I am new to the community and have been wondering for a few nights what to ask and what title to give it. I have recently bought DB and am 3/4 of the way through it and am still very worried, like most newbies to the forum, about the state of my marriage and if we can rescue it from it's current path towards the sinister dark cloud that is the Big D. I could waffle on for hundreds of lines of how our marriage got to where it is today but then again I suppose I could use a few of the abbreviations and acronyms that I have learnt since joining the forum. I work in IT and I thought IT had too many TLA's and FLA's....
Ok in a nutshell..... Together 13, Married 9 S 7 S 4 Discovered W's OEA end of Jan 2013
We went to marriage counselling in UK (Relate) which opened up communication between us and just caused us to have or 1st real and regular arguments. Of the 9 sessions we had, the counsellor did not suggest more than 1 or 2 positive things we could try to do to improve our relationship and I look back now and realise that the counsellor, pretty much gave up after session 6 where W had a session without me and told the counsellor that she didn't want to be married to me any more. I have had a huge wake-up call and also realised that my W has always buried her head in the sand to avoid conflict and not talk about 'hard' things. Now after years of this she has said ILYBNILWY and can not see a way back for us. Other things she has said that I have read about in the Forum and in DB book include; The OEA, which BTW she denies was anything other than friendship, has not changed the way she feels about me; She see's me more like a brother and it feels wrong to kiss or be intimate with me; If we stay together she will always be unhappy; If she stays with me its just for the sake of the children She is disappointed with 'where' we are in life (still struggling financially and not happily married)
After giving her space, for a couple of months, to try to work things out she has admitted, with a lot of leading questions from me, that whenever she does think about us and our relationship, that she keeps asking herself the same questions over and over and getting the same answers. A small glimmer of hope that I had was that she had a couple of weekends ago agreed to read a couple of books. The two books she has are DR and Project Happily Ever After. But she has already read PHEA and dismissed it as be disappointingly written and not relevant to our situation. I am really hoping that the DR book 'speak' to her and shows her that that there can be light at the end of the tunnel as the only two futures she can see are one with us apart or one with us together and in a loveless unhappy marriage. She is also against doing any further therapy as she says we have already tried and it didn't work. I suppose that is just about up to date and I have waffled on for far longer than I intended. Back to my original question....does anyone have any advice or success stories for people who were in low conflict marriages and are in an ILYBNILWY as most of the DB book that I am reading seems to focus on marriages where people argue or where the H is emotionally withdrawn from W? Thank you for reading about the trials and tribulations of this Limey!
