SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

** Posting as a member **

There's no question in my mind about Ozzy's status. He's a BS.

*****

Physical attraction has to be nurtured. My W and I are not young, and we got together when we were. I knew her back when just touching her when she was fully dressed made my knees weak. Now I guess we see each other as attractive for our age.

In some ways that's a big difference; in others, it's not.

Physical attraction is, in part, a choice. Don't get me wrong - I do gravitate to a type. My W isn't exactly that type. That doesn't matter - I focus on the features I like. My life is a lot more joyful that way, at least IMO.

My point is that your W can teach herself to find you attractive, Ink. If she does it, and if that's enough for you, great. If it isn't, great.

*****

The nature of As is that the WS appears to make fools of BSes. Appearances can be deceiving, however. A BS who charts their own course is the opposite of a fool, IMO.

I’m not a woman, but I think I understand some basics, in a limited manner, about a male’s attractiveness to a woman/partner. Of course, this is a multi faceted thing. I’ll simply point out one of those facets that I believe is relevant.

I believe that a woman is attracted to a man who is self confident, has a strong sense of self, is centered, knows his self worth, and is comfortable in his own skin.

Through the circumstances which you engineered, in which you find yourself posting here, and based upon your posts themselves, I’m wondering how you would self describe yourself re the attributes I’m identifying?

Consider the tortured mental path you must have walked to reach the conclusion that consenting to your wife having sex with an ex could be salutary to your flagging marriage.

Now, consider that the same brain, still clouded with the muck that must have clouded your vision when making the foregoing decision, is also the brain that thinks being an active participant in perpetrating an awful lie upon the unwitting BW is the logical choice. Bad decisions atop bad decisions.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 9:50 PM, Thursday, April 27th]

Attraction is different for everyone and different at certain stages in life. I find funny men without big egos attractive. I also find "manly men" with tattoos and beards attractive.

If you look at my history of men, none of them look a like or fall into the above categories. His wife may have lost attraction for various reasons but she lost it before he agreed to the issues he started with so to blame it on his willingness to allow her "freedom" isn't fair. Generalizing what women find attractive isn't helpful in this thread.

If Ozzy's wife is serious about fixing their marriage, she needs to get real with herself, through IC or not, about what made her lose attraction. I can give exact reasons and moments for what made me lose physical attraction to my past partners and none of those reasons are the same.

To take this further, this might be the specific issue in this specific case. Or, it might not.

Either way, OP can decide for himself if he thinks it’s applicable or not.

However, he has mentioned numerous times that his wife is honest to a fault, so why not directly ask why she lost her attraction?

So to be clear, when we're saying it doesn't seem like your wife respects you, we're saying that it doesn't seem like your wife values you as a person beyond your usefulness to her and doesn't cares about your feelings, except insofar as they advance or impede her personal desires.

This is a fair assessment at the moment. She is having a bit of a breakdown - it isn't really about me. I mean, she has lost attraction to me but that is mostly due to the fact that she is bored with life and wishes she could just be free. This is the part I can relate to which is why I was stupid enough to agree to all of this. Her IC is helping with this though and she needs to work through acknowledging the good things in her life and not aiming for absolute perfection (no-ones life is utter perfection right?)

@sisoon - thanks for your post. I think it emphasises the above. She is struggling with the whole "is this it?" element. She may get through that, she might not. Seems a shame to throw away all the good stuff we do have but hey, if that's the way it ends up, I am getting stronger by the day to cope with that.

@dean never easy to tell how posts come across to others. I think because I write calmly and without too much emotion it might have made me look like a doormat. I am not - the idea of this agreement was done through confidence in myself to be able to cope with it, and not have jealous feelings. That decision did actually have the opposite effect of what you are saying.

However, he has mentioned numerous times that his wife is honest to a fault, so why not directly ask why she lost her attraction?

I have asked this - the honest answer is there isn't anything specific. It is really just a lack of 20 year old lust which seems quite normal! Again she is just questioning is this it. But if we split then chances are she will spend a lot of time sitting at home alone questioning her life decisions (as would I), so it is not a decision to take lightly...

If Ozzy's wife is serious about fixing their marriage, she needs to get real with herself, through IC or not, about what made her lose attraction. I can give exact reasons and moments for what made me lose physical attraction to my past partners and none of those reasons are the same.

I guess the one thing she has acknowledged is the simple fact she has started looking at other guys (not just POSOM) and started thinking "what if" which isn't something she used to do. But there is not a lot I can do about this, just live my life and see where that takes me!

Ozzy,

I guess the one thing she has acknowledged is the simple fact she has started looking at other guys (not just POSOM) and started thinking "what if" which isn't something she used to do. But there is not a lot I can do about this, just live my life and see where that takes me!

Mate, I think that is the right headspace to have and now you are approaching it correctly. You can't make someone love you no matter what you do. Tell yourself, "If she leaves me, then it is her loss".

Hang in there.

I just don't want my family broken up. For those that have, please tell me how it affected your kids?

I will not be telling the OBS. Sorry to disappoint people. Based on the conversation last week it would end our marriage immediately. That shouldn't be the case but it is so I need to focus on my kids.

I said this over and over. But as the other option was splitting up, I managed to get myself into a mindset where I WAS OK with it.

Had a monumental argument (worst one yet) a couple of days after I last wrote where I said I have read the best thing I should do to end this thing is to tell the OBS. This went down terribly as you can imagine. She's actually right that having given my agreement to the situation that's a pretty awful thing to do to another family but I'm sure there won't be much agreement here.

Had a monumental argument (worst one yet) a couple of days after I last wrote where I said I have read the best thing I should do to end this thing is to tell the OBS. This went down terribly as you can imagine. She's actually right that having given my agreement to the situation that's a pretty awful thing to do to another family but I'm sure there won't be much agreement here.

At the moment this is all about the kids, that is completely right.

Maybe she wouldn't directly divorce me over doing it but it would fly in the face of the honesty that we had between each other in that period.

A sampling of quotes from your various posts. The dialogue with you reminds me of an incident at work. I work in a tall office building downtown. My office is on a floor above floor 40. A large company (Company X) occupies about a dozen floors in the teens and twenties. They have a network of internal stairs and an office rule of "up one/down two" (meaning use the stairs, not the elevator), but a great many elevator rides to or from my floor become an exercise in torture as we stop at seemingly every Company X floor, both up and down, for lazy assholes who choose to ride the elevator one floor. On the rare occasion where I get a full unbroken ride all the way between my floor and the ground floor, I get a sense of elation, like I just unexpectedly won a sweepstakes. It shapes my entire approach toward life. I eschew out-of-office meetings and such, purely because I loath the time on the elevator.

Once, I got into an elevator car with a member of my company's staff, a lower level staffer who is responsible for stuff like making coffee and cleaning conference rooms. When the elevator doors closed, she pressed and held the "door close" button, without releasing it. I had always understood from building engineers that this button is a placebo, so I asked her why she depressed this button and held it continuously depressed. "If you hold the button the whole time, the elevator won't stop at any of the floors for Company X. It will go all the way to the ground floor without stopping." For a moment I was astonished that this seemingly uneducated human had discovered, apparently via trial and error, such an ingenious hack to the scourge of lazy Company X personnel. "Really? Does that work?", I asked. She replied, with earnest sincerity: "Sometimes."

At that point I ended the conversation. If the hack worked, it would work every time. Clearly she simply enjoys the same serendipity vis-a-vis unbroken elevator rides as the rest of us, but for her, the placebo effect of holding the button gives her a false sense of empowerment, as if she has input into aspects of her fate that are actually 100% under the control of others.

Your thread reminds me of that woman. You gulp the hopium like a junk fiend, and you come here with your hunt-and-peck efforts to feel like you're exerting some type of force that will steer things one way or another, or like you might be able to formulate a clever gambit that will catalyze a re-start of your wife's desire for you as a human man. It's all just a shape-shifting self-made placebo. You don't have the reins here.

The one thing I do wish is that you would stop using your children as a proxy. This isn't "for the kids". Millions of children grow up with divorced parents and do just fine. In fact, what you're doing now is worse for them IMO. You are modeling, IRT, a hugely dysfunctional model of marriage where the wife is essentially living half as a single woman, half as a grudging inmate, while the husband mostly engages in avoidance to prolong the inevitable. Is that really what you want your children to grow up viewing as normal? Please stop flattering yourself that you are in any way disguising this from the children. Children are way more perceptive than adults are. They have as much or more brain power as adults, but are using far less of it, meaning they have tons on reserve. And their universes tend to be narrow. Thus, all of that unused perceptive ability and processing capacity is razor-focused on the narrow confines of their family. They absolutely know that things are not right with you and your wife, and they understand at least that, in the current dynamic, your wife is wearing the pants.

For your sake, I hope that at some point you gain understanding of the adage: "Don't set yourself on fire to keep somebody else warm." I've never seen a thread where that concept is more apt. My friend, you are going to burn yourself out completely, until there is nothing left but a spent ember. Then what sort of good can you be for your children.

For their sake, if nothing else, move on.

I spoke previously about how your logic has been so twisted through this.

I will not be telling the OBS. Sorry to disappoint people. Based on the conversation last week it would end our marriage immediately.

This is what it's come to. You so desperately wanted to remain married, at any cost, that you convinced yourself that giving your wife a hall pass to consort with another man was the path to preserving your marriage. We see how that worked out. In the process, you convinced yourself that shitting on another unwitting wife's marriage was okay if it possibly prolonged your own. And now, you continue to convince yourself that your wife -- who openly disrespects you and flatly states she is not attracted to you -- can browbeat you into not behaving in a decent and moral way with respect to the one victim in this sordid mess, by threatening to end formally the marriage she has long ago vacated in every meaningful way.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 2:23 PM, Monday, May 1st]

I would try to stay clear of the mindset that just because you’ve been married 20 years it’s perfectly normal for your wife to lose her attraction for you. I think I that this type this type of mindset helped to contribute as to why you are currently on this site.

I wouldn’t accept the answer from your wife that she can’t pinpoint why she lost her attraction. Of course, IC will help her wrt this. I’m sure she knows why, even one reason she can identify, or in general terms, in detail, or a combination of the two. She probably doesn’t want to hurt your feelings snd exacerbate an already difficult situation.

I would also try to stay clear of the mindset that your wife is always 100 percent truthful, all of the time. I know you insist that you know your wife, but no partner knows the other 100 percent, and blind trust, especially in the wake of these circumstances, I think should be avoided.

Hi Ozzy

I do hope that you continue to find your way, and still stay grounded and true to your beliefs. You have had the full gambit of advice and honestly, I am not going to give you any😉.

I do want to give you a few things going forward for thought.

1. Many WS resent their spouses, and have for a long time. It’s hard to be attracted to someone you resent.

2. There are any number of patterns that we pick up in our formative years from our parents. For example, a WW have had a loving father who just wasn’t around, or emotionally available. She goes out, finds her mate and everything is good. Eventually, she recreates that pattern of her dad with you, and then wonders if there is more to this stale, boring life.

3. All of the work, takes time. At least you and your wife are in in IC. There are a substantial number of wayward that just don’t.

Set your self a review date some time out before making any decisions. Let’s be honest, making decisions while still traumatized and hemorrhaging from all wounds is not ideal. Whatever feels comfortable to you!

Wishing you the best in your recovery and journey in life.

FWIW, your logic to continue as a family unit whilst you and your WW seek separate IC seems pretty fine to me. Don’t quite understand why it’s being suggested otherwise, nor what is being suggested otherwise, it’s still early days. It seems to me that you are indeed trying to protect everyone not just yourself in pursuing this current course of discovery, the children are no proxy as far as I can see but very much at the heart of your thinking. Mine were too, I needed to consider everything from every angle and not make knee-jerk reactions.. But your WW’s rather premature request to remain ‘friends for the sake of the children’ is fairly standard as waywards do tend to want everything to go back to before. Friendship is at the heart of a good marriage of course, but the way I see it is she rather took your friendship for granted, so she is the one using the children for proxy in this instance. Were she really interested in the sake of the children, she wouldn’t be making such categorical and to my mind deeply unkind utterances as the never kissing you again debacle, which may be her version of the ILYBINILWY so called ‘truth’ of the foggy wayward. I’d be marking that instance of unkindness on my ledger, if it were me. A notch against the friendship she is trying to regain. You don’t treat friends unkindly, again IMO.

I’m still curious about the gender stuff and whether she feels she’s had to be one of the boys in the family and where her femininity sits in the equation.

Hi Ozzy

I do hope that you continue to find your way, and still stay grounded and true to your beliefs. You have had the full gambit of advice and honestly, I am not going to give you any😉.

I do want to give you a few things going forward for thought.

1. Many WS resent their spouses, and have for a long time. It’s hard to be attracted to someone you resent.

2. There are any number of patterns that we pick up in our formative years from our parents. For example, a WW have had a loving father who just wasn’t around, or emotionally available. She goes out, finds her mate and everything is good. Eventually, she recreates that pattern of her dad with you, and then wonders if there is more to this stale, boring life.

3. All of the work, takes time. At least you and your wife are in in IC. There are a substantial number of wayward that just don’t.

Set your self a review date some time out before making any decisions. Let’s be honest, making decisions while still traumatized and hemorrhaging from all wounds is not ideal. Whatever feels comfortable to you!

Wishing you the best in your recovery and journey in life.

Thanks for all of this. Point 2 is an interesting one as it does describe her father reasonably well from her childhood.

Point 3 is key as well, I am already starting to get a bit frustrated with the lack of love and affection from her and feel like I want to move on already but that would seem a bit rash.

FWIW, your logic to continue as a family unit whilst you and your WW seek separate IC seems pretty fine to me. Don’t quite understand why it’s being suggested otherwise, nor what is being suggested otherwise, it’s still early days. It seems to me that you are indeed trying to protect everyone not just yourself in pursuing this current course of discovery, the children are no proxy as far as I can see but very much at the heart of your thinking. Mine were too, I needed to consider everything from every angle and not make knee-jerk reactions.. But your WW’s rather premature request to remain ‘friends for the sake of the children’ is fairly standard as waywards do tend to want everything to go back to before. Friendship is at the heart of a good marriage of course, but the way I see it is she rather took your friendship for granted, so she is the one using the children for proxy in this instance. Were she really interested in the sake of the children, she wouldn’t be making such categorical and to my mind deeply unkind utterances as the never kissing you again debacle, which may be her version of the ILYBINILWY so called ‘truth’ of the foggy wayward. I’d be marking that instance of unkindness on my ledger, if it were me. A notch against the friendship she is trying to regain. You don’t treat friends unkindly, again IMO.

I’m still curious about the gender stuff and whether she feels she’s had to be one of the boys in the family and where her femininity sits in the equation.

@edie as always your posts mean a huge amount to me, thank you. So well written and compassionate. I totally agree that rushing into things would be stupid. I have felt pretty low again the last couple of days and want her to snap out of whatever phase she is in but know I can't control that. So I am trying to focus on one day at a time and see where it leads. But it isn't fun being treated like a friend (at best).

On the gender stuff, do you have any links to studies that show that women with boys are more likely to stray or anything similar? It is a very interesting question. She has a sister and her dad was away with work a lot when she was young so being in a house of all males is a very different dynamic.

Off on holiday tomorrow so will check in when I get back.

Thanks again.

You have said that your wife is terrified of losing the kids half the time. If that is really the case with the way she is treating you she obviously does not think you will leave. Why does she treat you this way if she truly fears divorce?

On the gender stuff, do you have any links to studies that show that women with boys are more likely to stray or anything similar? It is a very interesting question. She has a sister and her dad was away with work a lot when she was young so being in a house of all males is a very different dynamic.

No, I don’t. It was just a thought as part of the etiological picture, as in her femininity necessarily perhaps sidelined might mean there’s not that polarity with her female her with the male of you that keeps alive the sexual interest/ spark of difference, added to the familiarity issue. Just a hunch only, that it plays, in some part at least, and possibly very subconsciously, into the bigger cluster of causes for her current dissatisfaction. I will research!

When my H and I first got married, I felt him begin to change. He seemed to feel, "I've arrived." He did not pursue promotions at work because we had two incomes, he stopped exercising (he had been an avid bike rider), he saw friends less. He instead did some yard work, relaxed more, watched more t.v. Yes, I changed too in response to that; I became more of a nag, less affectionate. This was where we should have confronted the problem--and I did try--but life moved on.

We had three kids, and when the marriage started to blow up at about the 10 year point, he handled it with terror. He handled it by making his needs smaller. He did not respond by stepping up and demanding we confront this and both get our needs met; he responded by taking a bigger step back. "I won't complain about the lack of affection, I'll just get my needs met with porn or whatever." This, of course, became its own separate beast of a problem. But he actually thought that becoming less of a person in the M was a way to have a great M! He actually thought I would love and respect him more if his real self, his strong self, the self that I dated and fell in love with, just disappeared!!!! 

He was so confused when his becoming smaller caused me to move further away. "Why aren't you attracted to me?" he wondered. "Look at how I don't push you on anything!"

But I was repulsed. Who was this imposter? Where was the strong, independent man that I married? Where was the man who took care of himself? Because that was the guy that I knew would take care of me. It has taken years in therapy for my H and I to address these things.

I can only speak for myself, but I see a lot of my issues in yours, Ozzy: women are attracted to people who unapologetically stand up for themselves and know their worth.

Be that guy. Unapologetically tell the BW.

So very well said @OwingItNow

When my H and I first got married, I felt him begin to change. He seemed to feel, "I've arrived." He did not pursue promotions at work because we had two incomes, he stopped exercising (he had been an avid bike rider), he saw friends less. He instead did some yard work, relaxed more, watched more t.v. Yes, I changed too in response to that; I became more of a nag, less affectionate. This was where we should have confronted the problem--and I did try--but life moved on.

We had three kids, and when the marriage started to blow up at about the 10 year point, he handled it with terror. He handled it by making his needs smaller. He did not respond by stepping up and demanding we confront this and both get our needs met; he responded by taking a bigger step back. "I won't complain about the lack of affection, I'll just get my needs met with porn or whatever." This, of course, became its own separate beast of a problem. But he actually thought that becoming less of a person in the M was a way to have a great M! He actually thought I would love and respect him more if his real self, his strong self, the self that I dated and fell in love with, just disappeared!!!!

He was so confused when his becoming smaller caused me to move further away. "Why aren't you attracted to me?" he wondered. "Look at how I don't push you on anything!"

But I was repulsed. Who was this imposter? Where was the strong, independent man that I married? Where was the man who took care of himself? Because that was the guy that I knew would take care of me. It has taken years in therapy for my H and I to address these things.

I can only speak for myself, but I see a lot of my issues in yours, Ozzy: women are attracted to people who unapologetically stand up for themselves and know their worth.

Be that guy. Unapologetically tell the BW.

But I'm afraid Ozzy is not ready yet to want to understand it. I tried to convey that, and I don't want to generalize it so no one should feel wronged, but in my experience, women contrary to men feel attracted to men challenging them and not accommodating them. Becoming accommodative by avoiding and getting "smaller" is repulsive for 'many' women. Often times, regardless the gender, we feel respect and attraction for people who 'lay down the law' in a reasonable way. And how Ozzy shared, his actions were in total not in this regard. Trying to make the most of it, to get along is not attractive in general.

[This message edited by bob7777 at 2:47 PM, Sunday, April 30th]

@OwningItNow:

You said very eloquently what many of us has been telling him since this thread began. That he needs to act as a confident man who has boundaries and sticks to those boundaries. I believe that both women and men are attracted to others that act with confidence and are sure of themselves. I know that is one quality that attracted me to my wife of 62 years. She isn't going to take any S..t from anyone. She hasn't changed since we met in college.

Quick update from holiday as not going well. We're with good friends who she always would have been silly and flirty with and that always would have been fine, but she's hugging them, smacking their arse etc etc while actively not even touching me. I also had to leave a dinner the other night as she was making so much sexual innuendo and couldn't even realise that would be triggering.

I brought up the fact that she is treating me worse than friends and she exploded saying as I don't shut the fuck up it is making me less and less attractive to her.

So sadly spending time together clearly hasn't worked! Will need to 180 further once home.

We've told our friends that she's lost attraction to me, not going to tell them the rest of it though. They all think she's crazy to be thinking that way but my wife thinks I'm turning them against her.

It's all pretty fucked really. Can't see this working out.

Ozzy, please go read "no more Mr. Nice guy

Wow.

She's told your friends she has lost her attraction to you..and they're observing her flirting and grabbing their ass.

So she enjoys humiliating you.

Also..you do understand that by telling everyone she isn't into you anymore, while simultaneously flirting and touching your male friends...that she is letting them know she's open to an affair. She's letting you know that to.