Yo moderator! I am going to type the word "[censored]". It is 11:56pm Pacific Time Wednesday, Oct 15. Can you please post the date and time of censoring. It is an important matter of science.
Well son of a bitch! It auto-censored my post. We have a censor-bot in the room. Well in that case, and in the further interest of science, lets try the grandmother of all expletives.... [censored]
Well son of a bitch! It auto-censored my post. We have a censor-bot in the room. Well in that case, and in the further interest of science, lets try the grandmother of all expletives.... [censored]
Sweet Lord have Mercy! That one got sensored too! Holy [censored]!
Sandi Patti was pretty bad. From what I read, she had two affairs with married men....
Ewwwwww! Sandi Patti boinking anyone is not the most pleasant image to envision.
But seriously... is this not a case in point. Church culture sure does not keep us any safer from infidelity and divorce. And a high profile one like this only validates the behaviour for others. I am not trying to judge. I am just trying to state as an observation.
Who would I, a cocaine addict, be to judge. I am just grateful that I could stop, recover, and make amends for the calamity I caused during my active addiction. Unfortunately, people who run off with OM or OW keep the hurt and damage going for a long time if not forever.
My thoughts.
Chaz
Chaz,
I agree... My whole case and point is NO ONE is safe from D....
Your spouse grows up in a "Christian" family.... No guarantee the M will last.... Go to church together... No guarantee the M will last.... Pray together every day.... No guarantee the M will last.... Have someone who claims to believe M is sacred (like my exW)...No guarantee the M will last.... The person REALLY NEEDS to be DEEPLY committed to the M....
Chaz, my friend, I pray God continues to bless you and your family....
Take Care,
RMG
Last edited by RMG; 10/16/0803:23 PM.
"The bad things in life open your eyes to the good things you weren't paying attention to before." from "Good Will Hunting"
I have absolutely loved reading this thread. Thank you Gigi for starting it.
I have been examining my failures in my M over the last several months and I can see that I took my M and H for granted. I didn't have my priorities quite right and didn't spend enough time cultivating our R. After 19 years together and 15 M'd we had fallen into patterns that neither of us had communication skills enough to correct.
Like you said, we never fought. I saw it as a strength instead of what it was - neither of us communicated our real needs or desires so we never disagreed on anything. He felt like I paid too much attention to my work and household duties and not enough to him. Of course, I felt the same way about him. We never talked about that though and he found someone else to talk to about it. Now he lives with her.
Regarding the current culture of the Christian church in America, I agree that too many churches put an emphasis on the "show" instead of the "message". Mine is not one of those. I searched for a long time for the right fit for me and I have found a wonderful church home where I am surrounded by loving, caring, fully engaged followers of Christ. I am so blessed by these people and am thankful to God every day for leading me to them.
T19 M15 S19 XH47 M43 bomb12/4/07 PA5/07 S12/26/07 D final 11/17/08 Back together with no defined R 05/2010 confused....to say the least!!!
Your spouse grows up in a "Christian" family.... No guarantee the M will last.... Go to church together... No guarantee the M will last.... Pray together every day.... No guarantee the M will last.... Have someone who claims to believe M is sacred (like my exW)...No guarantee the M will last.... The person REALLY NEEDS to be DEEPLY committed to the M....
RMG... all of the above applied to me and my X. She is in fact in a gospel music group and so is OM. So whatever.
For me, the thing that keeps a marriage together is deciding daily that you will commit to your marriage and doing the things it takes to keep it happy and together.
Like my sobriety, the decision and commitment has an expiry date of 24 hours. Not that I would not like or expect commitments to be longer, I am simply being realistic that it takes a daily commitment to do your best in order to have an eternity of sobriety or marriage or whatever. I believe we can stay happily married forever a day at a time.
Works for my sobriety and its working for my new marriage.
I think the biggest thing I did wrong was avoiding conflict. Yes, we had 19 years of "they never fight", but that was generally because I would do whatever I could to avoid fighting. It started out as a commitment to "biblical submission" but I think just became a habit--I was used to sucking it up, whatever it was, and he was used to me going along with whatever he did.
It would have been smarter to go ahead and fight about stuff that bothers me. But I was afraid. Afraid that if I pushed for my side of things, he would leave. Or even just that we would fight. I was afraid he'd be upset with me and give me the cold shoulder, or yell at me, or tease me...plenty of stuff that gave me reasons to just not confront him.
Last year was hell. After all those years, I snapped and started looking for what he refused to give me, from other men. YES, many people would say I was justified. YES, I felt like I had no other options...because hadn't I tried all those years to be a "good wife", and it hadn't helped at all?
But I still should have remembered that no matter how lonely and unhappy and frustrated I am, I am married, so I can't flirt with other men or contemplate an affair. Even if I felt he literally and figuratively pushed me there, it is against the vows I took, and destructive.
We'll see what happens. I'm working every day at being "a good wife", and a fully faithful one, but also at telling my husband what I need, and being honest about my feelings instead of just saying what I think he wants to hear and doing what it seems he wants me to do. Not sure it is helping, but I am trying.
And he does tease me, and yell at me, and give me the cold shoulder. He does all the things I was afraid he'd do (except leave, so far), and some I'd never imagined. It hurts. I am in a much worse position than I was before I started flirting and fooling around online. But I am back in my marriage, even if I have to eat crow most days.
I figure, things will get better between us, or they won't, but either way I will learn courage and I will have back my self-respect, instead of a pile of regrets.
A number of us responded to this question that we never had fights with out spouses. Wentcrazy has it right that it was avoidance.
Avoidance has always been and continues to be one of my weaknesses. I complain and complain to everyone else when I have a problem but when it comes to talking to the person directly, I say nothing. This wasn't just the case in my marriage but also how I am at work.
So it's not my fault that my X got addicted to porn and is now married to one of the "particpants" but if over the years I had been more vocal about issues in our marriage, if we had worked things out as they came up, if we had remained best friends, perhaps he never would have thought about looking at the porn on the internet in the first place.
Gigi
"It's not what happens to you, it's what you make of it." Zig Ziglar
Avoidance has always been and continues to be one of my weaknesses.
I think this is a huge one for many of us. How do we effectively address issues as they come up rather than avoid the pain of doing so and thereby letting the small issues become big issues? This is a tough one for any of us.
It is easier to go to one of the two extremities... Avoidance or Conflict. Neither is a winning situation.
To me, a hallmark of a mature relationship is the ability to communicate honestly and openly without it turning into a fight every time. Or without feeling the need to avoid for fear of the conflict or whatever pain comes from discussing senstive issues.
Like MASTATE mentiions... an issue like pornography. It is put in front of all and any of us. No man is immune to it catching his attention. It is a huge industry with continuous deliberate attempts by producers of porn to get it in front of us. Not just men. I know women who enjoy it too.
But how can such a controversial and possibly embarrassing or dangerous an issue be discussed and addressed in a relationship that is not mature and respectful? In my book, it simply cannot. It is a problem waiting to happen if it cannot be addressed in an effective way.
Women... let me assure you.... there is a deliberate attempt being made toward the men in your life to get hooked on porn. Addressing this with a man is no small thing. If he gets involved and cant find a way out, it is humiliating. Potentially devastating.
I am not minimizing the hurt a woman must feel if she feels she is competing with porn for her husbands attention. I can only imagine how big of an issue it is from the Womans perspective.
May I suggest that shaming him out of the problem is not very effective? I saw a program recently on this on at Christian channel. It was a husband and wife ministry team. They talk openly about it between themselves as a married couple.
The husband had been drawn into this temptation and admitted it to his wife. They got through the issue and now on a regular basis talk openly about it to keep it on the surface. She is mature enough not to judge him and to try to deal with her feelings of hurt by not directing it totally on him.
He takes many steps to avoid getting into temptation and has a safe place to go if it ever ends up in front of him. He takes responsibility for what he lets into his mind.
So again, my point that the extremeties of avoidance and conflict do not work on this or any difficult subject in a marriage. I feel we must find a mature connection of dialogue with our spouses.
My wife and I are reading a book together by an author named Gottman. One of the points he makes is that the degree to which couples allow issues to become rapidly and severely escalated is a key indicator as to whether or not it is likely their marriage will last. The author backs this observation with some amazing research.
I must admit, I am guilty of both avoidance and conflict in my first marriage. Living in and participating in these extremes was part of what I did to help destroy my marriage.
This is a great thread. It is a step away from blame and toward respobsibility, healing, and recovery. These can only be good things.
Yes porn is an excellent example of an issue that would be too hard to discuss in a marriage filled with avoidance. It's so embarrassing that my X use to blame our sons when I would see that someone had been on a porn site on the family computer. Those poor boys insisted that they weren't doing it but they got punished anyway because their Dad was they only other person in the house and he certainly wasn't going on those sites!!
I've been thinking lately about something my mother said recently. My Mother and Father were married for 30 years, divorced and then remarried. My Mother was the left behind when my Dad went off the deep end with a younger women and booze.
There are three kids in our family. My brother is the oldest was left behind by his wife of 34 years, my sister is next was left behind by her husband of 33 years, and them my I was left behind by my husband after 25 years.
My Mom was talking about thinking she had done something wrong in the way she raised us that caused us all to have these marriage problems. At the time, I told her it had nothing to do with her but lately I'm thinking that she did.
I think the example she and my Dad gave of not communicating effected us. It's what we knew, it's what we did in our own marriages.
Gigi
"It's not what happens to you, it's what you make of it." Zig Ziglar
