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Once she works on these and gets a better handle on them, she is going to feel differently. What that looks like is yet to be determined. As I said, she may realize that you are "it" for her and she wants to spend the rest of her life with you and grow old together. On the other hand, she may feel the opposite of that too.

And Doc, the same holds true for you too. You don't know what she'll be like a year from now, 18 months from now, whether you'll like her new and improved version.

I feel like I know what I need to do to fix things on my end and I’m already doing it—not to be over-confident in my ability to change, but I think I’m well prepared to do well in the shift. Especially because I’m not one to shy from conflict, so there will be no more resentment from me on any level—I will call it out when I see the issue. Without the resentment, I’ll be fine.

I’m not worried about her ability to commit to me—again, call me an idiot, but I don’t think she’ll ever cheat again. My bigger fear is her ability to change. I don’t know that she can go from being so incredibly resentful to being able to let things go. I don’t know that she can go from being so selfish sexually to generous. Those are very important to me.

Still, if I start to show signs of losing faith in her, the pressure certainly could affect her—but in that case, it’ll be over regardless.

I suspect my big hangup right now is knowing this likely began as an exit affair for her--she was done with me and had given up without ever trying to fix things.

It's because she was afraid to broach the subject of fixing the marriage with you. She knows she can't compete with you intellectually, physically, or emotionally. Just easier for her to walk away. I am NOT condoning what she did. I'm sure the cop was someone she could match wits with.

If you want to stay for the family and you want her to be a better, safer person, you have to find a way to give her confidence to take charge of parts of your marriage. I'm not explaining it correctly, but right now you're taking the lead on everything. You can still do that, but lead her to being more assertive about what she wants in your relationship. Yep, it's risky but I think it's what you want.

It's because she was afraid to broach the subject of fixing the marriage with you. She knows she can't compete with you intellectually, physically, or emotionally. Just easier for her to walk away. I am NOT condoning what she did. I'm sure the cop was someone she could match wits with.

If you want to stay for the family and you want her to be a better, safer person, you have to find a way to give her confidence to take charge of parts of your marriage. I'm not explaining it correctly, but right now you're taking the lead on everything. You can still do that, but lead her to being more assertive about what she wants in your relationship. Yep, it's risky but I think it's what you want.

That is what she told me last night, so you’re spot on.

The problem as I see it is she really doesn’t want to lead on much of anything. I have tried to force things throughout our relationship and she’ll just do nothing. It’s very frustrating for me.

As an easy example: vacations. We travel a good bit—usually 2-3 vacations a year just the two of us; then another 1-2 vacations with kids and other people, often members of my family; then another 1-2 vacations to visit her family.

She often complains about where we go and who we go with—she wants to do vacations but the two of us on a beach and I often want to do vacations revolved around good food. I plan every vacation and getting her feedback is like pulling teeth; and I’ve tried to really force the issue with her picking a location or an itinerary once we arrive—she just won’t do it.

So over the last few years, I’ve been picking places she wants to go—as I mentioned, we have done a few solo trips to Miami just this year so we can sit on the beach all day. Again, I know it’s what she wants to do, so I have put in the work to plan for it.

Still, the topic of vacations is a big debate for us—so this last year her anger shifted from the location to the people. We also did a trip to Disney World with my family in Dec. and after the fact she was angry they joined us. To me that’s s perfect place for them to come—it’s all family friendly stuff and my mom can watch the kids at night if we want to do a nice dinner. There’s no option where I never travel with my family anymore, so for her to sit back and do nothing while complaining about the trips I organize feels unfair—we did three trips solo this year: Miami twice and Italy; we did one trip with some of my family (Disney); and we hosted her family a couple of times with me spending half the time in the kitchen making them incredible meals (we couldn’t visit them because of strict Canada COVID rules).

So I look back at this last year and think I’m a fairly awesome husband on this topic, yet it was a relatively major point of conflict for her. I genuinely don’t know what to do differently and she can’t answer it in a conversation, but was holding significant resentment inside.

Even in these conversations we have been having I’m trying to force her to lead, but no dice. She just sits there.

How the hell do I let someone lead when they refuse to do it?

What I can do a better job is making sure she feels valuable to me. I think because of the resentment I was holding about our sexlife, I was often dismissive of her on topics I didn’t care about—not in a mean way (I don’t think), but I wouldn’t engage in a positive way. I think I can fix that.

I cannot help but observe that any woman who uses where and how many vacations a year are taken as a excuse in part to let a near stranger do her in cuffs is a very very fucked up human being.

I’ve heard of passive aggressive thought patterns before but this takes it to a new level.

She often complains about where we go and who we go with—she wants to do vacations but the two of us on a beach and I often want to do vacations revolved around good food. I plan every vacation and getting her feedback is like pulling teeth; and I’ve tried to really force the issue with her picking a location or an itinerary once we arrive—she just won’t do it.

Not to be mean here, but does she recognize that this exact behavior likely makes her an absolutely insufferable person?? I mean, how entitled can you be? To do what she did after acting like a petulant child and then complaining that she feels inferior to you. I mean, she is! A grown woman shouldn't act like this and she should be fighting to figure out wtf is wrong with her to act this way. Your description paints a picture like the insufferable women on some of those housewife reality shows. Is that who she wants to be? If it is, there really isn't going to be any change.

The vacation planning is frustrating. She sounds highly passive aggressive during it which is something to work on, obviously. Here's a process to think about, we'll use vacations as an example.

1) Start with the goal, not the solution. Discuss that we need a shared goal for our trip. Some could be shared, some elements could be individual needs, some a compromise. But goals don't include the plan, they focus on what success looks like and why it is important. So you both answer questions like: what does success look like for my vacation? How do I feel if it is a success? How would I measure it? How do we know if our vacation is high quality for us? What is most important to me?

2) You come to agreement on your goals for the trip, then you plan. Discuss what planning process is best and how you will collaborate. Do you do it together? Does one person take the lead? If one takes the lead, when do you meet to discuss options and ideas? How will you decide if there is a conflicting pov? How will we get conflict or disagreement on the table instead of hidden? Who will execute the plan once we agree?

Maybe you've done those things already. But making the process explicit and getting discussion and agreement on the process itself may help.

How the hell do I let someone lead when they refuse to do it?

You stop doing all the work. Stop leading. Tell her you are done working on the marriage, and it's up to her to take the lead. Then you sit back and watch what she does.

Part of the work of a freshly caught WS, is she has to do the heavy lifting. She has to work on herself,and the thought process that lead her to cheat on you. SHE HAS TO DO IT. Not you.

I understand your frustration. But, as long as you take the lead, she never will. As long as she believes you aren't going anywhere,and she has nothing to lose, she won't do anything.

And if she continues to do nothing? Then you should detach. I'm not saying you should leave the marriage. But you certainly need to stop investing yourself into someone who isn't investing herself into rebuilding a new marriage.

[This message edited by HellFire at 6:17 PM, Friday, April 29th]

You stop doing all the work. Stop leading. Tell her you are done working on the marriage, and it's up to her to take the lead. Then you sit back and watch what she does.

This^^^

Furthermore, if she doesn't want to participate in the vacation planning process - okay. You no longer go on couple vacations until it's one that she initiates and helps out with. Maybe she doesn't actually care about these vacations if she has such a terrible time when you go. You can still go on ones with family and friends, she is free to join, but if she chooses to do so, you will not engage with her criticisms about it. Same goes if you want to go somewhere solo. Because if she had an issue with it, she could have voiced her concerns beforehand or stayed home. If she's not willing to take the time and effort to speak up about these vacations, she gives up the right to complain when things are different than what she expects and her complaints become as tool she uses to build resentment over to justify her poor treatment of you. If you stop playing this game with her, it takes that power away from her and disrupts that pattern of behavior she is engaging in.

If she's not willing to lead, if she's not willing to act as a partner when it comes to building and maintaining the relationship with things like vacations, she's also not going to be proactive in working on herself so that she can be a safer wife for you. If she continues to build resentment because she refuses to change herself, where does that leave you? With a new DDay perhaps? If she won't do it, that tells you all that you need to know about where this is going and what the marriage is going to look like 1 year, 3 years, 5 years down the line.

So lots of feedback on the vacation example and it’s appreciated.

To those asking why don’t I just ignore her and do what I want with vacations—I do! I plan the vacations I want to go on and she can come or not come. The only ones she plans are when we visit her parents.

The problem is it’s a source of conflict—she holds it in as resentment and then withholds sex lol. It’s absurd, but I can’t keep doing that obviously. I thought it was a nice gesture on my part this year to plan more vacations she’s want, but it didn’t avoid conflict on the topic and she entered an affair. I’m not suggesting she entered an affair over our vacation schedule, but I just don’t feel like I’m the bad person she thought I was.

And it’s not that the vacation example is a silly one—they’re all silly (in my view). Honestly, the biggest fights we have gotten in over the last several months have revolved around desserts for the children. I’m of the view that if the kids eat their dinner, they should get a reasonable (small) dessert as a reward structure. She feels they should rarely get dessert (2x~ a week). So I try to compromise and not give them dessert every night, but ANYTIME they get dessert, she bottles in anger and will let me know a week later ("you gave them ice cream last Wednesday!").

It seems psychotic to me—my son is in like the 6th percentile for weight and needs the calories. It’s all just so exhausting. All of these things are coming to the surface now. Everything is either minor stuff like this or stuff from before we got married (prenup, etc). It’s just incredible for me to witness how much she has bottled up inside her. She lets nothing go.

I’m trying so hard to see it from her perspective, but anytime I back away, I see just how crazy all this shit is to fight about. I don’t think I’m a perfect husband, but the things she’s focused on are just so frivolous.

We had CT again today and i can tell the pressure from the CT got to her—the CT is echoing all the same points about her awful behavior and it’s hitting her hard. Today she broke down in disbelief of how fucked up she is, especially with her treatment of sex. As the CT explained, she was used for sex her whole life and then brought that view into our marriage—she just assumed us having sex was me using her for gratification. It’s just so insane and it’s so obviously true.

And I don’t think any of this is manipulation on her part to make me pity her—I feel like I have a front row seat to a car crash. I see her peeling back the layers of her brain in real-time questioning so much of her life. I do feel like the CT pity’s me though—every session I can see a part of her is shocked at how fucked up my wife is and I’ve been so oblivious to it my entire life.

I have no idea what becomes of it, but as I’ve noted before, I’m now on high alert for all of her madness. I feel committed to giving her a chance to change her life around. I suspect it sounds as if there’s no chance she can, but I also do see a positive side too. She is making radical progress on all of this through her awareness of it—before these were fights, but now she’s questioning her positions on everything and being a far more honest broker in the discussions.

Your wife mirrors mine so much. It’s a long, long path to R. Good luck. Hopefully, she fixes her flaws.

Ok..part of the work you need to do, is you need to stop tip toeing around,worried you might set if her crazy irrational resentments. And,really,they ARE so irrational. It's as if she is looking for something, anything, to get mad at you about, to justify her shitty behavior. You are not wrong. She is. You can not live your life, worried that you will cause her to be resentful.

Honestly, I don't think she's resentful nearly as much as she says she is.

[This message edited by HellFire at 12:18 AM, Saturday, April 30th]

Honestly, I don't think she's resentful nearly as much as she says she is.

What do you mean? She’s using resentment for a cover for something else?

And I’m not sure I’m tiptoeing. I don’t know though. I feel like I’m being the person I want to be—which I think strangely is just making her feel worse and more guilty. As someone said 20~ pages ago, no one is the villain in his/her own story; but it’s becoming increasingly difficult for her to look back on her life as anything other than a villain.

I think these "resentments" are more about control. She wants you to do what she wants(whether she voices it,or not), and when you don't, it pisses her off. Rather than say it pissed her off that you aren't doing what she wants, she claims " resentment." If anything, she's mad that she can't control you. So she punishes you.

I may have posted on your thread once. I can't remember. I'm not advocating one route or another, but I'll give you my experience for what it is worth.

I was married for 27 years when I filed. I had always been committed to my W and would have taken a bullet for her. Part of my dogged resolve had to do with my FOO issues. I had a really shitty childhood, and my M was my opportunity at redemption. Come hell or high water, I was going to show the world that I was better than my parents.

When I married my W, I was young and stupid.i had no mentor in my life who could guide me, so I married the first woman I really connected with, and man, did I ignore red flags.

My wife had made many bad choices in life, but had her come to Jesus moment and seen the light. In reality, she was a shallow, insecure, and deeply vain woman. With me, she married up, but deeply resented that, as she felt her looks made her the prize. I,on the other hand, was a more intellectually creative individual, something she would mock regularly. She complained about me being professorish and not sporty, etc. She mocked my dreams because not all of them came to fruition. Meanwhile, she was a woman without dreams. I had to convince her to go to Europe with me when she would rather go somewhere hot. Why visit museums a d galleries anyhow? Who cares? She nagged me to throw out my books, because libraries were full of them. She was essentially a cow.

The point was,I felt inferior to her from all of the brow beating. I had been ground down. I was convinced that I was lucky to have her. It wasn't until her A that I began to really unpack her behavior and the real dynamics of our relationship. I am co Vince ow, that at dome subconscious level, her A was a passive aggressive attempt to humiliate me. She felt angry that she had married up and so she needed to assert herself I some twisted display.

I was on really able to see our relationship with any clarity once we S. It was at that point that my,married for life goggles fell off, and I became more objective. When I looked at her, I now saw that she was a 50 version of her 20 year old self. She hadn't grown or matured because she did not gave the ability. She was in all respects, the most incurious person I knew. And I also realized that I had been freed from a lifetime of being shackled to that corpse of a human being.

Could I have made the marriage work? Only by surrendering my soul. I never realized just how soul destroying my STBXWW was until I had detoured from her.

From what I am sensing, seems like she wants attention and wants you wrapped around her finger? Wants you to read her mind and please her, also wants you to beg her for sex when she says no?
Am I close or way off?

The most soul destroying thing for a man is when they constantly plead with their wife for sex and she constantly turns them down only to find out down the track at the time she was quite willing to put out for the AP. Very humiliating.

[This message edited by Mene at 5:18 AM, Saturday, April 30th]

I think these "resentments" are more about control. She wants you to do what she wants(whether she voices it,or not), and when you don't, it pisses her off. Rather than say it pissed her off that you aren't doing what she wants, she claims " resentment." If anything, she's mad that she can't control you. So she punishes you.

I brought this point up to her last night and she related to it well. We dug into it and I really think you hit the nail on the head. All of her anger stems from not being able to control me—I’m strong-headed and moved passed her attempts to influence outcomes directly with me. Even with sex, it was her way to try to control my behavior, but it never worked—I never modified my actions to make it more likely she would want sex.

With her affair, it was the opposite—she had complete control of AP. He wanted to have sex with her and she used that to control his actions and feelings. As "co-workers," she could calm him down when he flew off the handle; but it was because she held sex over his head.

With me, she felt truly powerless and constantly undermined. And I dug into that too—pointing out how many things she did have control over that I just let her run with. Giving examples, she agreed—but the anger stemmed from the select few things she couldn’t get her way on. Hilariously, she brought up the two examples I used in this thread: vacations and desserts for the kids. She couldn’t win complete victory on those (very silly) topics and it bothered her.

It’s so clear now she hasn’t been looking for a partnership with me, just a person she can control. And she likely feels that she’s been losing that fight with me our entire relationship.

…my M was my opportunity at redemption. Come hell or high water, I was going to show the world that I was better than my parents.

I relate to that feeling. We dug into my parents and my father’s childhood a bit in CT yesterday and it seems clear to me that I brought a "success at all costs" approach into my marriage. My wife clearly didn’t have the same view on marriage.

From what I am sensing, seems like she wants attention and wants you wrapped around her finger? Wants you to read her mind and please her, also wants you to beg her for sex when she says no?
Am I close or way off?

I don’t know if she wants me wrapped around her finger, but she does always want to get her way—but she rarely thinks things through and can be impulsive, whereas I’m analytical and measured. The result are times where I’m not accepting of what she wants.

I don’t think she wants me to beg for sex—I think it’s far worse than that. I think she simply doesn’t have sexual desire for me because she already has me. Sex is a tool for her to either win a man’s attention or control a man’s actions. She already has my attention—we’re married—and she has found sex useless in controlling what I do.

Last night as our talk wrapped up we went up to bed and I kept it light and we discussed going to fool around. Once in bed, she cuddled into me, but I felt like sex might feel like an obligation for her in that moment—I could tell how tired she was and didn’t want to have an inauthentic sexual experience with her.

I told her I was fine if we just went to bed because I knew she was tired. She cuddled into me deeper and thanked me.

What occurred to me then was not that I was upset we wouldn’t have sex, it was that she never has desire to for me. We’ve gone an entire relationship of me never feeling sexually wanted—and now it’s compounded by the affair where I also feel unloved and disrespected.

I pointed out the obvious desire she had for AP, and her defense was that she would only see him every 1-2 weeks—but again, it’s not like she has desire for me every 1-2 weeks; she never does.

I then told her that I always have sexual desire for her and no one else; and that I just want to one time feel like her sexual desire for me outweighs mine for her. She quickly responded (half joking): "Well that would be impossible."

It was meant as a joke, but it hurt.

She pointed to our sex life post-affair as a positive for her interest in me, but to me the hysterical bonding doesn’t feel entirely authentic. There’s a mix of so many other things happening—it’s not purely sexual desire.

I told her how awful it felt to be so undesired by her and I suggested we go to sleep rather than keep talking as it was clear she couldn’t come up with any reasonable explanations.

I woke up this morning feeling like a recommitment to her is a recommitment to to this feeling for the rest of my life.

I’m in a long term marriage. I know that my wife is sexually attracted to me. However, that doesn’t translate into her wanting sex with me during the work week. She has a busy and stressful job and a time intensive daily exercise schedule.

I have a higher libido than her (I firmly believe most husbands do compared to their wives), but also lead a busy schedule. Due to my job I wake up at 5:45 am and go home bed at 10 pm. Thus, although I’m horny for my wife literally daily I too don’t have the time and energy for sex during the work week. Instead, we’ve come up with what both of us feel is a great solution, which we’re really happy with.

During the week we’ll hug, kiss, cuddle, and paw a bit at each other during the few minutes in the AM before work snd in the PM just before or after dinner. Sex is always scheduled on Sunday mornings. And, our sex life is amazing, even after 30 plus years.

My wife’s sexual desire for me, and her overall horniness, on Sundays is off the charts. However, it’s only really like this on Sunday mornings. The reason being is that my wife is totally relaxed on Sunday mornings (not Monday- Saturday mornings mind you), and her mind snd body understand that we’re going to have sex Sunday morning. So, physically snd mentally she gets all worked up. She actually pursues me on Sunday mornings.

Some poopoo the notion of scheduling sex. However, most things you’ll read about long term marriages suggest this strategy. If you both wait until you’re in the mood, good luck with that.

So, I’m recommending that you might want to try my system I described above with your wife.