SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Do you experience your commitment to your H's happiness as a sacrifice?

I do not at all. I view my husbands happiness as his responsibility.

I actively love him of course. Everyday I do things to show him my appreciation and I enjoy him and if he wants something I give to him generously and joyfully.

But he is the one who decides what makes him happy and is responsible to ask for what he needs. I no longer just throw everything at him in hopes he loves me. I know I can be okay if he decides he doesn’t. (that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be a mourning period)

What it’s hard to see maybe unless you have done it, is I used to do things more out of fear. If I am not this or that or doing this or that, he won’t love me. And it means I spent way more guessing at those things and not really logically questioning myself and my motivations that I didn’t really know who I was, what I wanted or what would make me happy. All the energy I had went to making sure my husband and kids would love me and that I was doing a great job at wife and mother.

So I simply do not make my happiness his responsibility anymore. I do not expect him to guess at things nor do I interpret his not meeting my unstated expectations as lack of love.

I do not feel either of us sacrifice in any significant way in our relationship. I mean, does one of us listen to the others hobbies even if we are not that interested in the same hobby? Or maybe will watch a movie that I am less interested in than he is -Yeah? But I am interested in him, and his experiences and his fulfillment. I don’t think those things are a sacrifice. That’s just part of the benefits of companionship- with very minuscule downsides.

I just mean I never made my happiness my responsibility. But I made his my responsibility. And when he wasn’t happy, even though those things had nothing to do with me I made it about not being enough rather than saying oh he isn’t fulfilled at work right now or whatever the true problem was. It creates disease in a relationship.

[This message edited by hikingout at 5:08 PM, Friday, May 15th]

I love my mother. I'm not in love with my mother. I feel like that helps explain the difference. If you don't actively desire romantic, physical, or sexual intimacy with your partner, I would not say you're "in love" with them, even if you feel love[noun] for them and show them love[verb] with your actions. When one or both partners of a committed relationship fall "out of love," they might do well to see about rekindling the "spark--" spending quality time together, doing romantic things, and re-discovering what made them fall in love with each other in the first place. I don't think it's very safe to just rely on having love[noun] for a partner and settling into the commitment you made to be with them for commitment's sake. Commitment should be a failsafe, not the primary bonding mechanism. Keeping the spark helps makes it more likely that you definitively want to be there with them, and vice versa, and that you're both mutual benefactors of the relationship.

I do think that one person can be in love with another without the feelings being mutual.

I have never fallen "out of love" with my husband. Not during my A, not even now when we're having big problems. I thought to myself the other day that the way many of you describe how you think WS feel about their BS-- that they must value what their BS gives them and/or how they make them feel, not for the traits inherent to them-- is how I felt about my AP. And I would not even say that I loved my AP. I enjoyed the escapism into the fantasy, and the flattery of feeling attractive, special, and interesting that he provided, and I think he felt the same. We used each other, even probably semi-consciously recognized that we were using each other for such things. It was not love[neither noun, verb, nor general.]

I appreciate what you shared, Hikingout... I need to work on my codependency issues.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 6:08 PM, Friday, May 15th]

I do think that one person can be in love with another without the feelings being mutual.

I think what you are saying is possible but in a long term relationship, staying in love does require mutual engagement on some level. Love is something that is continually created on purpose in a long term relationship. It doesn’t have the infatuation factor.

However, unrequited love is often limerance, rather than love. Healthy minded people tend to detach their feelings from someone who doesn’t reciprocate. Yes, you may still feel in love with someone who ended the relationship. But usually the idea of being in love with them fades to loving them fades to used to love them or I will always care for them or have some love for them.

A relationship you are actively in and both of you are actively engaged is the only thing that creates a sustaining feeling of being in love. And usually that can sustain some distance due to life circumstance.

Limerance is the most likely thing to form in an affair because of the push pull dynamic intensifies the desire when the person has a tendency towards wanting what they can’t have. The instability/chaos of the relationship is appealing to those of us who associate chaos with love likely due to original family of origin. I had a lot of unrequited love, and that was me always chasing love from someone who could not provide it. Subconsciously I believe that being able to change them meant I was special in some way, which I think would have given me the ultimate validation. It was so very unhealthy—-there in a nutshell is some of my own past with codependency.