Glad to hear things are less war-like at your house now.
I've gone back and re-read your first few posts on this thread, and I have a few questions (forgive me, I really can't go through the entire thread at this point...)
First, has W read SSM? I note that she dismisses such stuff as "psychobabble", so I'm kind of doubting it, but if she has, great.
Second, if she HASN'T read it, or even if she has, have you truly satisfied yourself on whether or not she has really accepted that there is a problem? If she is still in denial, no amount of work on your part will make the smallest bit of difference.
Is it possible that "every friday night" is too rigid and restrictive to work over the long haul? I know on the face of it, it sounds like a way to almost guarantee at least once per week frequency, but doesn't it also place undue demands on you? You yourself were worried about "performing on demand" on the requisite night, maybe your W has had the same reaction. Also, what if Friday night finds you two out late or somewhere where sex is not practical? Wait till next week? Try Saturday? Couldn't she then say "It's not Friday", thereby being childish and petty, but you get my drift?
I know you won't want to hear this, but it occurs to me that you can make all the New Year's resolutions you want to, divide up the housework, and schedule till you're blue in the face, but if your W doesn't buy into the fact that there's a problem that threatens her marriage, and that SHE has a responsibility (just as YOU do) to work with you to resolve it, there just isn't going to be much real progress.
I think in this sitch (yours, mine and ours) what we need are several different kinds of goals - short, medium and long-term. We need to take a REALLY critical look at things, and decide into which category each goal belongs. We need to think baby steps all the way. For you, once a week may seem like baby steps, for your W it may be giant leaps. I'm also thinking that both partners need to dialog on the goalsetting at some point. I can have "my" goals, she can have "her" goals, but at some point we must put them together and come up with a list of "our" goals.
Goals are great, but without an action plan on how to achieve a goal, they are just words on paper. You know this from your work life, Dave. We both know how a project must be run in order to succeed. I think we need to think of our R as a very, very long project. I'm thinking at this point a useful exercise would be to proceed as follows:
1. Write a description of what my marriage will be like one year from now. This is to be a VERY detailed description, and include everything I hope my marriage can be one year from now. I need to be sure not to include anything that I don't think could be achieved within the next year, but I also need to include everything that I can't see not achieving by then.
2. Working backward, create a series of monthly goals designed to get to the "one year" goal. How many things would need to change in the first six months? In the first 3 months? In the first month?
3. Break those monthly goals down into weekly goals, and use this exercise as a way of testing the reasonableness of the overall goal-set. Revise if needed.
Then it would be necessary to "manage the project", by taking regular "status reports" - comparing actual progress against the plan, and watching for needed course corrections.
Crap - that all sounds like way too much work, and maybe not even practical. I wll give it a try, though...
