A wedding ring is a symbol of commitment. Do you still feel committed to this woman, despite the road she has chosen to travel?
Are you here because you are still hoping to see your marriage eventually be restored?
My advice would be to stop STRATEGIZING and start being GENUINE. I doubt you will find a woman on this site that would tell you that a confident and genuine man is NOT attractive.
The one message that is the hardest to receive when you are at this point in a marriage crisis is that YOU CANNOT make her change her mind.
Nothing you can say. Nothing you can do.
And words suck the most. She doesn't want to hear about your love, your changes, your devotion, what YOU want...none of it. For heavens sake, STOP telling her these things.
I'm not sure if you ever had a tight childhood friendship that at some point in time was fractured. If so, then you probably can remember what you did to heal it.
You didn't write letters or make phone calls proclaiming your undying friendship.
You didn't send unsolicited tokens of your affection.
You certainly didn't take opportunity to prove your rightness and their wrongness - or to try to explain away your faults - or to tell them how you were changing day by day.
You left them alone. If you were wrong, you sucked it up and decided (INSIDE) to do better next time.
You approached them cautiously by kindly. You didn't try to talk about the fracture in the relationship. You just tried to make sure that the time you were together was a good one and an HONEST one.
Eventually time healed the wound.
True friendship is rarely lost forever.
You are fighting for your wife to return to the marriage. You are fighting for your wife to love you again.
You should be doing everything you can to redeem YOURSELF and hope that in the process your wife might want to be friends again.
Not because your goal is friendship.
Because you can't truly love someone you wouldn't want for a friend.
You're in the typical newcomer's rut.
Reading her, making changes that are possibly superficial because they are all motivated by your desire for HER instead of your desire to BECOME BETTER.
It's hard, I know.
But it's a trap nonetheless.
Divorce is a painful word and and a frightening prospect. It was/is for all of us. But you can't deal with this out of your fear.
Sorry, I'm not trying to bring you down. I just see you heading down a path that others have tried over and over again. It brings us momentary relief because we love finding positives.
The best work is far less glamorous. And it's hard, because it's about taking responsibility for your own life. It's about reclaiming the man you were when your wife first fell in love with you. It's about focusing on YOU instead of her or the marriage. In fact it precludes you being able to focus on her or the marriage.
That makes it scary.
That's what makes it effective.
Stop trying to reach her and you just might begin to reach her.
Blessings,
Bill
"Don't tell me the sky is the limit when there are footprints on the moon."
