wife won't admit PA with OM

[Accuray]

GreenBlue,

Normally I really enjoy your posts and your advice -- in this case I think you're being a bit extreme. You're implying that Jake can make his wife change by taking some action (moving out, making demands, etc.). In effect, escalating the situation will help because it won't allow his W to maintain what she's doing.

Jake has said that if he does that, his W leaves and he does not want that. Reading between the lines, I think you're saying that's OK because it will force a crisis that may cause his wife to re-evaluate or at least not allow her to continue to cake-eat.

I've posted it on other threads: DB is not perfect, it doesn't always work. In my view, it's the "least worst" approach because the others seem to yield consistently inferior results.

When marriage is in crisis, there needs to be motivation for both parties to want to go forward. There are two types of motivation, negative and positive. Negative motivation is effectively the fear that things will be worse through divorce (worse for the kids, worse financially, etc.) To GreenBlue's point, negative motivation is not enough to make it work -- it's a marriage of convenience in which neither party is really invested.

I don't believe this is Jake's only motivation -- if it were, he wouldn't be here. He's saying that the negative motivation is keeping them both at the table, but I believe his positive motivation is that he loves his wife and truly wants her back invested in the marriage.

Other positive motivation includes truly enjoying each other, shared happy memories, making each other laugh, having someone to trust, etc. That's what you start to rebuild through DB *if* you can do it, and it's hard!

Accuray