My Wife Having Affair/I just filed for D

[Accuray]

Coda87,

You're very conflicted. Your message on 11/20 lead me to believe you wanted out, but then you drove to the hotel with OMW to catch W in the act and confront her. I guarantee that action made her resent you very much.

If you want to divorce, divorce. If you want to try to save your marriage through DB, then you have to act differently and approach this situation in a completely different manner, and that will be counter-intuitive and painful for you.

I will tell you this, if you do it "half way" or sometimes DB and sometimes do what you want, the impact will be to not save your marriage and prolong your pain too, which is the worst outcome, so you have to either commit, or don't commit, but you can't semi-commit, because that's doomed to fail.

So if you want to commit, what do you need to do?

1) Reset your expectations: Realize you are in for a very long wait, and nothing you do can shorten that wait. You literally have to wait for her affair to end on it's own, then you need to wait for her to grieve the end of the affair, and then you need to wait for her to evaluate what she wants such that she can look at you as a possible future rather than just a scarred past. You can't shorten that timeline, but you can continue to lengthen it, potentially indefinitely, if you keep building resentment.

You have to drop your expectations of "what you are owed", or what marriage implies you should get. You have to adopt the philosophy that she literally owes you nothing. She doesn't owe you an apology, she doesn't owe you courteous responses, she doesn't owe you some time, she owes you nothing. You simply have to act as the silent better choice.

2) Decrease Resentment: Many relationship books use the concept of a "love bank" where you make deposits and withdrawals. If you make more withdrawals than deposits, the love bank runs empty, and your spouse starts shopping around to get their needs met elsewhere. In a "happy" marriage, your deposits need to outweigh your withdrawals by 20:1, and in a maintainable marriage, the ratio needs to be 7:1. Where this model breaks down though, is once the love bank is empty, the resentment bank starts to fill, and you can't start refilling the love bank until the resentment bank has been cleaned out, and that is very, very difficult. That's why when you spouse says "you never took me out to dinner", and you offer to take her to dinner *now*, it doesn't do any good, she no longer wants to go, because her resentment bank is preventing any love deposits.

Therefore *everything* you do needs to be measured against a yardstick of resentment. Will it make her resent you more or less?

What will make her resent you more will be shaming her, embarrassing her, scolding her, appearing to be trying to stand in the way of her happiness, being sad around her, making her responsible for your feelings, telling her you're not happy because of what she's doing, etc. etc. She will also resent you for discussing your situation with family and friends and making her out to be the bad person. You simply have to stop all of that if you want to DB. You have to "act as if" it doesn't impact you, and that you are fine no matter what she does.

That's different than condoning it or saying that it's good or even okay, you don't have to go that far, you just have to let her do what she will do, and act as if you are fine with yourself no matter what she does. It's getting to a "judgement free zone", and establishing complete self-reliance, like you had back when you were single.

3) Apply DivorceBusting: Re-read DB / DR and live it. Live by Sandi's 37 rules. The principles are really quite straight forward, they are just counter-intuitive. 180 your spouse's long running complaints about you, get a life of your own, and act as if you are fine. That's the prescription in a nutshell. Easy to say, hard to do, but that's the path.

The hardest part of this is the timeline. We typically feel that if we apply our best efforts to something, we should be rewarded. This is a lot like riding an exercise bike for an hour a day for a week and expecting to right away lose 20 pounds. When it doesn't happen it's easy to get discouraged, but if you really want to see results, it's probably better to get on a maintainable exercise plan you can stick to, and have realistic expectations of how long it will take to reach you goal.

If you choose to go the "save my marriage" route, there are no guarantees, W and OM could get married and live happily ever after. You need to be okay with that based on the fact that applying DB will make YOU a better person.

I felt that if there were things about me that blew up my marriage and annoyed my wife, they would probably come up again in future relationships and annoy anyone else I might start dating, so I better deal with them or they would be a permanent issue. That has nothing to do with W and everything to do with you.

You simply have a choice to make, and it's a tough one.

Acc