Thanks Esame. I am benefiting from this forum. It's giving me a lot of good strategies. And I'd like to give back. There's something I did the other day that really involved sticking my neck out and could have been a bad move but as I reflect it was a good thing and I want to share it. As I said, my H is self-reflective and knows that his infatuation with the new wife won't last forever but nevertheless he is in the middle of it now. At one point he got frustrated as if he wanted more appreciation from me and blurted out that he viewed talking to me as an "obligation." That's a translation of the word he used and it doesn't actually have as strong a meaning in English as the original does. The best way I can describe it is as a societal or family obligation that you just MUST do. Whether you want to do it or not, you do it. Now I could have reacted to that as an insult because who wants to just be an obligation but he seemed to want affirmation that he was doing the right thing.
So after we last fell into having a relationship discussion that didn't go well, I decided to text him the next day. I told him I knew he felt our relationship was an "obligation" but that I told him that I know that means that he really loves me, because when you love someone, you put their needs before your own. And I thanked him for it. Now, this is in the context that sometimes he says he doesn't love me, sometimes he loves no one, sometimes he loves the other wife and sometimes he seems like he is trying to convince himself he loves her and sometimes he says he loves me and sometimes he says he loves us both and has place in his heart for two. He's typical MLC and this is when he is talking about his feelings and so I don't put much stock into any of it.
So, what was his reaction? Now, his next call was mainly to ask me for my opinion on a major opportunity that had come up for him and he wanted to ask me about it. But before he said anything, he asked me how things were regarding the things that he had previously said he was asking about out of "obligation" that I had mentioned in the text message. The way he said it was as if he wanted to make a point of doing what I had praised him for in the text as if he agreed with it. He didn't say, don't read too much into what I am doing and get the idea wrongly that I love you, which he could have.
The moral of the story is that I think I successfully reminded him of the nature of the love between us by praising him for something that 1-is really an example of true lasting love, 2-that he clearly wanted to be praised for. I looked for something he felt he was doing right and then spun it to give it the meaning I wanted it to have for him, which was namely if you show long term kind of love behaviors that is a good thing. And I know he desperately wants to feel he is doing the right thing.
