Life, One Day at a Time (22 months)

[Accuray]

Thanks for posting that analysis -- it feels to me like folks on this board go through an evolution where in the initial shock we take on too much of the blame for what has gone wrong. Over the course of a year or more I think the blinders come off a bit and we say "hey, I wasn't *that* bad".

That doesn't negate the value of the work we do on ourselves. People usually only change in response to crisis, so this crisis is an opportunity for self-discovery and self-improvement, but that process doesn't mean that you weren't "good enough for marriage" before, because chances are we all were.

Any marriage is going to have ups and downs and tension, people are imperfect. Over time we settle into equilibrium that is reached as a reflection of both of our idiosyncrasies, insecurities, and how we are used to being treated.

I enjoyed the discussion from RockJC about unconditional love. From my time here, I don't believe that unconditional love is enough to keep a marriage going. You can unconditionally love your former spouse, or someone you don't want to live with. It can certainly be enough for a marriage of convenience, but not for the kind of marriage that keeps both partners fulfilled.

I believe that successful marriage requires 3 things (1) emotionally healthy partners, (2) mutual attraction, and (3) commitment to and respect for the marriage. I think in many cases I read about here, it's the attraction that has evaporated for the WAS -- I think that's the real message behind ILYBINILWY.

Initially I thought "in love" was the butterflies in the stomach feeling of a new infatuation, and that it was natural and normal for that to diminish and fade, and that it was not a required ingredient for a successful marriage. After a considerable amount of time, I've come to believe that this "in love" feeling is different from "long term attraction", and it's the loss of the latter that the WAS is really talking about.

Although MWD doesn't talk about that specifically, I think that the practices of "act-as-if" and GAL are designed to re-kindle attraction. I think it's the attraction that motivates the willingness to work on the marriage and the willingness to compromise, versus the perceived obligation of unconditional love. It's the fuel for the fire so to speak. I'm not talking about physical attraction (although that may be part of it for some), I'm talking about feeling attracted to your spouse for a wide variety of reasons -- intellect, humor, compassion, a broad range of things -- it's the desire to "be with" this person. That feeling is good, and it's worth fighting to protect.

I think if you find yourself in a scenario where your spouse's attraction is gone or diminished, it tends to lead you to behaviors that make you even less attractive, and you start a very negative cycle of self-reinforcement. There are a minority of books that approach addressing marriage problems from this perspective, but I don't think any have really cracked the "re-create attraction" dilemma.

My biggest fear going through this process has been that if our marriage ends in D, that I will not find another person who I will feel as attracted to as I do to my W. My MC said that in the case of divorce, there are 3 scenarios:

1) 2 healthy people who just made a bad decision to be together and amicably separate. He said this is exceedingly rare.

2) 1 healthy person and one unhealthy person where the unhealthy person's destructive behavior or emotional limitations eventually drive the marriage apart.

3) 2 unhealthy people where their mutual issues create a situation that is more or less doomed from the start.

He said that second marriage statistics are so dismal because the pool of "divorced" people tends to be 3:1 unhealthy to healthy. Unfortunately, the unhealthy partner generally views the "other spouse" as the root of all the trouble and won't do the work to become healthy, so the cycle repeats.

He said that if you exit a marriage as the healthy partner, OR as a formerly unhealthy person who has been willing to do the work to become emotionally healthy, then there is no reason at all to expect that you can't find a wonderful second marriage that will last -- provided that you've learned to avoid hooking up with unhealthy people.

From that perspective, I think the people who have found their way here, have gone through the self-discovery process and really committed to improving themselves are truly blessed, despite all the pain and hardship that the situation has caused. You come out of this, Adinva, as a much more self-actualized person, with much better relationship tools than you had coming in. I believe that will increase your capacity for happiness as well as your ability to achieve it for the rest of your life, regardless of what happens with H, and that is a gift.

Accuray