Ok, I had a thought last night and it was too late to post. I hoped I managed to remember it this morning, and I did.
Really, it was two thoughts. The first was the fact that for each of us, our 180's, if applied to the other's sitch, may look like something bad. Let me explain. If, in your sitch, you were always sitting around the house waiting on your W hand and foot, then not GALing and getting out of the house would be bad. If, as it is in my case, you were always gone then a 180 of being around more MIGHT not be a bad thing. I think a lot of us deal with this paradox. The fact is that one size DB shoe does not fit all. The goal is to CHANGE what YOU were doing that may have negatively impacted your R or life in general while realizing that IF you are going to be around the house more, it's because you want to do that for YOUR sake, not to cater to the whims of your WAS. Ah, another of those fine lines.
My second thought was that there seems to be the general consensus among us here that the only way to save our marriages is to get rid of the "old" marriage, filled with all the things that brought about it's demise, and replace it with a "new" marriage, built on the foundation of what we have learned about ourselves and our relationship with our spouses and held together by our not "allowing" ourselves NOR our spouses to return to the marriage unchanged. I have stated this myself MANY times. I now believe that to be only partially true, or at least in terms of it being the ONLY way to do this via DB. I now see another way, one that MAY be ill-conceived but after thinking about it, it's really how I have been doing things and SO FAR maybe it's working.
Conventional DB wisdom says out with the old and in with the new. It advocates a rebirth of sorts. What I now envision in my sitch is more like Groundhog's Day. I think MANY of us would say, after admitting MANY faults of ours AND our WAS, that in general, there WERE many good aspects of our marriages. We would also agree that DB's ideals of self change and the ability of OUR changes to spark change in the overall marriage, work. My contention is that, a-la Groundhog's Day the movie, that armed with our new, enlightened "selves" we can go back to the same scenarios in our marriage and affect change so that the outcomes are different. In effect, I am saying that I don't believe it's 100% important to get rid of the old M as much as it is to make 100% sure the new you is present in whatever M you have.
In my case, I can see MANY aspects of our old M still present, even aspects that MAY have been part of the problem. The difference is that MY approach is totally different so that while the overall marriage may be the same, my reaction to her within it, and my unilateral actions, change the dynamic. I think this is the essence of DB. Make no mistake, I am not saying she has no burden to change, but I can already see that she HAS changed both because of the affair (remember, part of what happens leading up to an affair, and then IN the affair is the WAS learns things about themselves that make them think their marriage is no good for them) and because of the changed dynamic between us. There is more communication, more intimacy outside the bedroom, and I firmly believe that once we get back "in" the bedroom again, there will be MUCH more spark between us.
I am not trying to reinvent the wheel, nor make excuses for how I do things. What I am trying to say is that I do NOT feel a need to demand or expect my W to make changes, or have some R talk where our new R is defined. I am comfortable existing in our old M as a new man. I am confident that if I can maintain my independent will to grow and move forward, I can infuse my old marriage with some new energy and allow what was already good about it, or rather, what worked for us in the marriage, to continue while casting the more negative elements to the side. I see her making changes and I see my commitment to MY growth as a catalyst for that. While I understand that her changing started LONG before I understood what was happening, and eventually led to a VERY negative thing in the affair, I can now help her continue changing and hopefully do it WITHIN our marriage, not without it. I may not have the power to change her, nor ANY control over her, but I believe that by keeping control over myself, I can at least help create an environment where we can both grow and if that doesn't happen, I know I will ALWAYS keep growing on my own.
This may be another argument of semantics but for me, I am really helped by thinking about things not as a total rebuild but a renovation of my marriage.
I have been struggling with this because while I do think it's generally bad to allow the old marriage to return, I think in SOME cases (maybe I am just fooling myself) with enough strong change from the LBS, many elements of the old marriage can remain intact.
Could be a pot of fool's gold, or the real thing, we'll have to wait and see. So far, so good.
