Quote: I just want to know how you got to where you are today after everything and how much your H worked on bringing back the M and how you got him to do that....
Well, honestly, we recovered our m with the liberal use of DB'ing (me) and lots of luck (both of us). h worked extremely hard on the M but in his own (wonderful, but sometimes unrecognizable!) way. IOW, we never went to MC (well, after the fateful first time when he told me and the MC he didn't know if he wanted to be married and the MC told us that he couldn't help us then ), he never read any books (to my knowledge) and we rarely, rarely talked about our R. He never said "I want to work on this marriage" (which is something lots of LBSes on the board seem to be waiting to hear) but he did work on it.
I embraced DB'ing like it was a long, lost child and used goals and 180s with intensity. I also have the KLA tapes which drummed the concepts into my head again and again and used other books ("men are from mars, women are from venus", "the five love languages", lots of books on listening, lots of books on forgiveness) to supplement Michele's program.
Doing lots and lots of "what works" (quality time, hiking, hanging out, movies, dinner, quiet times, chatting about fun stuff, etc) got us lots of good feelings between us. Doing hardly any of what doesn't work for us (big old R talks, assigning blame, etc) also helped too. There were many times when I got stuck in cheeseless tunnels thinking "we SHOULD be able to have R talks!" and nearly lost it...you know what? our R talks last 2 minutes at a time, are not done in an angry state, and can take weeks to finish...that's what works well for us.
You mention in your post:
Quote: first I want to express how important it is for us to spend quality time together....try for at least 10hrs a week.
-- will TELLING h this work for you guys? If it does, cool, if not, what if you just made some plans to hang out together? In my sitch, TELLING h it was important for us to do XYZ would have made him feel controlled and would have left me feeling let down. YMMV.
Other stuff that really helped...posting three positives a day, trying to meet h's LL when I was feeling down or needing reassurance, and all the stuff in my signature line...when I keep those things in mind, well, things go well.
Have you reread DR recently? That's always a good place to start, too.
Did this help? or did you have specific questions?
Sage
Relax. Appreciate. Be calm. Laugh. Enjoy. Be secure. Be loving. Be loved. Don't personalize. Don't ASSume. Accept. Be grateful.
), he never read any books (to my knowledge) and we rarely, rarely talked about our R. He never said "I want to work on this marriage" (which is something lots of LBSes on the board seem to be waiting to hear) but he did work on it.
and used goals and 180s with intensity. I also have the KLA tapes which drummed the concepts into my head again and again and used other books ("men are from mars, women are from venus", "the five love languages", lots of books on listening, lots of books on forgiveness) to supplement Michele's program.
