Really appreciate the counter point, Dom. I have found this to be true of my sitch as well and for a while thought I must be doing something wrong. Nevermind that we seemed to be moving forward, it wasn't exactly the way the book said it should be so it must be wrong. Anyway, I have figured out that this is not necessarily true and I appreciate you sharing your experience on that as well.
For me, my M has made HUGE jumps when I did things like say ILY (at the right time of course), sent flowers, called just because. It's a balancing act, to know when it's OK to slip something like that in without going overboard, but it can work. I think the key for me was that when I did those things, I made sure I was really working from a place of love and concern, not one of desperation. My W can smell desperation on me from a mile off and she runs from it like from a skunk.
