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Sorry for unclear title/content. I am the betrayed husband, my wife had the affair, and I am relating some things I found out that I don't understand.
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So my wayward spouse has been cheating, both emotionally and physically, with a man whom she knew is married with children. She had been acting strangely, and after a mutual friend suggested that something was wrong I began suspecting. In retrospect I should have seen what was right in front of me, but I guess I just couldn't believe it. I found that she had lied about an important meeting out of town on two occasions, leaving me with our children to go have a weekend-long physical affair with the same person.
I confronted her after I found out, and told her that if she wanted our marriage to work, she had to quit all communication and go to marriage counseling / therapy. She agreed. We started therapy. But it wasn't very long until she started communicating with this person again.
The second time I found out, I filed for divorce, assuming it was over. She begged me not to go through with it, that we could still save the marriage. I loved her then, and I still do now despite everything, so I had the divorce complaint withdrawn in the hopes that we really could fix things, both for ourselves and for our children.
She has continued to communicate with this out of state person, and each time I catch her and we confront she agrees to stop and just changes the means of communication, up to and including a secret cellphone and multiple email accounts and various chat applications.
I discovered that she had been creating some kind of crazy fantasy world with this guy. She had multiple email accounts, some of which were imaginary relatives, and she had a series of invented characters in her 'life' that she would tell this guy about and even communicate to him with. For instance she had a crazy imaginary x boyfriend that was stalking her and assaulting her. She had him believing that she was single, never married and with no kids. I contacted the other man and gave him enough information that should have been enough to convince him that he was being lied to. As part of our recovery/therapy at that point we both agreed to no further contact, again. Of course she was lying about that.
She continued and she had convinced this other person that she was pregnant despite protection (that was fun to read about) and they deliberated what to do about it, which coincided with my insistence that she get checked for STDs. At some point she convinced the other person that her imaginary stalker x was blackmailing her into not talking to him during the period I would discover the communication and she would change her method. There are lots of things where she takes her real life and alters it in the fantasy thing she has created with him. A half dozen of the invented people were a strange amalgam of people we know in real life, and then had some fantastical additional aspects added. There were fake siblings, fake friends, fake activities, fake encounters with various other people. What really bothered me was a darker conversation I had just recently discovered where they both talked about this imaginary stalker x being killed or taken care of once and for all. It scared me, so I took steps to ensure that this other man knew it was all a lie, and he finally believed he'd been lied to about all kinds of crazy things and called it off with her. Now she's finally in that uncomfortable mourning phase over the end of her affair, and maybe just maybe we can begin to work on whatever is left of our marriage.
So a big question I have is, while I expect wayward spouses to lie, both to their betrayed spouses and to the other person in order to conceal and continue the affair, how typical is it for the wayward spouse to create elaborate fantasy worlds with invented people and situations in order to manipulate others? What am I dealing with here?
[This message edited by idontknowwhy5 at 10:09 AM, March 3rd (Monday)]