Puppy, you asked if my goal is to be friends or save my maariage. And I think its both, of course I want to save my marriage. I wouldn't even bother with DBing if I didn't want my marriage. I'm not really sure how being friends and saving my marriage is two different things though. I'm not trying to be H's best of friend right now where we talk every day, but when we do talk I want to have good conversations with him. Is that not what I should be doing, w/o the ML part.
They ARE two different things. Once a D is inevitable, and you determine that the marriage is lost, I think your goal shifts to being as friendly as possible with the one with whom you're going to be co-parenting for the rest of your lives.
And when they are fully committed to the MARRIAGE, and working on it with you, under a promise of 100% no-contact and transparency, I also think you should strive to be friends, even BEST friends.
But during the DBing period, it is my personal opinion that you should be businesslike, civil, courteous . . . but not overly friendly or chatty. And certainly not BEST friend-ly. That is my personal opinion; not necessarily DB dogma. I believe as Gucci does, that your spouse responds to you as you begin to pull away.
btw, I happen to share some of your frustration about just how far we take it on these boards to "save ourselves" ... "work on US", etc. There are a million self-help books and websites that will help you do that, and I DO think that the whole purpose of this forum is to help us SAVE MARRIAGES. I think that one or two of the DB concepts -- mostly, GAL -- have been taken to the extreme and some people think that we're here to save ourselves, and whether or not our marriages get saved is collateral mending, so to speak.
