Funny you should ask, I was thinking about this a good part of the week.
ILYBIDLY means that they have given up on the UNCONDITIONAL love and sacrifice of self that is the key ingredient of lasting marriage. We can do loving acts for freinds, neighbors, and our relatives, but that's not marital love.
For our kids, we have unconditional love and put up with everything they throw our way, even if we get angry at them or lose our cool. When the dust settles, we will still do anything for them.
Thus, ILYBIDLY means that they still have loving feelings towards you and don't want to hurt you, but they have reached the point where their personal needs outweigh the benefits they receive in marriage. Perhaps they feel that we gave up on marital love to them a long time ago. Or at leats we didn't speak their love language. This also is what drives the tremendous negativity. Such decisions are not reached lightly and they have to prove in their minds that their breaking of the marital vows are justified because you have not lived up to the bargain.
That is also why the key to successful DBing is a loving detachment. While that might sound like an oxymoron, the detachment enables you not only to avoid taking things personally, but also to assess your spouse from a distance and contemplate the meaning of what unconditional love means to her and how you've provided or have failed to provide it. That's the new world of possibilities that are opened to us through detachment and which enable us to provide the kind of love that our spouses have long sought, but feel we are incapable of delivering. This new ability on our part to show unconditional love is what ultimately brings our spouses back.
Now this is not to say we should be doormats. We love our kids unconditionally, but don't give them everything they want. But even if our kids don't like us at times, don't we always strive to show them that we love them no matter what and to do so in a manner that they udnerstand, i.e., speak their love language?
I'm also not saying this is easy or that our spouses don't have issues of their own to deal with (perhaps insurmountable issues), but the bottom line is that soemthing in their lives clicked to say that the unconditonal love is not coming from us and why should I keep killing myself to reciprocate. The "I deserve better" mentality.
