Hello new members, and welcome to Marriage Advocates!

We are pleased to have you, and have provided a quick-start guide to the roles and responsibilities of Marriage Advocates' staff. We hope this information will assist you in finding help and understanding the MA community.

Please be sure to familiarize yourself with the Announcements, as we use this area to keep you updated on the latest developments at Marriage Advocates. Announcements of policy changes, new staff, and official positions are just a portion of the useful information you will find there.

We strongly suggest that you become familiar with the Marriage Advocates Moderator Manual to understand how our policies are applied.

The Welcome Wagon thread will help you to understand community dynamics and terminology. And - of course - check out and say hello on our Welcome Aboard, New Members! thread.

An Introduction to MA Staff -

User names for Marriage Advocates' staff have specific color designations to help you identify them. Each position has a title, which can be found under the member's user name. All MA staff are volunteers.

Board of Directors - The Board of Directors (BoD) handles the day to day issues of running Marriage Advocates. They determine direction, priorities, policies, and procedures for Marriage Advocates, as well as staff appointments. The BoD also handles moderation/administration appeals and issues of privacy. All BoD members have Administrative rights to our bulletin board software. Members are:

     Mark1952, Member and Advisor
     right here waiting, President
     star*fish, Member and Advisor
     Gladstone, Secretary
     AntigoneRisen, Technical Advisor
     
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Administrators - Administrators handle approving members, user security settings, technical problems, and other issues involving keeping the bulletin board software running. Our Administrators is:

     Fiddler



Global Moderators - Global Moderators are the backbone of our moderation staff. They respond to notices involving posted content and apply our policies. They can moderate on any board. Our Global Moderators are:

     Chrysalis
     Miranda
     holdinontoit
     SmilingWife

Moderators - Some specific boards are guided by subject matter experts. The moderator for these boards has jurisdiction over a single board that is his/her domain. Moderators are:

     AlTurtle, Professional Therapist - Moderates Turtle's Whiteboard
     LadyGrey, Professional Attorney - Moderates Marriage and Family Legal Issues

Ambassadors - Ambassadors greet new members, guide them as they learn about MA, and make sure that new members receive attention and help for their situation. Our current Ambassadors are:

     Orchid2

Advocates - Advocates perform necessary tasks and advise MA in areas such as content editing and marketing. These members give of their time and effort to enhance MA. Our Advocates are:

     Rich57
     NewEveryDay

Contacting MA Staff -

Contact the staff of MA at any time you have a problem.

If you read a post and believe it has a TOS (rules) violation, click the "Notify" button at the bottom of the post. This will send an automatic notification to the moderation staff, who will evaluate the notification and determine what action, (if any) must be taken.

If you have a problem that goes beyond this, such as receiving attacking or harassing Private Messages, contact one or more Administrators at admin@marriageadvocates.com or by sending a Private Message to one or more, preferably several, Administrators/Board Members.



Our staff may come around to this thread to introduce themselves to you.

We hope you have a positive experience here on MA!!!



          Warm Regards,
          Marriage Advocates Board of Directors

A warm welcome to all who arrive here!

Browse around--there's lots of good content to help you enrich your marriage, or repair it if it's in trouble. Lots of caring (and very astute) people on the forums, too. Among us, we've probably dealt with every imaginable marital situation, so don't be shy about sharing your concerns. If you need help, start a thread and others will share how they've managed similar situations.

Glad to have you with us.

Hi there.

My name is Mark (imagine that).

Bet you can guess how old I am, too.

My wife and I married in 1973 and have raised two kids born almost 12 years apart. Our daughter is engage to a guy she met a couple years ago. She blessed us with a granddaughter 6 years ago. Our son lives in the area too and we still remain close to both of our kids.

For most of our marriage, we floated from crisis to crisis with periods of what appeared to be a pretty good marriage in between. We eventually settled into a pattern of settling and ended up living our lives as if everything was fine between us while we both lived as if the other wasn't even there most of the time. She did her thing and I did mine and we both drifted further apart until we hardly even cared any more, about each other or about our marriage. We didn't even know how far apart we had really become.

It was May of 2006 when it seemed as if we had reached the end. She didn't want to be there any more and I didn't want things to be the way they had been for a long time. I found another site where I learned about marriage, romantic love and things that can turn a marriage around, even one as broken as ours. That website was Marriage Builders, the site of Willard Harley.

As I learned and began trying to make changes in the way I did things, both my actions and my reactions to what she did, my wife took notice. Before long, she was asking for explanation of the changes she saw and started trying the same sorts of changes as I had been working on. I guess it worked. Our marriage is better today than at any time in the past.

In 2009 we began teaching a class together at our church based on Harley's book Fall In Love Stay In Love and saw changes take place in the marriages of others. In June of 2010, we became certified facilitators of the Dynamic Marriage course from Family Dynamics. We lead the marriage ministry at our church and I have spoken at our own church and a couple of others on the topic marriage. I am also one of the "elders" of our church. That is, I am one of the leaders there and sit on the church board.

My wife and I, along with her sister and others in our area, founded a not for profit corporation in 2009 that strives to assist horse owners in times of temporary financial need. We provide feed, hay, bedding and basic veterinary care. We're still trying to find a way to expand that effort with a goal of being able to help people state-wide in Illinois. We fed 17 horses in 2010 that would have suffered or have been lost or confiscated due to starvation without our help and the help of those who made donations to the cause.

My participation here is mainly that of a poster like anyone else. I read a lot of stuff on the internet and research topics I find interesting. I felt quite honored to be asked to become a member of the board here. Most of my online posting is limited to Marriage Advocates. I have administrator and moderating rights that I seldom exercise though will do so in a pinch. I prefer to leave those tasks to those who do it better than I ever could.

In real life, I am a cell phone and land mobile radio sales and service guy. I have been playing with computers since they came as a box of parts and spent many years posting on Usenet forums and "news groups." I worked on stock cars for a few years in the Midwest and was once in Quality Assurance at the company that first put pay phones on airplanes. Current hobbies include fishing and photography. I guess you could say I also enjoy researching and writing about marriage.

My local blog is linked in my signature line below. Feel free to read and comment as you wish.

Welcome to Marriage Advocates!

Mark

Hello everyone,

My name is Gladstone. I chose this name because, like Donald Duck's cousin Gladstone Gander, I feel like the luckiest duck in the world. I was, several years ago, an active poster on Marriage Builders, where I used the name Cuthbert Calculus.

I was one of the first people involved in the Marriage Advocates project, as Star*fish asked me to be the site's first administrator, working with AntigoneRisen, who was asked to setup and configure the site. I was very happy to be involved with setting up this site, and I continue to be involved as a member of the Board of Directors. Unfortunately, real life has caused me to reduce the amount of active daily participation I am able to give to MA.

I have been married for fifteen years. For the first nine and a half years of our marriage, I was a pretty neglectful husband, spending more time on a hobby I had than I did on my marriage. From my perspective, our marriage was dull and humdrum - but I was shocked to discover that my wife had an entirely different view of things. Where I was mildly dissatisfied, she was very unhappy, and contemplating divorce. This link describes how I found out that my wife was unhappy and what I did about it. To make a long story short, I discovered how she felt by snooping on her, I realized that I had been an unmitigated ass, and without telling her, I decided I needed to change and to work to try to win her back.

It worked, and for the past five and a half years, my wife and I have been madly in love with each other.

I did not start posting on the Marriage Builders board until after things had turned around for us, and I started mainly to try to "reality check" myself - to make sure that I was seeing things the way they really were and that I wasn't missing anything that I needed to address. I stayed because I found that I wanted very much to encourage people who found their marriages in crisis.

I look forward to spending more time here and getting to know all of our members!!

Hi there, and welcome to Marriage Advocates!

Like those who have posted before me, my life was torn apart by infidelity. Today, I am in a good place. We celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary this year, and the marriage we are enjoying today is nothing like the marriage before or during the infidelity. It didn't always look promising, either for my marital recovery or my personal recovery. If you want to read the story, it is

here.

We have a DS27 and DS17 living at home, and a DD24 who moved across the country to tread the boards. In my spare time, I play with paints or cloth in my home art studio.

Marriage Advocates allows for a variety of approaches and viewpoints. Take some time and settle in, post a little bit about your situation, and folks will come along to add their thoughts!

I actually do play the violin (imagine that!) - although my motto is "don't give up your day job!

My marriage went through many years of misery, a stream on marriage counselors, who we gave a run for our money. About 10 years ago we finally found two things that made the difference and have helped us to begin building a loving and nurturing marriage. The first was Retrouvaille, which served to knock us out of the deeply rooted and dysfunctional patterns we had fallen into. We remain connected with the Retrouvaille community, a nonprofit peer ministry. Among other things, Retrouvaille helped us recognize the dysfunctional patterns we had brought into the marriage from our respective families of origin.

The second element was learning effective ways of communicating with each other, especially in emotionally charged areas and topics of conflict. The basis of this approach is validation, which I write about, sometimes ad nauseum.

What drew me to Marriage Advocates is the great diversity of perspectives and the lack of ideology here. I'm pleased and honored to be a part of helping this great site continue its mission to help marriages.

HI

I have been doing this for a while and help out MA on the Facebook page and Twitter(along with some others).

It has taught me a little about social media and I find that quite interesting.

This forum is quite stimulating and I learn so much from all the members about so many different subjects.

I just got a ROKU and read about it here, I just started a coursera class on genetics, which I also learned about here.
TV shows that people watch,and yes how middle aged people move forward with their lives.

Thanks to all the members that contribute here.
And I am glad to be able to give back and PAY FORWARD some of that knowledge.

If you found this forum from any posts on FB or twitter PM me cause I would love to know that something helped.