SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I began an EA which then turned physical. Immediately after, the AP told me it should not have happened, he couldn’t handle it, and now ignores me. It’s devastating and confusing. It has left me heart-broken, sad, and anxious.

You may think EA are “innocent” but I am the example of an EA making you feel good, happy, elated, to it then turning physical and intimate, and the other person crushing you.

We are married people. Therefore, you go home to a spouse you have to face. No matter the status or issues you have in your marriage, those issues are still there, you now have to face your spouse to deal with the issues you’re having, but now battle another set of problems including heart-break if you choose to continue your affair.

I understand limerance. I still struggle and am in IC to help deal with all of this. It will spiral out of control.

Deal with your marriage; work though problems, heal, move forward, and decide what is best for you. Don’t add the problems an affair will bring.

It's an EA and you're already cheating on your H, you need to STOP flirting with OM, moreover you need to confront OM and tell him to back off, that you CANNOT be friends anymore, that you are MARRIED, and that if he continues you will REPORT him to HR (this alone might do the trick), finally be honest and tell your H the truth.

But I need help. I feel I can’t talk to my husband as he is in so much pain dealing with a big loss. I don’t want to upset him by saying I started to flirt again.

Stop making excuses for not telling your H, he's a grown man and can handle it, I understand his friend is about to die but knowing that his wife (you) is fighting the urges of sleeping with POSOM will probably upset him but trust me it will be way less than if you actually start a PA, this could cost you your M and the stability of your child's future. Download "Not Just Friends" today and read it, Keep posting, this is a crucial moment, good luck.

I will avoid the man. I really hope he doesn’t try to pursue me more.

This is very passive thinking. The man is married with children. You're married with a child. Get ahold of your integrity. I believe you must demand that he back off. Tell him that you're done flirting with him and that you'll avoid him in the future and that you need him to avoid you.

Also, the fact that your husband is losing a friend is a very lame excuse for not telling him what else is going on in his life. Talking to him about your feelings will bring you closer together. Not telling him is isolating him from the reality of his own life. Right now you're in an emotional affair in my opinion.

I don't say these things to hurt you, but to wake you up to your faulty thinking.

Justsomelady:

I was once the other man and didn't know it. It was an intense short term physical affair that started on our first date. She made it clear that she was very attracted to me and acted as if she was as single and available as I was.

A couple of weeks later, she calls me at 8:00am one morning. It was a one way discussion and she was the one talking. Anger, desperation and conviction defined her tone, and I was the one she directed it to. After telling me to never call her or attempt to see her again, she hung the phone up. I remember still holding the phone, listening to the dial tone and wondered WTF happened and how and where did it come from.

Turns out, the tenant who lived one floor below her "heard" us, told her boyfriend (who I didn't even know about) and he surprised her that morning with evidence of us. Frantically, her first reaction was to save her relationship, and going no contact with me was the start, hence the 8:00 AM call.

The lesson here though was the unmistakable conviction and intensity in her voice to "no contact me". I couldn't even get a word out and she meant it that way. It was crystal clear that I was not her choice and that I have zero priority in her life, now or in the future.

It stung for sure, but she left no doubt as to where her heart was. I stayed away because of this. I didn't even call to see what she was even talking about, but just put two and two together and respected her wants.

If you are passive or lack conviction in your message to him, he will see it, feel it and know he can have you if he stays on you. You don't want to give him any room to think his presence and flirting can make you compromise your boundaries, because he will undoubtedly continue to weaken them knowing he can do so. I've read many WW who were just worn down and eventually gave in.

The way to stop being worn down is to do whatever you need to do so to ensure he doesn't even have access to you in the first place. You're smart to have come here before the fact and not afterwards as most do.

However, you're still highly at risk and seemingly vulnerable to your emotions and attraction to him driving the outcome. You have to be the driver, or else he'll drive you over the cliff and you'll look back wishing you had taken the wheel when you had the chance. Now is the time.

“I put a smile on and channeled my angst”

That’s not gonna cut it. You’re gonna have to actually be courageous and share with your husband or you’re just going to end up making justifications.

Consider, why is it that you can share these deep secret feelings with perfect strangers but not the man you pledged fidelity and commitment to, had a child with, share a life with?

Consider how ridiculous that is. You can share with a whole forum of people you literally don’t know, but the one person that should matter, is in the dark. I’ll never understand Wayward thinking. When I start feeling unhappy, unsatisfied, angsty, my husband is always first to know. He’s my partner. You can’t fix something if one person has no idea how badly it’s broken.

You are not only betraying yourself, your husband, your kids, the rest of your family, and everyone in the community who thinks you are a person of integrity. You are also taking away the agency of another woman - you are actively participating in her emotional rape.

Any woman who has an A with a married man is - in addition to the above - betraying another woman.

And I apologize if this is hurtful to the changed/changing WWs here whose APs were MM.

You have had an EA with this man for 3 years. Tell your husband. He deserves to know and have free agency to his choices. What you have done to him, your children, the APs wife and their children with the AP is wrong all in the name of feeding your ego. I could use harsher words, but I hope that helps in getting a view of who you have chosen to become and do. Maybe that will help you see the AP in a different light. You are stealing from your spouses and families. While they stay faithful, you two steal and feed from others investments. How would you like it if your husband was carrying on an EA with some other woman? Acting the way you act with your AP?

Get into some IC to deal with your issues that make you do horrible things to feed your ego.

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 9:54 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

Betrayed here.

Read your posts, and it is heartening to read that you are trying to take steps to avoid infidelity.

A potential problem I see, is that your support is all 'virtual'. There is nobody but yourself to hold you accountable whilst in your state of flux.

It might be good to get someone else IRL to help keep you grounded. You mentioned that your husband is in grief, and that you do not want to add to his burden, so you are keeping your EA (it is an EA) to yourself.

This 'putting off telling him' could last years, and in that time, if nobody is there IRL to support you, your M has high chance of going pear shaped.

Then the wayward rationalisation could start coming in (your BH could not give you emotional support, you were lonely, etc etc etc).

Your situation is worsened in that your EAP works with you. The chances of you interacting with your EAP will be extremely high, and you will not be able to lose your limerance that easily, as you will always be exposed to the source.

The very fact that you experienced a 'blip' indicates that you have not gotten control of your emotions.

What if you are tasked to be in the same team as your EAP? You may have to work late, alone with your EAP, over an extended period of time (important case with a tight deadline). He turns on the charm again. What will you do? The possibility of that 'blip' becoming more is extremely high.

By bringing your own food and drink to work is just trying to cure the symptom, not the actual cause. By having lunch at your desk is just running away from the issue, so it will be a temporary and weak fix.

You mentioned that "It is a big and busy season in my life", it can make you more vulnerable, since you do not have someone you can talk to. If the pressure of work increases, and the emotional burden of your family life increases, make sure that if you need to talk to someone about it, it is not your EAP, nor the office Blabber. Ideal is a female mentor, as the limerance could transfer to another male.

Justsomelady, can I ask what you learned from this thread?

At this point, it seems like you found something that is helping you avoid going further down the path of encouraging/allowing that man to put his penis in your vagina, even though that's what a part of you wants.

I think that women have no understanding of just how hurtful and in what ways it is hurtful to husbands so avoiding that is really, really good.

It also sounds like you are trying to figure out how you got to this place so that is also really good.

I'm concerned that you are not sharing this with your husband. I understand your thinking about that, both what you wrote and what you are probably not saying, and provoking unhappy feelings in him is not something you're likely to want to do unless forced. But:

You are putting a huge limitation, a very low ceiling, on the emotional intimacy you can have with your husband, not only now but for as long as you hold on to this secret. This is a major part of your life that you are not sharing with him. It is your deep, dark secret. But it is not only YOURS - because you are in a marriage, it's also part of your husband's life, though his is unaware that he is in a marriage with enormous limitations on emotional intimacy. And from now on, every year that passes will be a year that he is unaware that he was an unwitting party to intrusion, and if you ever do tell him, all of those years will feel like a lie. Not as bad as if there was sex, but still, the fallout will grow with time and with the continued hiding.

And the excuse about your husband's friend - that's an excuse. Marriage means that the spouse is the most important person in your life, full stop. If there is a threat to his marriage, he would want to know. There's always a reason to put it off. And you are right, he won't like it, but you may find that he can support and help you as you fix your problems.

I know it seems like it makes sense to avoid the continued emotional affair (if you can), avoid a physical affair (if you can), figure out why you ended up there (on your own), and keep everyday life going in the meantime. You are reluctant to throw a bomb in the middle of your fairly smoothly running life and would rather run off to a hiding place to fix it all up when no one is looking. Try to resist that approach. You might end up not having a physical affair but you'll carry secrets around and as a practiced liar and hider, I can tell you, you do not want to reinforce that practice. It's very hard to undo.

[This message edited by Pippin at 3:01 AM, July 22nd (Monday)]

^^^^^ this is really important IMO.

One thing that's been hitting me lately is how sad and devastated I am that my WH did not talk to me about what was going on with him, apparently for our entire M. The amazingly low bar for emotional intimacy that Pippin speaks of - it was one-sided in that I shared everything with my WH (and it's still not cool that he in turn shared my history with his girlfriend), but he did not reciprocate. I am incredibly heartbroken that he was the ONE person in the world I trusted completely, yet he had zero trust to share his life / his feelings with me. Zero trust to tell me about the slippery slope he was on for years & years before his EA went PA. That part of hurts just as much as the sex. Folks here say it all the time: it's not necessarily the sex that kills the relationship - it's all the lies.

Like it or not, you are describing an EA to a "T" . You are not being honest with your BH.

By bringing your own food and drink to work is just trying to cure the symptom, not the actual cause. By having lunch at your desk is just running away from the issue, so it will be a temporary and weak fix.

If you don't have anyone IRL, and SI is your only avenue for help, I encourage you to read all you can here. I encourage you to buy a paid membership in order to read older posts from the folks who have been through the very thing you are going through. To figure out how to dig DEEP DEEP DEEP into yourself to determine why you went down that slippery slope instead of working on yourself. To this day it enrages me that my WH never once - in a decade of PA and 15+years of EA - he ever asked himself: why am I doing this? So, by posting here you are ahead of that curve, but there are many more in front of you.

You can still read "not just friends". You can still read how to help your spouse heal. You can still read some brene brown and figure out how to open the windows to your BH and become vulnerable and trustworthy.

I spent the day being good to him and supporting him through his pain over his friend.

You make being nice, compassionate, and empathetic towards your husband as a CHORE. What is up with that? Why do you come across as that? Do you normally lack those qualities to begin with? Are you used to being the one that gets all the support, center of attention, or empathy and now you are adrift because your husband needs support now and you aren't getting it from him?

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 10:04 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

I told him the first time, and I went NC and then have had this blip.

Minimalizing it doesn't help you. You do really need to see it for what it is, an EA. And if you really didn't think it's that bad and that it's just a "blip" then tell your husband and see what he says.

When we minimalize things we have done its just to make ourselves feel better.

I know you don't want to tell your husband but how do you really think you will be able to fix the problems within yourself when you aren't truly holding yourself accountable?

I spent the day being good to him and supporting him through his pain over his friend.

What was it that you did to be good to him? I'm not being snarking it is an honest question.

The reason that I ask is because sometimes it is a lot easier to do small things. It helps us feel better about ourselves for a moment and avoid what is really going on.

Have you sat and had a talk with your husband? A real talk. Talk you him about what is stressing you out. What you are feeling right now. Talk to him on things that are lacking in the marriage or need to be worked on.

Sometimes the kindness thing we can do for our spouses is to show them that we want to work on our relationships. Plus it helps bring the emotional intimacy back into the relationship.

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 10:05 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 10:09 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

Justsomelady, you said:

You may not have seen my last post, but I will tel him next week.

I'm so happy for you that you've made this decision. I give you lots of credit for coming here and opening yourself up to some pretty tough comments. What gmc94 said was so important. My BS said much of it explains his feelings about me.

I want to mention something that I felt really bad about after my affair. I lied to myself in many ways. One lie was that it wasn't really an affair. Another was that after I had sex with him that we could be just friends. Not true, I carried on for 7 months after the sex and it hurt my family in so many ways.

Another thing is that I thought AP and I were the only ones who knew about the affair. After many discussions with my BS, I came to realize that probably many people saw the looks he gave me and the smiles I returned and put 2 and 2 together. Do you believe that others haven't noticed what's going on between you two? Also, you're counting on your AP to keep it to himself, but you can't trust a cheater to keep your secret.

Also, is there a rule in your company that you shouldn't get involved with another person in the company? Who do you think would have to go, if HR found out?

It's a great decision you've made to tell your husband. It will be hard, but easier on him if it comes from you. I wish you the very best.

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 10:08 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

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[This message edited by Justsomelady at 10:07 AM, January 4th (Saturday)]

How about stopping with the excuses?

I agree with Tren on this part but I think you shouldn't be thinking just about your spouse in this - you should be thinking about YOU. Who are you? What kind of person do you want to be? What do you want from your life that is missing now? And how do you think that engaging with this other person will help that IN THE LONG RUN?

Affairs are for the most part, VERY "in the moment" based on very short term thinking. There is a reason why so many write about them as being akin to using drugs - as quick fix (that isn't a fix at all) to a long term problem. They are like patching a pot hole with a hot mop when underneath is a huge sinkhole.

Do you feel like something is missing with your spouse? If so, what is it? Do you feel like you want to separate? No? why? And if you don't want to separate then why is this other person tempting to you? What can they offer you that will fulfill you in the long run?

It's a good thing you have started to think about these things now as opposed to after more damage has been done. You need to go NC ASAP - like cut the cord - heck, tell your spouse about how you've been feeling and bring this into the light of day and kill off the mystery of it (I have since seen you plan to - but it would be even better if you have thought about why this has been appealing to you to begin with and are prepared to talk about that too). It's a symptom of a problem, yes - but what is the problem? Hash it out with yourself!

[This message edited by ThisIsSoLonely at 1:04 PM, July 22nd (Monday)]