Dane, Your W didn't wake up one morning and decide "I'll have an EA and throw my whole life as I know it away!" This thing came about after years of feeling invisible/unloved/taken for granted/only The Mom,only His Wife/...empty love buckets. Imagine you go out and have a date now. All of those impressions are validated. Worth noting here that if my H had dated while we were separated, we would have had almost no chance of reconciling. Just saying... Greek
Me45 H46 T25 M22 S21 & 19 D13 Separated and filed 8/08 Moved home 11/08
The art of military tactical deception is as old as war itself. The Chinese warrior Sun Tzu's classic study on war written in 510 B.C., Ping Fa (The Principles of War, akaThe Art of War), recognizes that all warfare is based upon deception; make your way by unexpected routes, Sun Tzu writes, attacking unguarded spots. The Chinese have studied Tzu's work carefully for centuries. The Japanese, wanting to learn more about their enemy, studied the work as well, as did the Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In the dictionary the word deception means to deceive, to cause another to believe what is not true. To mislead. At face value, this is quite immoral. Generally, we would say it would be highly improper to mislead anyone to believe something that is not true. Yet Sun Tzu endorsed this practice in his Art of War. Like many concepts in life (and as you might expect), nothing is as simple as it seems.
What Greek said stirred up a painful memory. Deep in my W's A but before discovery, I was doing a lot of pursuing, begging, pleading etc. I kept telling her what a great Mom and Wife she was. She just went berserk one time, swept things off the dresser, and said with venom: "I'm not. I'm not a great mom, I'm not a great wife. I'm me, just ME. Can't you hear that? ME!". of course, a part of it had to do with her guilt too.
The dating part ... I'm not sure what to say. Depends on what is "dating". I would also feel it is not right to be intimate with anyone else while married. I sure went out with lots of friends male and female once I started to GAL, something I hardly did in the last few years prior. W has always known I don't have problems attracting attention. I guess I walked on a fine line with a woman friend that I now acknowledge had hopes to be together if I had D. That's another story.
I didn't "date", but the "fact" that there were women who wanted me did have an impact on W. To be clear, W agreed to break the A, but maintained OM was her true love that she would sacrifice for the kids, that we had no connection, that she wouldn't be too unhappy being M to me as she cares for me and "it's not like I can't stand your face". That wasn't an M I cared to be in and I told her so - that was co-parenting at best. So I detached from the limbo, went out a lot more and spent a ton of time with the kids.
As the fog lifted over the next few months, she kept seeing her friends, colleagues, mutual friends (male and female, including hot gym trainers), mothers of our kids' classmates, either socially flirting with me or telling her her H looked so hot and was such a good father and how lucky she was. I would suspect that helped burn off the remaining fog. That was when she started hacking into my cell and emails and insisting that she knew only too well how friendships can go inappropriate and how trusting me is different from trusting "predators". Go figure .
How to convey that "fact" and how "dating" fits in, and how useful it is to different sitches though, that I wouldn't generalize.
Me 42 W 39 Married: 11 Jan 1998, T: Since 1992 First Bomb: Sep 2007 Confirmed A/OM: 4 Nov 2007 Kids: D10, S5 Reconciled and together again after (alot of) time and heartbreak. 3rd kid, S, born 2 Jan 2010.
Grrrr and Double Grrrr girl, I am not Bad Santa nor am I the King of Infidelity, but I am the recommender of illusion.
Lets look at it this way, lets use OB as an example, you have a cheating spouse who is playing all the cards to keep you in tow. You live in uncertainty. And to make matters worse, he/she/it sleeps with their cell phone under the pillow so the last thing they see at night is the OP's text saying 'I Love you, goodnight.' Triple Grrrr.
Would you believe for a second, that laying on the bed, covered partially in a sheet, biting on a rose with ELO's 'Do Ya Do Ya Want My Love!' playing on the CD recorder is going to flip the 'You know I do I love him switch?' Or waiting around supporting their personal journey of finding themselves through someone else's physical and emotional pleasure is going to help in recovering from their marital problems? Good luck with that.
It doesn't appear to work for people on this site, and it rarely works for the rest of the 50% of couples failing at their marriages. But if their spouses could see and feel what it is like to be walked-away on they would very well questions their intentions. And if they don't? Oh well, they are telling someone else they love them when their spouse haven't heard it in a year or two. Its then time you sought your own personal happiness.
I had myself a texting friend. We were the most flirtatious pair. I remember people telling me to stay away since she was easy pickins. Her husband worked out of town all week and came home to play golf. Poor poor woman, She was a lonely as it gets. And on top of that her husband was a jerk.
Well her husband caught on (they all do) and at first ineffectively put his foot down. She came back and we both continued to play the jealousy button. In the end her husband, found himself a local job, put his golf clubs away for the winter and they are working on their marriage. I wish them the best of luck. They deserve a second chance.
Illusion. The illusion you have given up. Take a good read at many of the people on this site. Don't look at what they write with this motherly 'I wish I could be there for you' attitude, but look closely at what their spouses are doing and ask why. In many many cases they did not like their situations. One thing we rarely read on this site is what it was like in the past for them. We only hear how bad the LBS is hurting. Well that WAW was hurting too. Lonely, disrespected, desperate for a solution. Maybe they read Divorce Busting in Barnes and Nobles on their lunch break and interpreted it as my 180 is to hit their jealousy button, show them I can no longer put up with this behavior, lifestyle, bullcrap facade of a marriage, I am going to pull out all the cards and show them what it feels like to be ignored and unwanted. There are many different scenarios, but the common thread is what they did worked to make their spouses realize they need to work on themselves and think about their marriage.
Reverse the situation when nothing else you have tried works. Create the illusion you have given up.
Originally Posted By: Wallace Stevens
The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are."
The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar."
And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are."
I think Steve is trying to say that the whole DB thing is all about making the was think that you have checked out, and it is human nature to only want something after you have lost it.
I have said many times that the turn around point for my sitch was when I hired the hot little gym teacher to train me. It gives the was that spark in the belly, a feeling that she has not had in a while, a feeling she may confuse with love or that at least she cares.
I would not and could not ever be in a relationship with another woman while I am married, but my wife does not know that for sure, and when her brain started focussing on who I was spending my time with is when she started to focus on us again. Go along with the DB 180's and bam you have a reworking of a R that is better than before the bomb.
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