Loving, Listening, and Letting Go..

[aeolianchaos]

GB,

Thanks for the feedback..

She may be fishing to see if there is any chance you'd forgive her.

At one point yesterday I asked her if she thought it had been easy for me to forgive her for the A. I think this might have been the first time I had ever implied that i had forgiven her. I think I have. Its a hard question to test.

If she does, I think she wants you to take a stronger role in the m. She probably wants you to set boundaries, and to establish control. I know mine did, she wanted me to stand up more for myself in the m. The irony was that I saw myself as a loving compromising husband. (it's weird but in a way I think your w wants to atone for her sins).

Yes - in many ways I certainly viewed myself as acting out of what I thought was mutuality -- although I wasn't, as I really wasn't even thinking about my needs. It was more reactive than anything, moving to a different state every year or so.

I don't know if she wants me to set up boundaries explicitly. If anything, she has often complained that she felt like I was telling her what she could or couldn't do (because I told her I didn't want her talking to her friends about M issues if she wasn't going to talk to me about them).

One thing my W seems pretty firm on is this idea that I am intelligent, charismatic, clever, etc.. and she wants other people to see it as well as her. Not as in polygamy, but its clear to me she gets a reflected sense of self from the idea of being married to a 'cool dude.' This is a challenging one for me - if I look inside there is some truth to the fact that I do withhold these things in social circumstances - it is something I am working on and would like to change for my own benefit.

[edited by dbmod: reference is not recommended nor allowed]

I plan on finding this @ the library. Here is my concern with books like this: they tend to pathologize something that is a pretty common behavior. They refer to something in the general to reach a wide audience and create a 'system' for repair that leaves people with another label and its possible to get stuck within that system.