AS, you asked what I mean by living my life for her. I love myself and have separate interests, but I do feel that to a great degree I live my life for her. She has always been so important to me. Like I have said before, I have always put her on a pedestal. While there is a grain of truth in her recreation of what I have done wrong in our marriage, for the most part she is conveniently forgetting about all the other great stuff I have done.
I know I have to love myself and rediscover this love. I need to rediscover life, and in fact since the BD, I feel like I am living so much more purposefully. I am no longer skating through life. I am thinking nonstop about myself, what I enjoy, what I want out of life, what I want for my family. But I am also obsessing about my W. I just love her so much, even if she is being a witch to me right now.
I think that it is harder for me to GAL while living with my wife. It is hard to put the old way of life aside. Everything still seems so ordinary except fo the BD. She has no clue that I am crying every day, and we live our family life like it is one happy family as always. CRAZY existence.
You want to learn to do things alone with your children. It takes time to get used it. Then if or when you are D’d everything isn’t a complete culture shock. You’re way to dependent on your W and are going to struggle early on. The best way is to ease your way into it until it becomes your new norm.
Plus when you pursue a person who is rejecting you it lowers your value in their eyes.
I know you are right. I am trying to become less dependent on my W. This is one of my 180s (for me) and GAL activities. I know this is a problem.
I am trying to pursue less, but I struggle with this too. I have stopped saying I love you. I have stopped any physical touching. But I still set up date nights and family outings. I still ask if she wants to watch a TV show before bed. 75% of the time she does. We are probably in the friend zone. It is better than being in mortal combat, but living in the same house makes it difficult to stop playing house.
You guys come here and beg for help and we give it to you and you just ignore it. I’m trying, I’m suck at DB, I don’t say I love you anymore. I’m just happy to be in the friend zone.
This is why you are where you’re at right now because it’s pathetic. It’s beta male behavior and a big turn off to a woman. Google hypergamy
If you don’t put on your big boy pants and start to understand that pursuing a woman who is rejecting you is demeaning and emasculating you are going to suffer severely my friend.
Look D I am sorry I’m taking this out on you and I know it’s hard but I have to give it to you straight.
Lastly, it is complete bs to think you can’t live in the same house and be cordial without pursuing and friend zoning yourself.
I disagree with LH a bit. I think living together is most conducive to saving a marriage. I also think that you should be cordial throughout your sitch. I truly believe that you should kill her with kindness. (NOTE: This is not about "living for her" or becoming her slave, it is about returning good for evil. She yells, you remain calm. She throws off her vows, you double down on your vows. She goes out and hurts the marriage, you remain true to your marriage.
I believe we should live for one person. Christ. Others here probably take a more narcissistic view of living. But I believe that Christ always did the right thing, no matter what others did. So when she is mean, you are nice. When she verbally slaps you, you remain upbeat, confident and pleased. In other words, you emotionally detach from her garbage. No matter what she says. No matter what she does, you are emotionally even. Smile. Happy. Upbeat. Friendly even!
The friendzone isn't about being friendly, or unfriendly, it is about getting to a place where your wife cannot see you as anything more than a friend. That is what being AMOAFWL is all about. I watch videos for another relationship expert. He promotes the idea of good guys to great men. (You can google that.) One of his favorite things to talk about is how sexy woman find it when you put something ahead of them. Counter-intutivie? Maybe. But Destroyd, how has "living for her" been working out for you? Stop doing what doesn't work. start doing what does work. Imagine your W's surprise when she says "I need you to do this" and you say "That will have to wait because I am going to do this thing I want to do". She is going to wonder "Hmmm, he doesn't usually do that." Believe it or not it works.
Think of the guys that got all the girls in high school. Did they cater to the girls every whim? No! They were kind of jerks.Kind of the bad boy. And girls flocked to them. Yet we nice guys try to "live for them". And you know what women see in guys that "live for them"? Friends.
Trust me. I was friend-zoned by an ex-gf for years. It wasn't until I started to live for myself a bit (second only to living for Christ) that she would start to start to wonder what was up and get curious and start to want to get closer. This is the dynamic that makes DBing work. When you back off and give her time and space. Go out and GAL. Detach. And start working on you and 180ing to improve. yourself. The distance-pursuit dynamic kicks in and the WAW gets curious. Go read that thread. It is so important that you become a little mysterious. Most of us LBHs have the temptation to become an open book after BD. When we should do the exact opposite.
Don't tell her that you don't want to just be friends....live your life that way! SHOW her you won't settle for less. And the best way to do that is to show her you are going to be FINE moving on. And you certainly do not do that be hounding her about her EA.
In my first sitch in 2005, after I had software on my wife's PC (remember this is before smartphones) to track her communcation. She struggled. She talked to her friends from a support group she'd joined a few years earlier about how she wanted to contact OM so bad. And then one day she told them she didn't care if I found out and emailed him.
I got home from work that night, went into her office, and uninstalled the spy software. I told her, do whatever you want. I am done with it, and ready to move on if I have to. To this day I don't know if she ever contacted him again after that, but her whole demeanor towards me changed after that. And from that moment on she consistently showed that she was recommitted to the marriage.
The point? You've go to let go. You've been holding on so tight from day one that you've been smothering her. If you let go and work on yourself, so that you are ok whether she stays or goes, you will save yourself. That's most important. And in the process it may save your marriage.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
This is why you are where you’re at right now because it’s pathetic. It’s beta male behavior and a big turn off to a woman. Google hypergamy
If you don’t put on your big boy pants and start to understand that pursuing a woman who is rejecting you is demeaning and emasculating you are going to suffer severely my friend.
D, what LH says is important for you to understand. One of the common things you hear here is winning back the respect of your W and your attitude won't help. Whether she comes back to you or not, you will at least have your own dignity when you look back at this years later.
I watched a movie recently where a guy catches his wife sleeping with another man. He gets angry and starts yelling and complaining to her about her betrayal when he has been a good husband. The wife is the one who cheated and the guy looked like a normal confident person in other scenes in the movie. But he looked pathetic getting emotional and angry at his wife. Was it justified? Yes. But did he look pathetic? A resounding yes. Seeing that brought a lot of perspective on this
