I get the feeling from a lot of posts on this board, and it's understandable, that some assume only the words being written are the entire story.
You're right. We all can make that mistake.
I am basically looking for help to save this marriage, not to kill it.
You can't save your M alone. R requires work from you, but it requires even more work from your W, who has to change herself from cheater to good partner.
R takes 2. You cannot change your W - either she is or will become a good candidate for R or she won't. You get to choose how long you will wait, but she gets to choose to work for R, not work for R, or pretend to work for R.
Give up trying to control the outcome. Go for the best outcome you can get - that may be D.
3 years from now will be about the time you find yourself in what is called the "Plane of Lethal Flatness".
Sure, if one or both of you don't do your work. In fact, if you find yourself feeling flat for a long period of time, one or both of you aren't doing your work. At that point, you can get going on R or on D.
This suggests that there is no reconciliation, is that what you are saying?
R = M, IMO. Part of M, and part of R, is doing things for each other, evoking good feelings and pleasure, lots of pleasure, I hope.
But life also calls for resolving issues, and that's a giant part of R. The issues can be trivial - peas of string beans for dinner - and some are not.
You have to deal with the fact that R pretty much requires you to let your W get away with her A. That's actually a mixed bag, if your W is a good candidate for R. I know my W got more than a little pleasure from her sick relationship, but she also has to deal with the fact that she got that pleasure by failing as a human being and as a professional.
But she had sex with more people after we got married than I did, and I like sex.
My resolution is that I chose to honor my vows, and she didn't. I had many chances to cheat; I chose not to. In retrospect, I'm still happy I chose not to. That's not a character flaw.
Some people refuse to accept their WSes' As. That's not a character flaw, either. And it's not a character flaw if it takes you a long time to figure out you will/will not accept the A.
Did your W use her A to attack you? Did she want to hurt you? If she did, you have to figure out how you'll deal with the attack.
Do you feel she somehow emasculated you. I did - and I looked down, saw I was still whole, and then realized everything worked on d-day the way it did before d-day. I was able to deal with 'emasculation' easily. But how will you deal with it, if you get the thought?
Do you have requirements for R? What are they? Has your W signed on? Will she satisfy them? How's she doing?
If you don't have observable requirements for R, how will you know if you're on track or not?
What's your vision of your M? What's your W's? Are there conflicts? Can you resolve the conflicts? Do you even want to do the work needed to resolve the conflicts?
How sexually compatible are you? HB is one thing, but it usually ends. To R, you need to surface conflicts and resolve them. Sex is often hard to bring up.
Etc., etc., etc.
IOW, you report bonding with pleasure and service to each other. That's the relatively easy part of R.
Just keep yourself aware that R also has some very hard parts.
Oh - yeah - I don;t want to discourage you. R can be beyond rewarding.