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[This message edited by WonderingGhost at 2:41 AM, Tuesday, April 18th]

After you get exhausted and stop doing the heavy lifting. When you are bone tired and ask for a D.

My experience anyway.

Honestly, I don’t think you can. The more you tell them otherwise, the more they’re resistant to listening.

Just tell him that if he thinks he can still be friends with her, being friends with you is up in the air.

I don’t think there is anything YOU can say to your husband to get sense into his thick foggy brain.
He will believe what HE wants to believe. From what I’ve read here on SI, many WS do wake up and see the reality for what it is.
It must be beyond frustrating for you to have to deal with this nonsense. Time does clear things up for the BS and the WS.
Read "questions for the WS" in the I can Relate Forum. It has helped me to understand the mind of the WS.

SI please tell me they snap out of it eventually? What can I even say to get his brain to click?

Respectfully, I think you're asking the wrong questions here. What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same things over and over again and getting the same results?

Stop having this conversation with him. If he brings it up, just say something like, "I don't agree and I don't wish to discuss this yet again." And then walk away if he continues.

Try to work on DETACHing --

Don't
Even
Try
And
Change
Him (or Her)

If he's your STBX, just keep moving in the direction you need to, to make sure you're not cohabitating any longer than necessary.

What's the definition of insanity? Doing the same things over and over again and getting the same results?

Actually, it’s doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Nevertheless, no matter how much that makes sense, and how much I agree with people here that the change must come from within him, my experience is that doing the same thing over and over did eventually produce a different result (perhaps it was just a correlation?)

My husband was convinced the OW was a friend. It still hurts when I remember the look on his face on DDay when he told me "She’s a really good friend". It still hurts when I remember he told me she was a better friend than I was because I wasn’t his friend – I was his girlfriend (we weren’t married back then), therefore, I cannot be his friend (masterpiece logic, right?) He told me my support, and everything didn’t mean as much as hers, because it was expected of me to provide that. And a bunch of other bullshit. From today’s perspective I believe he was trying to convince me it was somehow necessary for him to develop friendship with her. Poor guy didn’t have many friends, and there she was, so friendly and awesome and caring… How dare I tell him what he did was wrong, that he was wrong?!!

Anyway, it took approximately 1 year for him to snap out of it. Perhaps it would take less time, but I was in complete shock during the months after DDay, and he just wanted to forget everything. I guess I was ready to dig deeper once things settled down a bit. We talked a lot, I analyzed every little bit of her behavior and words and did my best to demonstrate to him again and again that she wasn’t a friend, that she wasn’t a good person, and definitely wasn’t so awesome and caring. I am 100% sure she didn’t care about him, she only cared about herself, and she was only using him.

It took a lot of patience, perseverance, persistence, determination, nerves of steel, and indeed a good amount of insanity on my end for him to start seeing things not the way he wanted them to be, not the way he interpreted them, but the way they were. She was not a friend, let alone "a really good friend". I refuse to believe I had nothing to do with him realizing that. If I hadn’t pushed for it, he’d still be blissfully ignorant. However – this is important, and this is the "it depends on him" part – he had to get rid of his arrogance, vanity, pretentiousness, self-righteousness, and many other things which prevented him from being honest with himself, and with me. Not only what he did was wrong, but also, he was wrong about her – he totally misinterpreted stuff, he misjudged her character, he didn’t recognize her true intentions, and so on. To put it bluntly – he was plain stupid.

No one likes to think of themselves as stupid. Once they realize how stupid they were, you’ll hear sentences such as: "I just can’t believe I was so stupid", "What the hell was I thinking", "I can’t recognize that person", etc. It is not just common among waywards, it is common among people in general. I remember back in high school, I had "a really good friend". Then I found out she gossips about me behind my back. Then it clicked – she was gossiping to me all the time, why on Earth did I think she wouldn’t gossip about me? I guess I inflated my own specialness.

Anyway, to conclude – although it depends on his willingness to get rid of certain personality traits which prevent him from admitting he was stupid, your actions can push him to that place. However, the biggest question here is: is it worth it? If he’s soon-to-be-ex like you say, I’d say it is not worth it. I’d say it’s better to invest that energy into your own healing.

EDIT: just to be clear – I'm almost 6 years past DDay, and I doubt it was worth it for me. Yes, I helped him to be a better man. Yes, I got the satisfaction of him admitting I'm absolutely right. But at what cost? It's a Pyrrhic victory...

[This message edited by Hannah47 at 2:48 PM, Saturday, March 11th]

People like your WS get addicted to the highs. Euphoria is a wonderful feeling and you get it every time you interact with that other person regardless of who they are. The stupidity of it all is that it puts their relationships in jeopardy just like he has with you. Sometimes they come out of it on their own and sometimes it takes a brick upside their head. He is still in the affair. That’s the reason you’re not seeing any common sense. He just wants that high so badly that I think she could turn into a gorilla and he wouldn’t care. When you are separated, and moving away from each other, he might one day you wake up and realize that he had it good. In fact, he had it great with you and at that point you might see him start growing up. It depends on whether you are interested anymore.

For me, I had to hit rock bottom and not want to be that person at that time or ever again.

The pain has to be so big that he will go through with whatever he needs to to get to the other side.

Most I believe need therapy.

Some ws don’t get it until they have rinsed and repeated many times, some never at all. I can say that from my own situation and reading hundreds of others over the past going on six years - the ws that does want change still takes six month to a year to really get it. And will make some changes right out of the gate.

Some waywards never get it. Change requires circumspection and circumspection requires self-awareness, which many simply do not have.

Useful perhaps for you to both read Shirley Glass’s Not Just Friends. It’s sounds like an impasse, and you cannot ‘make’ him do anything. He believes he could be himself which he did’t feel he could be with you so that is something for him to explore in the work he is doing, what that actually means for him. It’s a process to figure himself out.

[This message edited by Edie at 6:34 PM, Monday, March 13th]

He doesn't get it and if I were you I wouldn't bother hitting my head against the wall anymore. Why not go NC or limited contact until you are no longer cohabitating and no more talks about the A, just business as usual like the finances. BTW i 100% agree with you there is no gray area here. The fact he is even using that argument shows he's completely clueless as most WS's are.