Here again after 9 years and struggling 3

[Zues126]

Thanks for the reply IP.

I feel like a lot of the advice is about how to move on and not be upset anymore...

...This isn't really a M right now is it? I don't want to bury my problems, I want H to come home so that we can work them out. I don't understand why that's wrong.

I think this is where we all start. "I want my marriage to work." It sounds like such a noble statement. And in many ways it is. You should want your marriage to work, you should want to get through the 'for worse', you should want to remain true to your vows. Where it becomes less noble is when it interferes with other things in life you should value.

You should respect the fact that H is his own person. You don't get to control him. It takes 2 people to remain in a marriage. Your desire to remain married is noble as long as it inspires you to behave the way a married woman ought to behave. It becomes unhealthy when your desire to remain married starts leading you to focus on finding ways to control H's behavior. Accepting that he is his own person and gets to make his own choices is validating. As long as you feel the only acceptable outcome is him making the choices you want him to make you deny him as a person. If he is ever in a marriage with you again it will have to be because HE chooses it, not because you choose it for him and will him to obey.

You should also appreciate and enjoy the life that God has given you. This is quite a loss, I'm not pretending otherwise...but your appreciation for life simply cannot be conditional. My most important breakthrough was realizing that if I looked at the sky and told God that despite having my health, happy and healthy children, a good job, good friends, many gifts, and the miracle of life...if I still looked up at the sky and told him it wasn't enough, I couldn't possibly be content without the marriage I wanted when I wanted it...well, that would be so entitled that Him giving me a woman wouldn't change anything anyway.

I just thought it would get him out of his 'fog', as I said at the end of my post, the reality of losing something.

This is an example of controlling behavior. It's one thing to set boundaries so you aren't being controlled by him, abused, taken advantage of, etc. But trying to orchestrate consequences in his life to change his behavior is controlling.

from a man's point of view, do I express my emotions in safe ways to him?

This will be hard for you, but right now you don't. He isn't interested in your emotions. He doesn't want to hear them. So you can either spew at him anyway and give him more reasons to distance himself, or you can bite your tongue for a bit and avoid driving him away further. I know you have emotional needs and as a husband he isn't meeting them. I get it. He has told you that he doesn't want to be your husband.

If this changes in the future then you biting your tongue won't be the model of how the relationship would work. If the time comes when he is interested in reinvesting in a marriage with you then you'd get professional help to find ways to express your voice in constructive ways. That day may never come, and it isn't today. So if you want to scream, scream on the forum, not to him.

I don't understand how I can detach when he is round here almost every day acting perfectly fine with me.

Detaching doesn't have much to do with him. It has to do with you. For you I think two things will help.

First is, as we've said, starting to accept your H's decisions. The more you can let him be the less of your energy will be spent on him.

Second, GAL really is crucial to detachment. The point of it isn't to distract yourself. It is to meet your emotional needs elsewhere. Look- suppose you were in a desert, and you had an empty water bottle. You could keep trying to drink from the empty water bottle, but that doesn't do anything. It would just be frustrating because there is no water there. BUT- if you could find another source of water...maybe there is a juicy cactus you could break open with a rock...you could get the water you needed. Suddenly the appeal of an empty water bottle would fade. Similarly, if you reconnect with friends you haven't seen for a while, get involved in your church and help others, whatever, you will find other ways in meeting your emotional needs of being heard, understood, known, appreciated, respected, whatever. As you meet those needs your H will no longer look like the sole provider of everything you want and need in your life. He will start to look like a man. A man that you would like a M with...but not unconditionally with continuous affairs. A man that you can accept makes his own decisions and one you could live without if he so chooses. But then you'd be in a healthy spot, so he'd have more reason to believe that a M with you could work out.

I feel like things to save my marriage are too vague.

So as we've said, it's too vague because there is no magic bullet that will get someone else to recommit to a marriage. There is no love potion. My specific advice would be to:

-Spend 15 minutes a day reflecting on the things God has given you that you can be appreciative for. Celebrate what you have. Daily. Unconditionally.

-Pray for strength to let go of any grip you have over WAH. Before every encounter pray for the strength to overcome your own pain and be able to let him go on his own journey without influence from you. This would also be a 180. I would guess that H's reasons for leaving is that he felt controlled and criticized, that if he didn't do or live the way you wanted he would be in trouble, and maybe even you denied his needs as a way to manipulate him into being the H you wanted. I don't know about that, I could be wrong. You haven't said much about your past behavior or contributions in the breakdown of the M so I have no clue, I'm just guessing based on how you talk about your H now. So letting him go and not condemning him would be a big step towards a 180, and also ties in with validating the feelings he's expressed about how he can't live like that anymore.

-Work on yourself. There is more to the DB journey, but this would at least avoid driving him away further or doing more damage to a hurt marriage. From here I'd like to hear you write out much more about the dynamics in the marriage, where your behavior was unhealthy, why you acted that way (what was at the root of it), and some things you can do to grow as a person so those same things wouldn't happen again. I'm 18 months post BD and still ask myself every day "If I was in my M again could I handle myself better?" I still am not confident of that, so I keep trying to find ways to understand why I was so needy or reactive in my M, how I can mend myself, how I can meet my needs elsewhere to reduce pressure on my partner, why I feel the need to cling to my idea on how love and relationships work. I have read many R books, have really challenged myself, and I'm still scared that I don't have the tools to make an R work. Your plan seems to be that H needs to come back and do things the way you need him to do them so your M works. That's not really stepping up on your end.

Basically as you write more about yourself we will have more specific advise. As long as you're writing about H all we can say is 'let him go on his journey'.

In the meantime DO keep posting, and know there isn't a limit to how much pain you can dump here or how many times you can rant to us to avoid screaming at him. We get it. All of us have felt the loss. We truly do get it. I just want you to use us as your outlet so you don't have to keep trying to drink from an empty water bottle. For me I post a lot because the forums ARE my GAL, they help me meet my emotional needs so I don't hurt as much from the loss. I just want to see you in less pain, but unlike family and friends I don't think the answer is outside of you.