My take on the 5LL is that we tend to fall in love with people who make us feel loved in our LL's. Finding someone who really makes us feel loved is a rare thing. Once we feel truly loved, it is something that is really hard for us to leave.

This of course assumes that we are mature enough to realize that not everyone in the world will make us feel as loved and that leaving the person who makes us feel loved may mean that we never find another person who will make us feel loved.

I believe that unconditional love is a very powerful building block for a good marriage, if both people understand how rare it is. For me GAL and feeling like I was becoming a complete and integrated man, allowed me the freedom of opening my heart and loving my wife unconditionally and recognizing that she might not love me back. Ultimately, she decided (with the help of a good sex therapist) that I was a very good man, one who showed her daily how much he loved her, and that she would probably never be able to find one as good as me (if she tried at all). It was then that she started to put her heart into rebuilding our marriage.

My suggestion is that at some point you will need the help of a skilled marriage counselor (preferrably a certified sex therapist) for your wife to talk/argue/reason her way into realizing that she too needs to work at building the relationship. My wife needed someone who pushed her to realize things my wife didn't want to think about. It was important that it wasn't me and that my wife felt I was on "her side" in her self discovery process. I was the one who took her out to dinner and listened to her complain about how the sex therapist was pushing her too hard. I was the one who held her when she cried from being emotionally overwhelmed.

Rebuilding a marriage is all about a series of small steady steps over a long period of time. Good luck to you and your wife. Remember that it will be a roller coaster. Crying is fine, real men do have emotions and do cry.

>43 years of marriage--My wife and I are now closer than we have been in decades. I believe that my SSM is over.