How to shake up spouse without having an affair?

[Young at Heart]

...then I was able to say quite calmly and matter of factly to him "I will not be living in an alcoholic marriage in 12 months time" and really mean it. He knew I meant it, just by my tone and the look in my eye. This is not something you can fake you have to feel it, then you will have the right tone.


...The same thing might well happen if you went to your W and said "I will not be living in a celibate marriage in 12 months time". She might try to work on herself, and she might not manage. She might decide that the shame of not achieving that is strong enough for her to say things like "you don't love me any more". And the marriage might end.

Are you ready for that? Because until you are nothing will change.

+1

I have been in a much shorter SSM situation. It took our sex therapist to twice confronted my wife with the fact that she knew that we were headed for divorce if nothing happened. And then asking me if I had thought of divorce and my saying that I would divorce my wife if we could not find a way for our relationship to contain touching and sex, before my wife understood that she needed to change and for her to agree to become sexual again. Our marriage is by no means out of the woods yet, but a change has happened that makes me hopeful for the future.

I am not saying this is the answer. I am only saying that is what happened in my situation (so far).

I had come to the conclusion and truly believed that I would divorce my wife, even though I love her and love her company. In the Pasionate Marriage they talk about reaching a crisis where your integrity demands that you take action and that you can not retreate from that position. I felt that comment was on target.

I have also been reading the book Mating in Capitivity, which talks about some of the same concepts within the Pasionate Marriage Book, but with different titles. In Mating in Capitivity there is a discussion about security versus risk/exploration and that the security is intimacy and time together, while the risk/exploration is where the passion and sex within a marriage grows. This is in some ways similiar to the Pasionate Marriage's concept of differentiation and marriage as a people growing process.

My only other comment is that the phase, "..how to shake up spouse without having an affair?" basically implies how can I change my wife.

I think that ultimately we are better off, when we change ourselves and allow our partner to change with us and join us. That means that if we feel that we need to change, we don't know where the change will take us. It could be a change that will mean that we have to give up something we really value, like our relationship with our wife. Those kinds of changes are very frightening, but ultimately we do them for ourselves to get a life and live with the consequences. As we make those changes in ourselves we need to communicate the change to our spouse and offer them opportunities to understand that we are changing and to join us. However, our spouse may choose not to join us and that ultimately is their choice.

Good luck to all of you.