Why Would a Married Man Do This?

[NotATLDave]

1. Why else would he have taken his wedding ring off?
2. I would consider it common courtesy, I suppose
3. a spouse who is so detached that they are ok with it.

Gotcha! You just assigned "meaning" to actions and am making assumptions based upon your own values, feelings, etc. If you were my W, I would now ask you to repeat back what I've been saying to ensure that you really heard what I was saying. Because, with your response, you are saying one of two things...that you didn't understand anything I said -or- that I'm a liar. You are entitled to believe what you want but I have no reason to lie here.

Let me address the first quote.

We have a divorced neighbor who comes over to tell us about all of her boyfriend problems. She says stuff like "he did such-and-such, therefore he must not really be into me". I've been around groups of women where this seems to spiral into a feeding frenzy of validation, etc. My W, prior to our therapy, *would* validate her. Now my W says stuff like..."well, maybe he just wanted to do such-and-such...why should that have anything to do with you?". Then she would respond "but boyfriends *shouldn't* act that way"...as if there is some big rule book. In reality, she doesn't have enough esteem to say "this is my rule, my boundary and it really hurt me that he did that". The problem is that the confrontation of the boyfriend's action doesn't come from the right angle. She thinks he's bad and she punishes him rather than making herself vulnerable and discussing the fact that certain things bother her. I've even tried to get her to understand this but I think some folks are either too emotional or don't have the capacity to "get it".

honey, I'm sorry for using you to make this point.

Let me add one more thing to this pot. My W and I have always had an incredibly high degree of independence and trust. That hasn't changed. Actually, my W has always been the easy-going one without a lot of internal rules (but then again, she doesn't seem to have a huge dynamic range of emotions either). I'm the one whose coming to grips with these ideas because I used to assign tons of meaning to others actions. Hell, the rejection people feel on this board when their spouse won't have sex with them is a product of this. As someone who no longer "feels" pain when his spouse rejects him, I can san say that the process takes a while. It starts with learning how to think. Developing faith that your new thoughts are correct. Then confronting bad feelings with these new thoughts. Eventually, the bad feelings just don't happen anymore.