don’t get this point make me nervous.

Sacred soul, while I don’t disagree entirely I am not sure I agree completely. I know I do countless things as a parent of adults that I do simply for them. I don’t do it to feel good about myself. Perhaps one reason may be to avoid the pain of seeing my children suffer, but I don’t really feel "good". I can feel happy seeing them happy, but who am I doing it for? Not sure it matters. 😂🤷‍♀️But, I do see your point. Acts of kindness enhance the moods of the givers and receivers. It’s the whole chicken and egg question again. 😂

Why can’t you do that for me? Why can’t you say these things to me? Why can’t you show me you love me so I believe you?" His response was finally, because this is me. Yes, I figured HER out, how to keep her happy and quiet through inauthenticity and lies. Is that what you want? Me being someone I am not? Then he went on to list things he does and says to me that he sees as acts of love and devotion. Things he never did for her.

Yes, I think this is definitely a thing. I want to put a couple different spins on it if I can:

1. The person I pretended to be to the AP wasn’t just inauthentic to please him. I was very much playing a character or role that I had projected and acted out in almost a characuture way. I hated who I had become so much and I wanted to be a cooler, younger, sexier woman. Except I reverted back to a much younger, more immature version of myself. Most of my play acting wasn’t even for him, it was part of the escapism and avoidance.

2. In many ways I did a lot of role playing in my pre-A marriage to earn love. Trying to be this perfect, understanding, cool wife.

In both cases it was unsustainable. #2 had been more sustainable because at least I was doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing.

This is why authenticity is almost a foreign concept to a ws. It took me a good long time to figure out who I am, who I wanted to be, and what I wanted and needed. Not knowing that for a long time had brought on mountains of pain that I didn’t even know were growing in the background.

Inkhulk, it’s okay to expect passion in your marriage (which to me is created through a combo of emotional and physical intimacy) or whatever else you would like to build. If you do go back to reconciling I would suggest thinking of terms of what that looks like for you, rather than a comparison of anything else.

And I have been (surprise, surprise) contemplating the same thing as emergent- why wouldn’t she read what you write here? Especially since IHS. I have seen couples on here time and time again where they claim they won’t read each others stuff, but they can’t help themselves. They want to know where the other is at and what is being said in their counsel. Then of course the forum goes nuts saying it’s breaking a boundary. It’s one of those things I think you could take judgment about either way.

I suspect it’s two fold- one reading what people say about her here would be a lot to face and probably to a certain degree counterproductive. I certainly had a hard time with it for many years. It’s an anonymous forum and a lot of assumptions are made that may or may not fit and fighting with a bunch of strangers in your head and feeling that agreement from your husband, I am going to say that flies in the face of what the goals of IC are.

Second, I suspect she is very clear on what you are asking for. Whether she is trying to give it is questionable because she is so far off the target.

[This message edited by hikingout at 11:10 PM, Wednesday, January 31st]

This also baffles me. I sort of understand if InkHulk had asked her not to because of how it went down previously, but I cannot imagine not using absolutely every tool available to me if I really believed I was at risk of losing my marriage.

I can see that this seems odd. In the last blow up, when she told me she had read it, I compared this to my diary. She responded that it’s a public forum, which is indisputable. And also, she leaves her diary sitting out in the living room. She is worried that some day our kids might find this and read all these salacious things about her. And that I can see hating the idea of that. But how they would ever find this place and identify my code name is beyond me unless she told them. And again, she leaves her journal out for anyone to pick up. Much more of a security risk there, me thinks.

All that to say, I think that I have put it out there between us that this is my diary and treat it as such. You say you would do anything to save your marriage, but would you grab your partner’s diary? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s at least not baffling when I put it like that, is it?

Also, I do not detect that she brings up or uses information that she could find here. She sure as hell isn’t using the perspective that HikingOut and WOES have provided, and I don’t hear any hint of cross over between what is happening here and what she says. I’d be pretty sensitive to it, I think.

Sacred soul, while I don’t disagree entirely I am not sure I agree completely. I know I do countless things as a parent of adults that I do simply for them. I don’t do it to feel good about myself. Perhaps one reason may be to avoid the pain of seeing my children suffer, but I don’t really feel "good". I can feel happy seeing them happy, but who am I doing it for? Not sure it matters. 😂🤷‍♀️But, I do see your point. Acts of kindness enhance the moods of the givers and receivers. It’s the whole chicken and egg question again. 😂

I learned this when I read The Four Agreements. It's one of the agreements: "Nothing others do is because of you. It's a projection of their own reality."

You're a good parent because it's important to you that your children not suffer.

I think that I have put it out there between us that this is my diary and treat it as such.

Then she's either being respectful of your space, or is reading and keeping it on the downlow by not mentioning it. I respect the former, and completely understand the latter.

FWIW, every single thing that anyone does is always about themselves and how it makes them feel. Even the most selfless actions are done because it makes the doer feel good.

Maybe I'm naive but I disagree with this. Does doing something good for someone else make me feel good? Yes, that is a pleasant byproduct of good deeds. But that's not the purpose behind doing them.

I asked myself do I want HIS love, do I want a programmed version he spits back to me when I tell him what I expect, or do I want to search for a man that speaks the same love language as I do?

So….. I think you just put to writing an incredibly challenging and deep question, and I thank you for it. I’m going to try to explore this. I think this could go Emergent text wall long, but know that I am doing this all with my thumbs!
So let’s talk "Love Languages". I’m going to just assume people know what those are. So we all go and take the quiz and find out what our top ways of RECEIVING love are (or if you are a dude you just stamp Physical Touch and skip the quiz [please just allow me one generalization, everyone is smiling anyway]). And then the assumption implicit in this whole thing is essentially what BTB articulated, that we are now able to expect our lovers to find ways to show love to us in manners aligned with our love languages, cause why wouldn’t you? LOVE ME!

But what if the way our lover SHOWS love isn’t in line with our prefered ways of receiving love? Now what? Who is supposed to bend? Here I am railing that I want BOTH an authentic creative woman AND I want what I want. Seems like a great recipe for disappointment.

Now in my current case, I am getting neither, so this is not an attempt by me to talk myself back into R (back away from the keyboard, HF). But it does certainly get me thinking about what it could look like if either one of those boxes started getting checked.

It’s actually incredibly serendipitous, the interaction I just had with Sisoon and this topic for me. I told Sisoon that I was showing him honor by taking his point seriously enough to deeply argue with him. That, my friends, is a way I show love. It is what comes naturally to me, I deeply appreciate it when people do that to me, and if you get that from me then you can be sure that I think highly of you. But that is decidedly NOT how my wife receives love. So now what? I want to be able to be authentic and show love in the language that my soul speaks, but she has historically felt threatened by it, much less receiving love.
This talk of authenticity needs to go both ways. I want her to accept that part of me. She would love me by letting me love her that way, letting me be me. And I have also wanted to show her love in ways that speak to her soul naturally and are less fluent to my heart. It’s both, I think. If Sisoon comes back and tells me that he is deeply uncomfortable with how hard I’m arguing with him here, then it seems like if we want to continue to relate then we both need to learn.

So in conclusion, if my wife were to really reach out to me in big ways meaningful to her (not talking doing laundry, cooking, those kinds of motherly type things, looking for loverly things), I should celebrate that authenticity. And if she were to come to me with a strong showing of the things I particularly enjoy, that should also be celebrated.

If the day comes that she stops being afraid, heals some of this shit, and shows me something, OTOSOH, this discussion will absolutely be in my mind. Thank you again, this has been a really good exercise for me.

Yes, that is a pleasant byproduct of good deeds. But that's not the purpose behind doing them.

This could be its own topic all together. And this is an area I have done a lot of work in.

Face value, I agree with Blue. I do things to make others happy. At one time it was so they would like me or love me or see me in a certain way.

But the complexity spirals from there.

I celebrate the fact these days I do things for my husband because I truly want him to have a better day. Though it’s no longer transactional, it is to my betterment he is in my life. I don’t expect validation or praise or returned favors, but I do enjoy the feeling of being loved or having things I do be noticed and appreciated. It feels good to love and appreciate him too.

I have had to challenge myself- because I had to figure out where my motivation is and how healthy it is.

Truth is we want relationships, we want to connect, to love, to be loved. Those are the best parts about life. We can be genuine about wanting to make someone’s day better or showing appreciation. But it doesn’t come without the idea we are feeding a connection that deeply enriches our life. It’s very difficult to say you get one without the other.

Soul sister- yep those agreements came into play as I was doing this work too. And I think it’s has to be true because we have no idea what we would do in a world where there was no love or connection to be had. There is always something in it for you, even if you truly and genuinely are loving and blessing the other person without expecting anything specific in return.

Edited to add: on the other side of hell- even if you want nothing in return for doing things for your kids, you wanted the whole of motherhood. You wanted to know what unconditional love is, and all the other things that are you decide to be a parent.

[This message edited by hikingout at 1:30 AM, Thursday, February 1st]

…but he likes how she looks in sexy heels and showing off his wife decked in designer swag whenever they go out together.

This reminds me of a Simpson’s episode where Homer got Marge a bowling ball for her birthday. With the ball already engraved with his name on it. He intended it for himself. Clearly an egregious violation of all this.

I believe in that episode Marge got into an EA, almost PA with her bowling instructor when she decided to spite Homer and use the ball anyway. Funny recollection…

This could be its own topic all together. And this is an area I have done a lot of work in.

Fully agree. There is already a lot going on in this thread, I request that if people want to discuss altruism that a new thread be started. And also, sorry if I offended anyone with my quick take on it.

I do hope that she wakes up, gets creative, feels safe doing so, and meets you in the middle to both find ways to express and feel a satisfying love. After all the evidence to the contrary I’ve witnessed , I still believe that the right love CAN be enough. I don’t know your wife, but I can’t help believe that there still exists a deep love between the two of you. I can’t believe she’d stick around through all the hell (and I know she brought it on, but the aftermath of Dday are hard on the wayward too even though we give very little concern to that) if she was only in it for financial security. But mostly, I hope you find a peace and happiness whatever road you take.