Quote: ok poe I'll look into the tapes but honestly...would you have read anything or listened to anything BEFORE w actually left/ got involved w om?
Well, let me answer that question with an emphatic YES! When my W dropped the bomb, the "I don't think that I love you anymore", that was when I got DB and got to work. That was my eye-opener. It was another 2 1/2 months before I found out about the OG. So, no, it doesn't necessarily take leaving or having an A to wake him up.
BUT, you can't constantly be threatening to leave, thus sending the message that whatever you say when you are frustrated should be taken in a grain of salt. My W did that a few times earlier in our M, screaming out in the middle of an argument, "I WANT A DIVORCE". I hated when she did this, to know that she would even think about that as an option, and that scared me a little. But I knew that she was mainly just frustrated and angry, not serious. It also angered me because I thought she used it as a way to get her way, to win the argument, and that just made me want to resist.
When she said "I don't think that I love you anymore", though, we weren't arguing (and hadn't, recently). It came seemingly out of the blue while we were in bed one night. I knew that she was dead serious and that THIS was something I had to pay attention to.
So what I'm trying to say is this. If you ever really get to the point where can't take it anymore and you're ready to leave, you need to tell him in a quiet moment, far removed from some recent argument or hurt. He won't be able to "hear" you if he thinks it's just another one of LL's frustrated rants. It can't be effective if it happens when you get frustrated about a bunch of broken eggs (I know, it was more than just that), or even if you're angry about something more substantive. It needs to happen when it's clear that the discussion is about the whole R, not just about some recent events.
