He did ask if there were any pictures, but I really had forgotten about them. So I said no.

I agree with WalkinOnEggshelz . Sending nude photos is not what most would consider a forgettable action. Also, to 'forget' that you had a journal? A journal that's filled with information that contradicts what you told Swat? Seems unlikely.

Did you really forget, or are you just lying again to downplay the situation and protect yourself? Be honest.

So here I am sitting in bed not sleeping and I have no idea what to do.

You have had pages and pages of good advice from people who have BTDT and are telling you what to do. If you'd followed it from the first day you might have spared your husband some pain. It might be too late for the marriage but it's not too late to fix you, for your own sake and that of your children. So stop moping and get to it.

I never thought I would be in this situation. He was always supposed to be here with me. That was our dream, why did I do this?

Is this a rhetorical question? Are you still in IC? Are you making any progress in finding out the cause of your brokenness?

ETA: Assuming that Swat calms down and decides to give another shot at reconciliation, are there any more nasty surprises that he might discover which you have 'forgotten' about? Does he now know everything there is to know or will he be blindsided yet again?

Are you still NC with AP? If Swat looks in your browser history will he discover that you've been stalking his Facebook page or searching for him online?

Did you ever read those books that were recommended to you? What did you think of them? Did anything you read really hit home?

Even now you appear to be more focused on how your impending divorce will effect you rather than about the pain your lies have inflicted:

'He was always supposed to be here with me. That was our dream, why did I do this? ... I couldn't even cry when he told me this. I was just shocked, I couldn't say anything. I've ruined everything for my family. I cheated on a kind, loving, generous and all around great man. I lied because that was my first defense.'

Are you genuinely remorseful or is this thread just for show, as a way to manipulate Swat into staying?

[This message edited by DessieLessie at 7:37 AM, June 2nd (Monday)]

I see a common trait about you that you should be working on.

In one of your earliest posts you state how you liked the fact that the OM just wanted to f__k you rather than make love to you. You found it exciting and something that was missing from your marriage. (I may not have the exact wording correct). You somewhat recant later and state that you only had intercourse once. Perhaps it was the statements from the OM that you liked, not multiple times (sex) - only you know the truth... and it is your lying about the truth that is hurting your R.

On your first D-Day, you met with the OM, then lied about it to your BS. You felt the meet was justified, but you lied to your BS.

You had excuses then, and now about forgetting you had the journal, the pictures and statements made between you and the OM?

All I can say is stop trying to justify your actions by convincing yourself you forgot. I agree with DessieL, no one forgets about writing a journal, sending nude pictures. Therefore it is difficult to believe you that you didn't mean what you said at that time. I think your BH doesn't believe you either, no one forgets so quickly, plus you made the similar reference (above) only weeks ago.

You have a wonderful family, and a BH who gave you a second chance to come clean. You have failed him both times.

My best advise is to absolutely stop your excuses, come clean and be completely honest about your affair. Stop the TT once you are caught, or the excuses as to why you lied to him time and time again.

I also agree with Bigger, take immediate legal action against this OM. This has to stop and he needs to realise the consequences.

Under no circumstance, speak or communicate with the OM about anything, deal with this through a lawyer and the police only.

I am truly sorry about this, spend lots of time with your kids to help give you strength to get through this. This is especially rough on them.

Good luck, stop lying to yourself or your BH.

He did ask if there were any pictures, but I really had forgotten about them. So I said no.

This is a lie and you know it. You know you sent them and you knew you had a journal.
You were afraid to admit to them because you knew they could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. If you would have brought them to SWAT's attention when he asked, this could have turned out quite different.

The real truth here is that you didn't really value yourself as a person and did things with a scumbag because you felt like a scumbag too. You criticized and humiliated SWAT because he had all the qualities you felt you didn't have. Both you and OM were/are jealous of him. Your own jealousy and low self-esteem has caused you to lose a good man. My personal feeling is he is truly done. I think as a man he has reached his limit of disrespect from you and OM.

He said he was going to turn down a position so he could still work 12 hour days and have every other weekend off.(fri,sat,sun) He asked that we split custody on those weekends, and since he has no other family the kids would spend the holidays with me and my family.

THEY ARE HIS FAMILY TO! What the hell have I done?

He says he wants nothing but his personal property and his truck... ...Why doesn't he want anything from me?

There is a slight chance that if you truly change yourself over the next year or so (yes, it will take at least that long), you might be able to win him back. But if you really love him, you should let him go.

sorry for the t/j - I'm just wondering what other posters believe can be done about the photo distribution.

End of T/J

2)

Have a shower, put your game face on and let today be the day you start becoming the person you want to be

LEOs often fall prey to KISA tendencies. Your princess act for so many years attests to this. You obviously have no idea of what it takes to be the spouse of a LEO. His job is impossibly difficult and so is yours.

However, to be successful and survive, a LEO must have strength and stability. Your actions have created chaos in his life, so he is cutting you out now as quickly as he possibly can.

You need to get your act together NOW. You may not win him back (and you probably are not a good match anyway) but you need to show that you can be a strong, adept co-parent. You need to stand on your own two feet and be proud. Everything else is just noise.

Talk to an attorney asap. Find out what you need to survive. Find out what you need to do to co-parent. It doesn't sound like he is making good decisions in his haste to cut ties, so you need to step up to the plate. Find a good attorney, but not a shark. You both need to negotiate this with dignity--for his professional sake and your sanity.

You can make it through this, and in the process maybe, just maybe he will start to see you in a new light. That's not the goal necessarily but it may be a tangential outcome.

[This message edited by Sad in AZ at 10:14 AM, June 2nd (Monday)]

Hopeful reconciliation.

He did ask if there were any pictures, but I really had forgotten about them. So I said no.

Lies and infidelity go hand-in-hand. I caught my wife in too many lies to count, before and after D Day. It will take awhile to get this tendency out of your system. But it serves you absolutely no good purpose to b.s. the people in this forum. They have no other agenda but to help you sort this out in a healthy way. Unless sending nudie pics to men other than your husband is something you do habitually, the possibility of you not remembering that your loose-cannon OM had compromising pics of you seems pretty close to nil.

It's way past time to start practicing radical honesty. My wife said things about 3 months past D Day that made her look like the lowest of lowlifes, but her coming clean at least let me know exactly what I was facing and gave me some small sense of security. Doesn't SWAT deserve at least that?

There may be quite a lot you can do with regards to the distribution of your image without your consent.

Up to now you have been motivating yourself with the goal of recapturing SWAT and keeping him. Several wise posters told you from the beginning that you needed to let go of the outcome and focus on healing yourself.

I think you read the words, but I don't think you were able to take the meaning behind them until now. You have been self-centered for a long, long, long time--the comfortable motive of getting what you wanted for you (SWAT being what you want just now) was too strong and too familiar. It was your default setting.

Unfortunately this latest has taken that motivation away. Given who SWAT seems to be, and given his character and circumstances, I think this discovery has put an end to recovery of your marriage.

SWAT needed, above all, for you to be truthful to him. To have lied about whether their were pictures, and then to have the pictures show up on everyone's cell phones... well. And I agree with those who have checked you on this--you don't simply forget taking photos of your own distinctive body art and mods and emailing them. Or perhaps you sincerely DID forget, but that is actually worse if true: it means that you lie to yourself so reflectively, and believe your own lies so deeply, that lying to others most dear to you is just a seamless consequence. You are not a safe partner for a man who values integrity almost above all other values.

The journal is bad too. That you explicitly forbid SWAT to do something for you that fantasied about, and that you then shared with your other man as your fantasy is profoundly emasculating.

I am sorry, but I can't hold out false hope.

So, from this day on, recapturing SWAT is not your motivation.

Now, the real work can begin.

You are still a mother. Right now this instant you have children in confusion and pain who are looking to you for love and truth.

What are you going to do to model for them being a giving person not a selfish one, a person of integrity whose word they can trust as they go though all the changes to come? How will you model being a woman of character so your sons know what to look for in a woman and your daughters know what to be?

And SWAT is not leaving your life, he is your co-parent for life. What are you going to do to make yourself a safe and reliable and trusted partner in parenting?

You have two huge brokens. First, you are profoundly self-centered. Second, you have come to employ lies to yourself and secondarily to others as a reflexive and instant mechanism to keep others attention focused on you, and to control their perception of you.

You deserve to be a person who earns her own self-respect. You can be a person who is worthy of the respect of others. It is never, ever to late to become a giving person rather than a selfish one. It is never to late to become a person of integrity--someone people turn to for help, instead of someone manipulating others into helping yourself.

But you have to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Stay in IC, and be relentless in stripping away your layers of lies to and about yourself. Stay here on SI, and let these wise people help you grow toward real self-knowledge and integrity.

Every day is a new chance, and also a new test. You may have lost SWAT as a husband and as a life partner. You cannot "lose" your parents, or your children. THEY are "stuck" with you. What you are you going to give them? A women who at her lowest and most broken, started the painful journey to being a woman of integrity, with the capacity to give? Or a women who left them alone to continue to stare at her own reflection in her self-made hall of mirrors, a woman who refuses to see them and love them and engage them?

You are choosing right now, with what you do today. Chose bravely and choose well.

My best advise is to absolutely stop your excuses, come clean and be completely honest about your affair. Stop the TT once you are caught, or the excuses as to why you lied to him time and time again.

+1
Absolutely agree.

You're still lying because you are still operating under whatever issues you had during your A.

I feel like you're in the "dry drunk" adultery stage in which someone is not actively engaged in the A, but their attitude is still selfish, still looking for justification, still self pitying, still hiding things, still focused on themselves, still unable to be a safe partner and spouse. And when you're in that mode, you're still going to hurt your BS terribly because you can only evade the consequence of your state of mind for so long before it oozes through.

When you finally get to the bottom of why you're doing this, when you finally "get it" for real, you finally start to heal enough to become a safe partner. Some BS wait through that stage and others simply can't. Naked pictures of you texted around? A diary of sex fantasy that trashes your own husband while fantasizing over the OP? You STILL wondering why your BS is depressed? I mean that is absolute emotional torture and I find it impossible to believe that you "forgot" the pics and the diary. Nuh uh. And the very fact that you're still pretending that you forgot it is really indicative of the place your mind is right now. That's not a healthy place.

Right now if Swat wants a divorce because he's in survival mode, I totally get that. I'm sure you get that, too. You're not a safe partner, you are very focused on yourself even when you're trying not to be, you may have an ocean of trickle truth left in you and you're still in an emotional place where you're "forgetting" marriage-altering enormities. Asking someone to be vulnerable to those things? When there's no end in sight? Surely you can see how nearly insurmountably huge that could be.

Does that mean you can't be a healthy person and good spouse? No, because you absolutely can. It takes work, years of work. And that work has to happen if Swat is married to you during the work or not. I totally agree with the people urging you to keep going, keep seeking the answers, keep looking for the right path. I really think everyone here is capable of reaching a healthy place, though we often have to walk through fire to get there and drag our BS and our children through fire with us.

You did neither - and it looks about as bad as it can.

Forgetting about pictures? I find that very hard to believe.

I don't think there are many men that wanted to reconcile more than your husband. He REALLY wanted you to make it - it is clear from virtually everything he wrote here.

I would start by asking yourself hard questions about why you risked such an opportunity - one that was sitting right in front of you. He did things after D-Day that clearly showed that he wanted you back. He triggered, but he was clearly letting you back in.

I was cheering for you. Still am. It may be in a year or two if you can show your husband you have changed he might open his heart again. But right now frankly you are not ready to be a partner for him.

[This message edited by redsox13 at 11:48 AM, June 2nd (Monday)]

It doesn't sound like he is making good decisions in his haste to cut ties, so you need to step up to the plate.

Sad in AZ, this made me LMAO, because even if you didn't mean it this way...the implication that SoSorry could make better decisions than SWAT, WRT their M or the dissolution thereof, struck me as ludicrous.

I feel like you're in the "dry drunk" adultery stage in which someone is not actively engaged in the A, but their attitude is still selfish, still looking for justification, still self pitying, still hiding things, still focused on themselves, still unable to be a safe partner and spouse.

circe, brilliant and spot-on. As hard as we've tried to facilitate a "virtual intervention," ultimately SoSorry must choose to enter rehab and start the painful detox process. Clearly, tragically, she's not ready to give up her maladaptive coping mechanisms, and while I hope she doesn't do anything else she'll come to regret, IMHO she hasn't hit bottom yet.

He did ask if there were any pictures, but I really had forgotten about them. So I said no.

I must tell you, that as a BS myself, I would find a statement like this almost impossible to believe.

How do you take a naked picture of yourself, send it over the airways to someone else and have it slip your mind?

IMHO you haven't reached the stage yet where truth and rebuilding trust are the most important things to you. Right now I think the most important thing to you is self-preservation.

And, as far as what you wrote, my inclination is to believe that you believed it at the time. You can deny all you want now, but, again, are you being truthful?

It will be hard, but please know that here there is plenty of love&support for you. Sometimes tough love, but love nevertheless.

Become the best you can be, and if down the road that leads to another chance with SWAT, amazing, but if not, you being the best you can be will still be great for you, your kids and everyone else in your life.

Best wishes

I dont post much but thought this might help.

When you wonder/think about how your husband is responding to things he is made aware of, try and remember that what he is experiencing is a traumatic event.

Our affairs cause trauma to our spouses and the degree of trauma he is dealing with does NOT depend on how serious or how physical the affair was. The severity of the traumatic reaction is determined by (1) how the discovery was made, (2) extent of shattered assumptions, (3) individual and situational vulnerabilities, (4) the nature of the betrayal, and (5) whether the threat of betrayal continues.

In his mind the threat may still be there.

These factors interact with one another to determine the intensity, scope, and persistence of post-traumatic reactions and unfortunately this reaction cannot be changed right now by how sorry we are.

All of us operate from a set of basic assumptions about our relationships, our partners, and ourselves. We can describe, at least in a general way, the terms of commitment that characterize our marriages and other significant relationships. Our assumptions provide us with a map of our partner’s personality and moral character that predicts how he or she would behave in compromising situations.

We are traumatized when these assumptions are shattered because our safe, predictable world is no longer safe or predictable.

This is what he is dealing with and every new bit of information he finds out about just causes more trauma.

It doesnt mean that all hope is lost as other will tell you, but it does mean it will take time for him to heal.

I write this with good intent and hopefully, along with what the others have written, you may start to WAKE UP. And start to be honest with yourself first and foremost.

You have lied to your BH for so long but you have lied to yourself even longer.

He was always supposed to be here with me

And he was until you chose to lie, cheat and manipulate him to the point of no return.

And just curious, you were always supposed to be there for him too right?

But you chose and continually choose to put yourself first.

Even after signing divorce papers all you convey is self pity. Of what you have done (and feeble excuses for why) what you are faced with losing and what you are going to do now?

Where is your concern about SWAT? Caring about how he must feel having to make this gut wrenching decision for himself and your family because his spouse is too selfish and self centered to take full accountability and stop acting like a spoiled brat.

Sounds as if your whole life you have gotten what you wanted, when you wanted and how you wanted.

Great, you have an inheritance, a house with no mortgage, three beautiful children and a loving husband but that wasn't enough. You were "bored?"

I would be ashamed that is the best excuse you have. Again, it makes you sound incredibly shallow and bratty.

A marriage isn't about entertainment, it is about commitment and dedication. It requires acts of giving, of sacrifice, of honesty and integrity.

He says he wants nothing but his personal property and his truck... ...Why doesn't he want anything from me?

Because you have nothing to give him right now but more humiliation, heartache and pain. He clearly isn't interested in your material offerings. They mean NADA. Even proves further what a stand up guy he is.

I lied because that was my first defense

You lied because you are a liar. If you were remorseful and accountable you would have faced the music and not had to be "defensive" in a situation YOU created.

If you love SWAT at all...let him be right now. Give him time and space to breathe.

I hope you can take a long hard look at yourself and come to terms with who you are and who you want to be. Only you have the ability to make those changes.

Good luck.

[This message edited by 1Faith at 1:14 PM, June 2nd (Monday)]

She's been treated with kid gloves throughout their M; it's time to pull up the big girl panties and get on with it.