the most important question I have for you is this: could you clearly define why your M hit the rocks, and are you completely certain that you would not repeat your side of the mistakes?
Not that you asked me, but...
complete certainty?...yowza, good luck with that.
Quote:
Is it possible that there could be as little as 3-4% of all current marriages that are actually reasonable happy and fulfilled to to a greater degree than not?
Revise this- Is it possible that there could be as little as 3-4% of all current people that are actually reasonable happy and fulfilled to to a greater degree than not?
Life is tough. Marriage is tough. Divorce is tough. Being single is tough. Happy people tend to be happy...and most people aren't (look at how many are on antidepressants)...
@JonF: [Breaking your long query into constituent parts]
(1) could you clearly define why your M hit the rocks
(1a) Within some range of specification, yes; there's still the "mystery" element (so-named by WAW Herself). I could do a better job, at this point, of clearly defining why it sputtered from WAW's POV than from my own -- a better line of inquiry for "my side" is "why didn't it sputter given that...?"
(2) and are you completely certain that you would not repeat your side of the mistakes?
(2a) No. Again, there's the perception problem. What if -- for purposes of argument -- largely no mistakes were empirically made, but Walkaway merely perceived them to be made? Because Walkaway wanted X but did not communicate I Want X to Left-Behind in a way that resonated -- Chinese and Russian, in @aliveandkicking's outstanding metaphor above.
And -- apostasy approacheth -- there is always the possibility that LBS behaves the way s/he does during the slide down because of the way s/he actually feels about the M -- it seems to me that it's at least within the realm of possibility that The Bomb is in some sense a self-fulfilling prophecy. What if Hubby stops communicating with Wife because, by dam, he just doesn't want to communicate anymore?
More problematic -- a la Schnarch and not believing until experienced -- I have a far lower degree of confidence that WAW Herself would not remain WAW Herself even in PeachesandHerbdom.
(3) Are you two new "yous", and need to approach this newness with a whole different gameplan?
(3a) Too early to tell. We're only starting to engage as normal people, so I don't know who she is, and she doesn't know who I am; and I don't know who I am with her, and (projecting, but reasonable projection) she doesn't know who she is with me -- AS WE ARE NOW.
Just catching up and so stepping back a few days in posts.
I can understand both Mrs SP and you ( SP )feeling the way you do.
Like anything, once you step back from a situation and possibly start untangling the emotional ties , you can see the flaws in anything. Your kids, your parents, your work and your marriage.
I feel, now that I have experianced and still experiancing rebound guy, that I am the person I should be. Years of M changed me ( that was the change ) neither of us were who we were when we married.
I too am sad that someone else experiances no doubt a more happier H. He has expressed sincerity in his comments to others about rebound guy 'that he hopes he will make me happier than he ( H )made me "
Of course rebound guy will, I am me now. GAL and conquering the FEAR allowed me to become selfish again and consider me first. I feel freer. I am sorry I was not this person with H. Wow if you can retain who you are through decades of M, then maybe that is the key to a successful M.
Nah. Not buying. There's Just SP. What WAW is seeing is what she would have got -- indeed, perhaps even what she already had -- had she constructed a different narrative. (Assuming, of course, that SP would have done more work, which is a strong, but not improbably so, assumption.)
So are you saying that we are each the director of the scripts we are given. That the players have no influence on how that person / character is percieved ?
Peel back layers indeed. O'dog is surprised how he keeps realizing new things about past sitch as layers of distortion drop away. How long will this process last? Years maybe.
As an irrelevant side note, the title of the thread "Sympathy for the Devil" reminded me of that GDead song, "Friend of the Devil" and now I've got it stuck in repeat mode.
"My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand." Thich Nhat Hanh
...Let me wax statistical (h/t @Coach, @Thinker, and our Big Midwestern City friend who has departed these boards).
Hey, did I just hear my name? I'm not that big... Haven't had that Alaskan yet that you promised... After that, I'll be so big the lederhosen may not fit anymore...
I've not departed... just been in "read only" mode for awhile... Staggering workload hasn't helped matters...
Originally Posted By: SmileysPerson
What you're sort-of promoting here, @JonF, is a kind of (wikipedia link) linear regression. It's always struck me, in fact, that that model is at the heart of the DB method -- find out what was "wrong" (the explanatory variable(s)), change the value on that variable (she hated that I wore jeans, so now I wear linen trousers), and -- boom! -- you should observe a different outcome (you become the person only a fool would leave -- ta-da!).
Fair enough.
But the Walkaway isn't a "dependent variable" -- isn't a static outcome or observation.
What we have here is a strategic interaction in which both parties are engaged in (internet link) Bayesian updating. Each person is changing his/her beliefs (in lieu of probabilities) about the other in reaction to observable somethings in the other [quote=SmileysPerson]My WAW went from being a loving, generous, moral, caring, amazing mother and wife, to a selfish, arrogant, affair-consuming, so-so mother. Am I to believe that I lived with a facade for almost 8 years?
Surely not. But you are to believe that (a) she has changed (though perhaps not/probably not in a permanent way), (b) that that change was (at least from her POV) necessitated by some countervailing set of changes in @JonF, and (c) that whatever changes you make to "bring her back," at the end of the day Back -- CuePeaches & Herb -- will depend upon --
(1) her next-round evaluation or (i) @JonF, (ii) the marriage itself, (iii) herself, and (iv) @JonF + marriage + herself, and
(2) @JonF's round-after-next-round evaluation of (1).
And even that OVERSIMPLIFIES things! That's just the "real time" clock... That is, not only are the WAS and LBS moving targets at any given moment in time, but the revisionist lens through which the relationship is now seen by either (or both) parties clouds perceptions of temporal "reality" that much more... Which is just another way of saying...
Originally Posted By: SmileysPerson
reconciliation is such a low-probability event.
New: What a Weekend
H-48 WAW-49 M-22 S-14,9 D-11 EA disc.-11/07 PA disc.-3/08 EA2?-6/08 to ?
@pollyanna: So are you saying that we are each the director of the scripts we are given. That the players have no influence on how that person / character is percieved ?
To a certain extent, yes; in social psychology there's a concept called the "fundamental attribution error," one form of which refers to the "salience" factor. When I see Joe Tentpeg yelling at his kids on the street corner (says the theory), I am more likely to attribute that observed behavior to JT's disposition -- "sheesh, what an a**hole THAT guy is!"
This is because we are humans and tend to focus on the thing that captures our attention -- other people. There may very well be situational factors for JT's behavior -- the kids just jumped out into traffic, for example -- that I'm not aware of, but instead of saying, "I wonder why that gentleman is upbraiding his offspring?" I say, "Sheesh, what an a**hole THAT guy is!"
So when Walkaway makes her/his evaluations (one would hypothesize) those evaluations are attributed to Left-Behind's disposition, rather than to situational factors that Walkaway is unaware of or not attending to and which might explain, ameliorate, or otherwise rationalize the behavior to which Walkaway is (silently) objecting.
For example: When WAW's parent passed beyond this earthly vale, and I was "emotionally unavailable," WAW assumed -- this by her own admission -- that Smiley's Person "didn't give a sh*t that I was hurting and just wanted me to shut up and move on."
The fact that, merely 4 weeks prior, I had been in a place where one could witness every manifestation of destruction that can be visited upon the human body and where at any given moment one might be shot, blown up, rocketed, mortared, car-bombed, or otherwise done-in, and that this "might" have desensitized me somewhat to death generally -- this did not enter into WAW's evaluation.
No, no -- it was a personal shortcoming (dispositional) and not an artifact of outside forces (situational).
So yes - in that instance I was confined to a role, a script, that WAW constructed and (importantly) of which I was unaware.
@AlexEN -- not only are the WAS and LBS moving targets at any given moment in time, but the revisionist lens through which the relationship is now seen by either (or both) parties clouds perceptions of temporal "reality" that much more
Oooooo! An excellent point! I forgot to put a variable, t=time, into the @JonF conditional probability equation!
That is SO DAM cool! I wonder if there is a time element here. That would be good data to have. Does anyone know -- of those who have reconciled and moved to piecing, what has been the average time of separation? That is, total T=time from D-bomb to Piecing?
I would be willing to wager that there's a temporal point on the curve where (wikipedia link) diminishing marginal returns set in.
That is, a point in time-elapsed-from-D-Bomb at which each additional Unit (Utile) of energy put into DB'ing provides a smaller and smaller marginal return.
Common sense explanation: I'm in the mood for a beer right now. (No, really, I'm in the mood for a beer -- who's got one handy?).
So I drink a beer. Ahhhhhhhhhh, that is refreshing. "When you say, 'Bud,' you've said a lot of things nobody else can say / When you say, 'Buuuuuuuud-weiser -- you've said it all!"
So I derive One Unit of pure, barley-hops-'n'-water pleasure from the King O' Beers.
And I drink another. Ahhhhhh, that is also refreshing. But not quite as refreshing as the first one -- after all, I'm not quite as thirsty. "When you say, 'Bud,' you've said a lot of things nobody dum-dee-dum / Dum-dum-dum Buuuuuuuuuuud-weiser -- dum-dum-dee-dum!"
Still, that was pretty tasty, so why not have another. Yep. Pretty good. Not as good as the first two, but still pretty dang "Dum-dum-dum Buuuuuuud... *burp* (pardon) ...weiser! Dum-dum-dee-dum *yawn*"
Well that's three already, so I might as well kill the sixer. And by number six, I'm not really deriving any pleasure out of them (though I'm likely trying to talk myself into believing I am -- "WHENYOUSHAY 'BUUUUUUD'! YOU'VE SHED A LOTTATHINGZNOBODY ELSH CAN SHAY BUD-WEEEEEIIIIIIISH...URK! [flees barcalounger for nearest porcelain deity]."
Diminishing marginal returns.
So I wonder, thanks to my BMC colleague @AlexEN. When does the payoff (in both relationship and self-improvement terms) to DB'ing start falling afoul of diminishing marginal returns?
