SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

If you lose your conviction - just remember that she's rather go on a fuckfest with her boyfriend in Spain than be in Disneyland with you and your daughter

Soooo, she planned a romantic vacation and oops! Took the wrong man by mistake?

Or accidentally put his name on the ticket instead of yours?

Perspective is a very funny thing. And by that, I mean funny weird and not funny haha.

Of course, it also depends on your semantics and/or personal world view, but her actions are neither mistakes or accidents but rather a series of carefully thought out plans and actions I.e., lying, sneaking around, visiting a foreign country, etc.

I don't know about anyone else but I have never mistakenly ended up in a foreign country. I have never accidentally went on a trip with anyone either. And I have had a lot of interesting life lessons over the years.

Stay the course an don't waffle. Look, there is no way you will ever get over this. Your WW threw her marriage an life with you away to be with this worthless chad, neglecting her daughter an you. She recklessly exposed you to STDs some of which can kill you. God only knows how many women that chad has been with. Everybody eventually shows you who they really are. Your WW showed you who she really is. Stay strong.

When one is a CEO or travels a lot on the job, there has to exist an extra special faith & trust between husband & wife. It has to be there. A tremendous amount of leeway exists and therefore both parties understand the gravity of the situation.

I would agree that now she has proven herself unfaithful and untrustworthy, it will never exist again- and those are the pillars of this type of a marriage.

That said, do see to it she and her daughter have quality time together. If for nothing else than for your daughter. Let your daughter judge her mother as she will without influence from you. You owe that to her.

Also, just a suggestion... see to it your wife has the means to at least have a decent apartment... for her daughter to visit her at. Divorcing her is fine and even appropriate, but don't poison your daughter as it may very well boomerang back on you. You can't lose her as well.

I wish you well. Stay in touch.

BP

[This message edited by thatbpguy at 10:21 PM, May 13th (Saturday)]

Forceful reaction or doing the "pick me dance" as a reaction, most of us here regret how they initially reacted to the betrayal and wanted to have done otherwise, but the reaction would not have been displayed should the unfair and traumatizing betrayal not have been done by the cheater, physical violence of course is unjustifiable but that (fortunately) has not occurred in your case, remember that it is always tough and that you are inexperienced with this and that you are only human and you have been shaken up quite a bit, it is a good quality that you still empathize with your WW but also empathize with yourself, I wish you strength in these difficult times, stay strong & safe brother

somebody who doesn't mean anything to her".

Following the logic...then what do you think that this makes you?

By the way, is her boyfriend married? If he isn't you can rest assured that she is being coached. If he is, then you know where to hit next.

It'd be sort of fun to somehow have communicated to the POS that in the next year or two he's going to be visited by some gentlemen and castrated for all this. He knows you have the means to do this. He won't have a good nights sleep for years due to his fear. Oh well, just a fun thought.

If you are dead-set on divorce then try not to waffle too much. You don't want to give your daughter any false hope. You can have a functional co-parenting relationship once the divorce is done.

I think you are wise to stay away from your wife just now. It must be so tempting to give way to sentimentality, however, she can't be trusted with any goodwill you show her. If she stabs you in the back again then it will be a lot harder to get along with her in the future.

When is her flight home? If it's Monday then let her fly home Monday and come confess what she's done (not 'explain', it needs to be her coming clean). If her return flight is Wednesday or later, I say push it up to Monday. It's time for her to come home.

You all need to start talking, even if it's just to talk about how to handle the D. I think for your DDs sake she needs to have some stability in her life. She needs to know what her world is going to be like moving forward.

Have fun at Disney. Then I recommend starting the work to put your worlds back together, no matter what that will look like.

Thanks for staying in touch. Good luck.

YHGTBKM,

I have been thinking of your situation, and my heart goes out to you. Your wife has put you and your daughter in a lousy situation. She lied to you for months, and even lied to your daughter about having an affair. Is there really any kind of “explanation” that can make betrayal like that alright?

I am not saying that to cause trouble. I say it because it is exactly the dilemma I faced. I had a set of basic values and expectations of myself and my partner. They were, and are, hard-wired into me. In the aftermath of infidelity, I found myself struggling to compromise all of those values and bend them into a warped pretzel so that my partner and her actions could somehow become “acceptable” and make it possible for me to continue having any kind of meaningful relationship with her. In the end, I just couldn’t do it. I got so tired of trying to restructure all of my values and needs for honesty, openness, respect, and genuine love that I realised I would have to become someone that I wasn’t just to accommodate someone who had crapped all over me. So I stopped trying, and I parted company with someone I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. It was painful, but it was the best thing to do, because we parted on relatively good terms. Had I dragged it out much longer, I don’t think we could have parted that way, because we kept arguing, and I just could not trust her any more. It preyed on my mind, and the doubt that she had introduced into the relationship became a barrier between us that never changed. Weirdly, it actually seemed to grow bigger as we tried to reconcile, rather than reducing.

My problem was not 'forgiving' a particular incident that happened on a particular day. When I focused at that level, I found that I could almost sympathise, and think, "Well, she's only human, she was flattered by 'x', she was excited by 'y'", and so on. It may hurt, but we have to accept that our 'significant others' (these terms drive me nuts) are only human, and as such, they are as fallible and flawed as we are. But while I could semi-forgive/accept individual incidents (as horrible and hurtful as they were), what I could not make myself accept was the underlying principle that she let herself do that stuff. That she felt 'free' to indulge herself while she was in what was supposed to be an important relationship with me. That was revealing about her, and what she thought of me. I finally understood that whatever she felt for me, it was not the 'true' kind of love that makes a person think of their partner 24/7, and protect them. That her idea of what 'love' was did not match mine.

Thankfully, there were no kids to witness the arguments as the relationship crumbled after the trust had gone. I have always had a pragmatic outlook on life, and the old saying about, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, flies like a duck…” applied to my feelings about my partner after she cheated. If she walks like a cheat, lies like a cheat, acts like a cheat…I just could not get past what she had revealed about herself by cheating. She kept apologising, and I do believe she was genuinely sorry about hurting me, but she was no longer the person I thought she was when we got together. I knew what she was capable of, and no words could undo what she had done. Parting was all we could do.

And it worked out alright. We are still in touch occasionally, and I now have someone new in my life that I love and trust. Had I stayed with my ex, I never would have had that again, and the whole thing made me understand how much I need honesty, trust, and love in a meaningful relationship. I found that without those elements, I was just going through the motions, and life is too short to waste doing that.

My reason for writing this is to describe the issues that I faced in trying to reconcile, because for the sake of all concerned, you should not attempt it if your gut tells you it is not likely to work. It would make things even worse for your daughter to have her hopes raised, thinking everything could go back to how it was, only to find that it cannot happen.

What you have to keep in mind is that you are not the ‘bad guy’ here. You have questioned whether you have been too ‘harsh’. That will always be a matter of opinion, there is no right answer to that. There may be some who say you were, and others who say you should have thrown your wife out on the street the second you found out what she was doing. My take on it is that you did what felt right to you at a time when someone put you into a situation that was alien to you and not of your making. Ultimately, we have to be true to ourselves and trust ourselves and our judgement, particularly if we find we cannot trust someone close to us.

You are an intelligent and compassionate man, and you will be doing a lot of soul-searching and thinking about what is best for your future and your daughter’s future. That may be attempting reconciliation, or parting from your wife and co-parenting. Neither path is smooth, but people do make them work.

I wish you well as you work through this difficult time. Trust your gut; it will tell you what is right for you.

[This message edited by M1965 at 4:30 AM, May 15th (Monday)]

ok YHG, what is your gameplan ?

1) When does she get home ?

2) What are you going to do when she shows up to the house ?

3) What is your gameplan when your daughter takes her side ?

4) What are you going to do if she falsifies a DV charge or uses a locksmith to get back into the house ?

I love your actions so far. Being stoic isn't going to keep her away. You have to now plan a defense of your gains in order to keep them.

When does she get served divorce papers ?

Did you make copies of your evidence and keep two copies off campus, if you will ?

and I am glad you stopped waffling too

I have been following this thread and applaud you for such a beautifully executed plan!

You seem like a person who knows ultimately what to do. I can relate. I knew there was no going back. I often describe my D situation as a 'rip off the bandaid' type scenario. In the first few weeks, I was so focused on what I needed to do to get my ducks in a row, I wasn't really even sad or upset. I was all business.

But once everything was in place, it was a different story, and the emotional rollercoaster began. My head was in one world, my heart in another and at times, they crossed paths. My heart would try to convince my head that maybe it could work out, maybe things could be fixed,..

And so I read and read and read. And talked a ton with some trusted friends and family. And joined a divorce recovery program. Because as much as I wanted to press the fast forward button on my roller coaster, it didn't exist.

The woman you love (because feelings can't be switched off that easily), your best friend, the mother of your child, the person you thought you'd grow old with, she betrayed and hurt you more deeply than any other person could. But even if you already know what the final outcome is going to be, it doesn't mean it's going to be an easy ride.

Stay strong. Learn about the stages of divorce recovery. You've now proved to your WW and her BF who's really in charge. From this point forward, you don't need anymore epic show stoppers. Take the high road when dealing with her. (It will serve you well in the end.)

What a wonderful post from M1965. I couldn't agree more.

When I found out my xWW had cheated it went against everything I believed in, and against everything I believed was possible in her. I had always thought that if it happened I would file for D the next day and not even reconsider staying together. I was wrong. You don't really know until it happens, as many here can attest.

I "took one for the team" and decided to move on. But I did it all wrong. I rugswept the whole thing and then spent years acting like a PI. Day after day after day. No one should have to live like that. But I did. I thought I was doing it for my kids. But I don't think it was necessary at all. I filed some years later when I found out she was in fact a serial adultress. At least by then it was easier because already shattered was the idea that she was trustworthy and that it was always just the two of us in our marriage.

You'll do what's best for you at the end of the day. You're obviously a smart guy and you'll figure it out in the coming days and weeks. Based on what you've written so far I'd be surprised if you didn't file. But whatever you end up doing I'm confident will be best.

I just wanted to let you know that if you do decide to D that it's not the end of anyone's world. If you're wired like me, I hope you won't make my mistake of letting fear prevent you from doing what needs to be done. I wish you the best of luck.

Hang in there, you are doing better than can be expected under the circumstances. Yes, she's so sorry now that the gravy train is leaving the station that she's even told her parents; it's pathetic. Which brings me to the following:

"mistake, accident, just sex & somebody who doesn't mean anything to her".

The "just sex" line always floors me. Ummm, yeah, that's a pretty big fucking deal (pardon the pun) to most people, but especially men. This reminds me of another poster's thread. He blew up his WW's world and her response was, "I never told him I loved him because that would be worse than sex". Worse to whom? Obviously, to her only. It is a head-scratcher alright, but truly reveals how self-focused cheaters are...

For your daughter's sake, she deserves to be treated civilly, but no better than you would any other person you'd pass in a store or on a sidewalk. You can be largely indifferent to her because she's fired you from that role.

Continued strength and courage to you!

[This message edited by Sanibelredfish at 8:52 AM, May 14th (Sunday)]

Both ChamomileTea and M1965 have made posts that are probably all that needs to be said on this thread.

M1965's post should be mandatory reading to all BS & WS. When we compromise our belief system and values, that's when the real problems begin- and never end.

I have agreed to talk after she provides a full written confession complete with timeline and details.

I have advised that I will not supply her with any funds to travel home...in fact I said you may as well stay, this could be the last European vacation you get to take in quite a while.

I have concerns that my stance could affect my relationship with my daughter but as they say, on bridge at a time.

I think if you communicate well to her she will understand, She may disagree, but so long as you can explain yourself to her it will be fine. Also, don't vilify her mother to her.

M1965, powerful post, you hit every trigger and button I've been dealing with for over 12 years. If I wandered back to this forum in the last couple of weeks, after been gone from this site for a long time, looking for something I guess I was searching for, I think I found it in your post.

I stayed. Mostly because I did have a child still at home.

Maybe it was a mistake.

For all of her, "It was a mistake", etc, etc....is she still shacked up in Europe with OM?