Muddle's Muddy Waters

[grasshopper]

First of all, Muddle, forgive me if I am belaboring this. To me, this is a fun exercise and helps me focus my thoughts so...

The lack of something, to me, can't ever be a bad thing, because by definition, it isn't anything at all.

VERY interesting. I see your point but I think I am operating on the idea that my W and I BOTH had the same idea of what a "good" marriage was to us and neither of us lived up to that mutual understanding. The real problem is that I did't even know I was missing the same things as her until I really started to explore what I wanted.

Again, very interesting thought.

My W came to see things in such a negative light AFTER the A was in full swing. To me, this meant that the A had changed her perspective, and because she wanted out of the M in order to peruse the A, she looked at our M from an angle she never did before.

So what you are saying is that either because SHE told you so, or you inferred it yourself, you think this otherwise happily married W of yours decided one sunny morning that she would start an affair, THEN started to gain a distorted, or "different", more negative perspective on your M? I submit that people in an A almost ALWAYS develop DEEPER negative views of their marriage but I also think that being "away" from the marriage and with OM helps them recognize what has been missing all along. That does NOT mean they were happy, it just means that in my W's case, she learned a lot more about WHY she was unhappy where before she only knew she was.

I think we are both talking a lot about perspective here and I agree that if our premise is that perspective is everything and theirs is different AND valid, then we are basically on the same page.

I just fully accept the fact that for whatever reason, my W thought our marriage was "bad" enough or unfulfilling enough to have an affair. She was NOT happy and that is for many reasons, not just our marriage, this is true, but so too is it true that she chose to try to be fulfilled by a man, something that she had living with her already. Something's wrong with that picture if you accept your permise that the marriage/R was "good" and they just made a choice to go another direction.

It took me some time to realize that this did not make her wrong about what she saw. Although her perspective and motivations caused her to veer more negatively when viewing an aspect of our M than she used to, and than I did and do, it doesn't change the fact that those things she's passing judgement on exist.

You SEEM to be making my point here. I am more concerned about my W's perspective on things than any abstract philosophy on good and bad. To my W, our marriage was bad. Period. For me to think that it was good and simply in need of some patch-work would be, in my mind, discounting her perspective. She was ready to leave. She had her mental bags packed and you don't do that when there is a good situation that needs some work. You do that when you suffer through years of, yes, unfulfilled expectations and desires and decide to DO something about it.

I have read that before, but I'm sure you're well aware of the variety of opinions on As out there.

Maybe not so much as you'd hope. I would welcome more info on this. I guess my ideas on A's comes from reading the books I have, mainly DB/DR and the thousands of posts I have read here over the past several months.

No M is perfect, and even if you have wide open lines of communication, there are never any guarantees. To me, an A is all about personal choice. The person who chose to have the A, chose to have the A for their own reasons, whether it had to do with the M or not. I think that quite often, an A is an attempt to fill a void in oneself, one that can not be filled by marriage, or any relationship for that matter. It's quite possible for anyone to have this void in a good marriage if they are not happy with or in themselves.

I would have to guess that there are theories out there that say that an affair can happen to any marriage, no matter how good or bad and that it's mostly about personal development or lack-thereof that is the motivating factor and NOT the marriage or spouse. IF that is the theory, then I guess I just have to disagree. It may all be about those things, but to me in the end, the decision to have the affair and continue it for any length of time is a reflection on the quality of the marriage and thus there IS hope for reconciliation should the quality of the marriage be improved and the individual perspectives on it exposed and are addressed by each partner.

I guess this is where we sorta agree and not. I DO think persoal choice and filling "voids" has a lot to do with it, but in the end, as I said, choosing to fill those voids outside the marriage rather than address them from within denots a situation that was not conducive for individual growth, i.e. bad for both partners. As you say later on, and I could not agree more, marriage is about two whole people choosing to be with each other. In a "bad" marriage, I think one or both of the individuals are not able to grow and thus when one of them decides to try to grow, they find themselves "stuck". I know that's more about MY sitch than a universal but...

Did we have false expectations of what M would be? I think this is a big part of it.

Yes and no. I think, as I said, in my personal case, the things that my W "expected" from our marriage were some of the same things I did yet neither of us ever took the time of effort to try to GET those things. We just too it for granted and ended up here. In general expectations are bad (oops, sorry), however, mutual expectations are usually refered to as an agreement and thus, since both people are working towards the same goal, of upholding the agreement, then you're fine. The tricky part of MY sitch is that my W and I didn't know until recently that we even shared the same expectations, just that they manifested themselves in different ways. Now that we are communicating much better, we are discovering that had we only known what the other truly wanted from the marriage, things may very well have been different. We both agree on that.

I think some people need to be on the brink of disaster in order to "fix" something, and thinking of the old M as bad does that for you, motivating you to change it.

Obviously this does apply to me in particular because as I said, my W WAS unhappy and I did nothing to address her concerns to the extent that I could. Some of that was in her, and up to her to address, but a lot of it was the dynamic of our marriage and yes, it DID take this affair to wake me up to that fact. I WAS motivated at first by the "brink" but now I am motivated by the possibilities of a much better, happier marriage where we can BOTH grow as individuals and learn to be interdependant and NOT codependant, wanting to share in each other's lives, not NEEDING that.

At present, I would like to think of my M as what it is, with significant room to improve on a good thing. This allows me to be primarily motivated by love and not fear.

I was motivated by fear of losing all I have and now I am motivated by the love of my family. The definition, or semantics of how I think about my "old" marriage really doesn't have much bearing on that. I only use the past mistakes in my marriage as a tool to understand what I don't want to do in the future. I use the present, the most important time, to embrace the love and life I have, grow my PMA, increse the communication between us and in general, rebuild our marriage in the likeness we would BOTH be happy with.

Truly, the past and future don't really even exist but in our minds anyway so WTH...live on, lol.

GH

P.S. Before someone accuses me of thinking too much, I only think about this stuff when I read something here. The rest of my day is spent actually LIVING, not thinking about how to live...or at least I WANT it to be, lol.