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1970, I to am a BS that has access to everything my WW ever sent the AP. Text messages, picture, and videos, that are very disturbing. This is my WW doing that with someone else!!!!!!!!!!

Now how would you feel if you found this? How about kissing him knowing just hours, days or even weeks before his mouth was all over her genitals? Or the fact his penis was just inside her, then you? Put yourself in his place. How about knowing all the fun and trips you went on with him and he was sneaking away to text and send her pics.

Give him lots of space and be honest with him and yourself. See what you have done for what it really is. You cant sweep it away.

I am not going to voluntarily give my husband a separation. I want to stay married. I want our children to have both parents in the house as they grow up.

You're still being very selfish, but claiming it's because of your children. You're putting your wants above your husband's. If you wanted your children to have both parents in the house growing up, why did you have an affair? You had to know what you were doing would jeopardize your marriage and your children's wellbeing, otherwise you wouldn't have hid what you were doing, right?

Do you think demonstrating a marriage where their father visibly loathes their mother is a good example to set for your children, too?

* I believe anger felt by many BS comes from not just the pain of the betrayal, but also being confronted with two unattractive options. He either does nothing and lives with the shame of staying with the person that dehumanized him or divorce and lose the most important part of his life, his family and children. He loses big with either choice, so he's stuck with nowhere to go and seemingly no path to peace and personal happiness.

Your BS is probably stuck between the shitty idea of not being with his children 24/7, or having to stay with someone he has no respect for and doesn't want to touch to be with them.

I am pretty sure the only reason he hasnt left is the children. I seriously doubt he will ever accept this. I doubt there are many people who could ever accept their spouse having an EA/PA associated with reading thousands of texts/sexts describing an embellished version of the emotions and sex during the affair.

He goes through long periods of time where he will barely look at me much less talk to me.

We havent hugged or kissed or had sex for six months.

Like I said I am pretty sure he is only staying for the children.

He even tells me to get away from him if I try to approach him. He has not shown a second of hope for our marriage since Dday.

I have no idea how to get through his wall of pain, anger and hatred.

I have even begged him on my knees to talk to me and just walked away.

It sounds like you're basically living with an IHS (in house separation) going on. How is this a healthy marriage to model for your children? Infidelity is a dealbreaker -- you made vows when you got married, you broke those vows. Whether or not your BS wants to rebuild a new marriage with someone he can't trust, that betrayed him, that compared him and his sex to another man and declared him wanting, is something he needs to decide.

For many BS, even if thet desperately want to fix things and keep their family intact, they just can't. Their WS is a constant trigger. A constant source of pain. Giving him a physical separation could possibly give him a much-needed break from the pain and help him figure out what he wants. Letting him know that you're willing to give him space and that you're not going to take his children away from him could be a fantastic relief from the constant (and I mean constant) pain that he feels. At six months out, I was probably thinking about my WS's A every five minutes. Literally.

Maybe some time apart would make him realize he still loves and misses you and wants to give R a shot. Maybe it would make him realize that he's happier and better off without you.

I hope he at least gives R an opportunity and allows me the chance to create a marriage that would make him happier than if he divorced me.

Honestly, that might not ever be the case, and it's very entitled of you to think that's even a possibility.

Imagine your marriage is a piece of paper. You crumbled it up into a ball and threw it in the trash. Now you want to take it out, and it's covered in coffee grinds and old cheese, and you want to flatten it out with your hands and convince your BS it's just as good as before, if not better. Maybe your BS will see the beauty in the fact this piece of paper has been through a lot and is still intact. Or maybe it just looks like a soiled piece of garbage to him now, and he either wants a chance at a new piece of paper, or none at all.

You already made the decision to end your marriage when you chose to let another man stick his dick in you. Now it's up to your husband to decide if he wants to build a new marriage with you. You need to work on accepting that you cannot control the choice that he ultimately makes. All you can do it work on becoming a better, more honest, more authentic person, and that you can do the best you can to put your BS first and try to help him heal. What that means is giving him space if he needs it, and not trying to initiate any sex or affection unless he wants it.

[This message edited by ibonnie at 12:31 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

Wow....just wow. You are incredibly selfish and self-centered. You definitely don't get it. Not giving your husband a voluntary separation is within your control. The rest? You have no say in it - you really don't. That's your husband's decision ultimately. It's a little too late for you to act all concerned about staying married and your children having both parents in the house as they grow up. You have blown up his world and their world and NOW you want to act like you care about their futures? SMH

I am not going to voluntarily give my husband a separation. I want to stay married. I want our children to have both parents in the house as they grow up.

BS here.

As I was reading along, I saw a lot of good things but then you hit the wall with " will not voluntarily give a separation ".

After all of what you said, you came back to what YOU want. Unfortunately for you, what YOU want does not and should not matter to your H. Your H should be thinking about himself and the kids. Regardless of any other problem within the marriage, you created a problem within the marriage by going outside the marriage.

With that, as a BS, I would like to suggest that you simply let him speak. Let him ask questions and even if he has asked the same question in 20 different ways, answer him honestly. This is how he is coping and it is the only way he will be able to move on with the M if he decides to R.

How long was the affair?

I am not going to voluntarily give my husband a separation. I want to stay married. I want our children to have both parents in the house as they grow up.

So what you're saying is that if your husband were to tell you today that he needed you to go live with relatives for a while or find an apartment in town and move there so he could get some space from you, you'd refuse?

If so, I'm glad his walls are still up. You're not going to be someone worth opening up to until such time as you can humble yourself, surrender all control, let go of the outcome, and understand that the only things that matter right now are what he wants and needs and what terms sets in dealing with you. Your own wants and your desired terms don't matter. They have no place in this situation. You lost a right to have a voice in your marriage when you had an affair, and you've got a long, long way to go before you can begin to reasonably expect the right to have a voice in your marriage again. You must give him your everything without expecting a single glimmer of hope in return.

Giving him a physical separation could possibly give him a much-needed break from the pain and help him figure out what he wants. Letting him know that you're willing to give him space and that you're not going to take his children away from him could be a fantastic relief from the constant (and I mean constant) pain that he feels. At six months out, I was probably thinking about my WS's A every five minutes. Literally.

Maybe some time apart would make him realize he still loves and misses you and wants to give R a shot. Maybe it would make him realize that he's happier and better off without you.

This is what I was thinking. Provide space without judging his aloofness and trying to change it. Just be steadfast in providing logistical living comforts, i.e., his space is clean, his beer is cold, etc. My mom was hospitalized recently. She's 91. She was in critical care. She's a pillar in the community and church, so people were eager to pay her a visit. I had to politely tell everyone she needs rest and until further notification, it would be best if they can refrain from calling or visiting her.

Friends and family mean well. They want to see her because they feel better and believe she will feel better at seeing them, which is true some hospitalized circumstances. Critical care is different however, and sometimes people can't make the distinction. They just know she's hospitalized. It's a little selfish, but I understand. The fact is the needs of the patient are paramount. At 91, my mom needed rest and the space to allow the medical professionals to facilitate her recovery on schedule. I was there to offer the in-person love and support, and help manage everything else. We needed friends and family to provide prayer and send cards and flowers.

Hopefully you can see the analogy here. Your husband remains in critical care. Just like a nurse sits at her station and periodically makes rounds stopping in or walking by to make sure everything is okay, you too can adopt a selfless posture of staying in an adjoining room or bedroom and engage yourself with walk-by's, seeing if he needs anything, as well as anticipating his needs and fulfilling them before he even knows them.

I'm talking logistical, not emotional or physical, as you'll have to read if or when he'll allow you to comfort him in this way. But an example of the logistic support. Let's say you see he has a doctors appointment penciled in on the refrigerator calendar, but he may not be aware that the same day the kids have a half day of school, so they need picked up earlier than usual, so you arrange Uber transportation. Things like this. Yes, they're small, but you're allowing him space, yet are still engaged with his logistical needs and helping through anticipatory actions.

All the while, you are intensely working on yourself. The outcome is of course out of your hands, but as was posted above, even living in pain, he can take some comfort in his current situation where his kids will not be taken away and he has them under the same roof. This is the best his life has to offer right now. It's not much, but for right now it's as good as it can be for him. We know life has much more to offer, but again, he's in critical care and unfit to consider tomorrow, when yesterdays actions have placed him in the position of just taking one day at a time.

Have to agree with the others concerning the selfishness and lack of humility in your "separation" comment. It reeked of entitlement and arrogance which are the same traits that enabled the affair. Perhaps you spoke out of context, but if not, your words do not represent the remorse that is required of you, by a long shot.

As indicated in my analogy above. The needs of the patient (BS) are paramount and highly prioritized. Not your needs, but his. Maybe this is partly why your husband is responding to you with such detest. He may see that you are still in the mindset that it's all about you. Gotta check this pronto. Critically important.

[This message edited by Jorge at 2:58 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

How was your marriage before affair.

how did affair started?

And how was your relationship (intimacy and in general) with your husband during affair.

Were you good to him or did you treat him any less during your affair.

The biggest question.

Did you had any intention to stop while in your affair if Ap didn't get caught.???

What made you to confess ?

Imagine your marriage is a piece of paper. You crumbled it up into a ball and threw it in the trash. Now you want to take it out, and it's covered in coffee grinds and old cheese, and you want to flatten it out with your hands and convince your BS it's just as good as before, if not better. Maybe your BS will see the beauty in the fact this piece of paper has been through a lot and is still intact. Or maybe it just looks like a soiled piece of garbage to him now, and he either wants a chance at a new piece of paper, or none at all.

But it's not just a piece of paper. It's his heart, his confidence, his sexuality, his core, his everything.

Listen to the advice here on SI (and read other threads too).

If you have not already read how to heal your spouse by Linda Macdonald, do it TODAY (you can find it in PDF online, it's about 100 pages and a quick read). And then read it again & again & again (I'm a bs coming upon 1 year since dday - I just re-read it last week).

And I'm with the others on the "voluntary" separation. You suckerpunched your BH in the worst possible way.... do whatever HE needs to HEAL HIM. It is absolutely trauma - don't for a minute think otherwise. There are lots and lots of books about trauma (and some threads here on SI with recommendations). It's a real mindf*ck.

BS' don't "get over" anything, they do whatever they can to get THROUGH it. And 2-5 years is not an exaggeration.

I’ve been mulling over your thread to try to come up with helpful advice. Admittedly your chances for R seem remote. Based on your description, the degree of trauma that your BH has suffered it substantial, and much of it is directed specifically toward his identity as a sexual man. A long term highly sexual A. I won't give you credit for confessing because you did it assuming you'd been caught. So, a LTPA where you were caught in the act and did not voluntarily stop the A or confess. As stated in an earlier post, I'll go out on a limb and assume there were direct slights to your BH, such as avoiding sex with him so you could fuck the AP, or bringing home sloppy seconds. Stuff like that. Even if that was never the case, not once, during the entire six months of the A, based on your description of your messages, I think it's safe to presume that in addition to feeling betrayed, it is likely your BH feels emasculated and sexually humiliated by you. Cuckolded even.

To that end, my first suggestion would be to stop trying to emphasize this blurry line between the fantasy and the reality portions of your written messages to the AP. If your BH wants to discuss this, you should of course continue to be factually thorough and accurate. But regardless where the boundary resides, whatever part was fantasy was done for the purpose of boosting the AP’s sexual self-esteem and making him feel better about himself sexually, it was done to encourage him to stick his penis into your various orifices, and it was done at your BH’s expense. You didn’t just feed your BH a shit sandwich. You shat on your BH’s face, head, and penis, and then belittled your BH about it with your AP. You really need to own that without trying to minimize it at all. Any attempt to minimize, even a little, will almost certainly infuriate your BH.

Second, you should talk to your BH about who he would like to know about the A. Let him control that decision, but you should offer to self-inform family, co-workers, church, anybody he wants to know. When you out yourself, you should be as explicit about how awful you were as your BH wants you to be.

Third, you should work on making a document that explains what you love, desire, and respect about your BH. If all you have is that he’s a good man and a great father, you might as well leave the marriage. Dig deep to recall what made you horny and lustful for him when you were dating, and find those things again. It’s a long shot whether he will ever give you a chance to be anywhere near his sexuality (I would never let you anywhere near my Johnson in his shoes), but it’s the only shot you have.

Fourth, you should make a detailed written timeline of your A. Include all the dirty details. Start from the first instance of meeting the AP, and include your thought process in terms of when/why you decided that opening your legs and letting him fuck you was a good idea and was consistent with the idea of staying married to your BH. Fucked up thinking, to be sure, but it was what you thought and you should own it.

Fifth, I would urge you to read all of the posts in this thread. What jumps out to me is that most posters here, after reading your posts, feel that you come off as selfish, entitled, self-centered, egotistical. I share that impression. Not at all R material. I find it significant that you have been able to create this impression in the minds of that many strangers via just a handful of posts. I think you ought to devote as much time as possible in your IC to the concept of empathy. You cannot have true remorse without empathy, and your posts suggest that you do not have the capacity for empathy.

Finally, you might encourage your BH to post on the Just Found Out forum. There are a lot of people here with lots of experience getting out of infidelity. There are other examples of WW’s and BH’s husbands posting on here in parallel.

By the way, have you and your BH been tested for STD's yet? Better do that right away if you haven't done it yet.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 3:38 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

BH here, 2 years post DDAY. I just wanted to say that at 6 months out, I barely spoke to my wife either. At that point I was definitely only there for the kids. At that point, I would’ve rather eaten shit than have sex with my WW. I was super detached, doing the 180. I admit it, I knew that I wasn’t helping either of us through this, but I just wanted to punish her more and more.

At about the 1 year mark, my WW finally said that enough was enough, I either start trying to make the marriage work, or let’s get divorced. Like you, she had been doing all the work and became very remorseful, and I just ignored her. I finally began working on my marriage instead of just keeping to myself and doing the 180.

Sex is still a struggle for us, a year after resuming sexual activity. I’ve determined sex is just not part of her love language, and for me, she’s just a warm body to have sex with. I still have a some bad days, but overall I’m glad I’m still here. Give your H a little more time to grieve in his own way, but eventually you have to give him an ultimatum. You either join me in trying to fix the marriage, or let’s get a divorce.

I know people on this forum like to hammer on about how it’s all on the BSs schedule. But if after a year of limbo, both partners either need to shit or get out the toilet, so to speak.

If you love him, let him go be happy.

If you truly want what is best for him, you may have to accept that what's best for him is someone that you can't be.

Tough pill to swallow, but this marriage sounds full on dead. Staying or forcing someone to stay...is just cruel. At some point, the patient is just too far gone and reviving them for more surgery is just cruel.

A gentle divorce with favorable terms to him would be an act of kindness.

To me then if it’s already 6 months from d-day you and your husband should be a bit further on.

If there still isn’t any talking, still the constant interrogations (with no seeming goal), no intimacy and both of you hanging on to the kids as an excuse to not divorce… Well… something needs to break this deadlock.

Have you tried telling your husband that this present situation isn’t sustainable?

Have you suggested MC? Talk to a pastor?

Have you two talked about how to make the kids not the excuse to remain married?

I think that if you both realize what you are risking then you both might make a better effort.

Keep in mind that you are telling him that what you said at the time is not true while expecting him to believe you now. How does he know what is and isn’t true?

I have read the grilling/questioning can go on for a couple of years.

Six months out is not that long of a time.

I am not going to offer my husband a separation or divorce. I would not be honest with myself if I suggested a separation or divorce. My suggestion of these two possibilities might hurt him.

I also am not going to suggest separation or divorce because they would hurt my children.

My goal is to keep apologizing and being the best wife I can be even though he wont talk to me very often.

My hope is the truth will eventually pierce his pain enough to let in some light.

I never loved the AP as much as my husband. I never enjoyed sex with my AP as much as my husband. I could easily pass a polygraph showing that I did not enjoy sex with my AP as much as my husband.

[This message edited by 1970 at 10:20 PM, January 1st (Tuesday)]

I never loved the AP as much as my husband. I never enjoyed sex with my AP as much as my husband. I could easily pass a polygraph showing that I did not enjoy sex with my AP as much as my husband.

Lets be honest here...

This isn't your husband speaking and you don't have to sell nonsense to us.

You absolutely did enjoy it more and you absolutely did love the AP more than your husband. You F'd the AP instead of your husband because it was better...or else you would have been at home in bed with your husband doing the same thing. You chose the one you preferred and the one that was the BEST....

You may look back in regret, but at that moment...you absolutely did make a choice of Option Husband or Option AP. You chose AP...and you chose it because it was better in that moment.

You can look back and see it with more clarity now, that it may not have been worth it long term...but what happened was real when it was happening and it happened as it did. It wasn't an illusion or a dream...as evident by the stains on the bedding.

If you can't admit that to yourself, good luck with the rest.

Sometimes, there is no good answer. People do some awful things. People have a hard time accepting that they are bad people when they do awful things...they want to believe they are "good" and it was a "mistake"...but usually they aren't good people and it was a choice.

Either way, you can't fix what you won't accept as reality.

Good luck. You need a lot of it.

If there still isn’t any talking, still the constant interrogations (with no seeming goal), no intimacy and both of you hanging on to the kids as an excuse to not divorce… Well… something needs to break this deadlock.

I am not going to offer my husband a separation or divorce. I would not be honest with myself if I suggested a separation or divorce. My suggestion of these two possibilities might hurt him.

I also am not going to suggest separation or divorce because they would hurt my children.

My goal is to keep apologizing and being the best wife I can be even though he wont talk to me very often.

I don't think anyone is saying you should just pack up and leave town in the middle of the night. What we're saying is that your husband doesn't talk to you, shows no affection, and can barely be in the same room as you. It's either because it's too painful or he has too much anger.

So talk to him. Stop making it about what YOU want.

I would not be honest with myself if I suggested a separation or divorce.

We're saying, stop thinking about what YOU WANT. You already did that, and you chose to have an affair. Ask your husband if HE wants this, and if HE wants it, then put HIS needs before YOUR WANTS.

If you want to help heal your BS, we're suggesting that you have a conversation with him and say something along the lines of, "honey, I know you don't believe me, but I love you so much and I want to work on our marriage. I'm so sorry I betrayed you, and I know I can't fathom the depts of your pain. If you need some space from me, please let me know and I am willing to give it to you. This isn't what I want, and I don't want you to think I'm looking for an excuse to abandon you, BUT if being around me causes you too much pain, or if you don't know if you want to remain married to me and need some time and space to figure it out, I'm willing to put your healing over my wants. However, there's nothing I would like more than to remain here, and work on figuring out why I did what I did, and how to fix the deep flaws that I have. I'm so sorry."

I also am not going to suggest separation or divorce because they would hurt my children.

Your actions have alreadt hurt your children. A separation or divorce would just be the consequences of the harmful actions you have already (repeatedly, since this wasn't a ONS that you immediately confessed to) taken.

[This message edited by ibonnie at 12:11 AM, January 2nd (Wednesday)]

Ok I may go against the general consensus here but if my WH would offer me a separation (when I didn’t ask for it) I would take it as him wanting to run away from my pain and tell me he is not invested anymore. Sure, we had the “do you want me to move out?” conversation. But once that was done and we agreed to remain in the same house I didn’t want to hear the offer again. The BS feels unsafe enough, alienated enough, we already don’t know what is true and what isn’t, we already don’t know if we can trust a word that comes out of the WS’s mouth, we don’t need them to signal that they cannot take it anymore and wanting to separate under the disguise that they are thinking of us.

Saying that I would expect every WS that still has an ounce of respect to move out if they are asked to.

As to the claims of not enjoying the sex with the AP and not loving the AP but loving the BH - that’s almost laughable. If it wouldn’t be so tragic. So let me get this straight, you loved your husband so much that you thought lying and deceiving him, emasculating him and treating him like dirt is a sign of love? You have a lot to discuss in IC. Becasue if that’s your idea of love than God help any man who is loved by you. And please don’t say this to your BH. That is a fucked up concept. My WH tried to tell me that too (and hey, based on a 9-5 affair he had with no family time taken away from me and him still spending all his free time with me I almost believed it) however it only made me realised how shallow and unworthy his love is. If that’s what a person understands by love then I don’t want it.

Love, besides being a raw feeling in your heart, it is an action. We showed you love every time we didn’t take the opportunity to cheat on you, as much as you May believe you’re some sort of prize that made men run after you and you couldn’t refuse it, let me assure you that your BH also had opportunities to cheat on you but guess what, he didn’t do it. His moral grounds, his integrity and his love for you made him think twice about destroying your reality. That is love. We can all fall to temptation. We can all find excuses. Some of us though understand what love really is, putting the other person above our animalistic instincts because we don’t want to hurt them, because we love them.

I echo the posters above that it strains credulity to suggest that you didn't enjoy sex with the AP as much as you did with your BH. I think it's negative to your efforts to heal your marriage to suggest otherwise. Did you lie to your AP and sneak around behind his back to create opportunities for sex with your BH? Nope. The person you lied to, and sneaked around, was your BH. People make that kind of effort and prosecute that kind of dishonesty to get some candy, some good stuff, something they really enjoy a lot. At the time, your BH was your sexual Plan B.

To that point, I think you also need to be honest about the fact that, but for the happenstance of the AP getting caught by his wife, the A would still be ongoing, you'd still be ramping up the fantasy aspect and the freaky sex, and all of this would be even at a higher level than it was. You did not end this A of your own choice.

Which leads me to another suggestion toward healing: create a detailed, written timeline of the A, cross-linked to dates of your emails and also to family events. Your situation is somewhat unique because your BH has already read your texts. What he doesn't know, though, is your private emotional and mental place at the various events during the A. One of the issues in healing from an A, especially a LTPA like yours, is that it creates an "intimacy hole" in the marriage, where you created a private intimate space that you shared with your AP but kept secret from your BH. One of the things most betrayed spouses struggle with is simply making chronological sense of the events of the A. After all, he was married to you, and from your description it sounds like you invested a lot of time and energy into the A. That time and energy had to be taken from some other part of your life. I'm guessing that, like most LTA's, you took it from your marriage.

Your BH, for example, will try to remember what he was doing the first time you were fucking your AP. He will be curious to know how that came to pass. What did you talk about with your AP to arrange that first fuck. What level of flirting and courting preceded it? Why did you decide to betray your husband at that point in time, as opposed to a week earlier or later, or a year earlier? Why that AP as opposed to any of the thousands of men who would likely be happy to have sex with you? What lie(s) did you tell your BH to create that first opportunity? What did you think and do the first time you returned home after sex with the AP?

These details will be very painful for your BH to hear, but they will restore intimacy and they may be the first honest thing you say to him (because, let's be honest, as everybody here notes, that bullcrap line about preferring sex with your BH over your AP, even during the A, exactly nobody will ever believe that).

I do agree that it would be a bad idea for you to offer a separation to your BH. I think your BH would see that as you giving up on him and running away from him. By the way, I'm editing this later and I do disagree with Bigger (below), for once. I agree with his concept in general, but timing is everything. Six months out from DDay from a LTPA with the kinds of details in yours, including the express and intentional sexual humiliation of your BH, is way too early to expect him to be able to engage with you in any sort of meaningful way. In fact, I disagree with Fenderguy that a year is the appropriate threshold. A year may have worked for Fender because that was his personal truth. But every BH has to heal from the initial trauma to some extent before being able to engage, and it is not unreasonable to expect your BH's obsessive questioning about the basic facts to continue for years.

To that end, I might add, the written timeline would probably go a long way toward truncating that process. It should be a working document that you revise and build as you remember things, perhaps often triggered by questions from your BH.

In the meantime, I think your only hope for R, albeit a slender hope, is to cling to him as tightly as you can and tell him that if he wants you gone he's going to have to physically push you out of the house. You have wounded his sexuality so much that the most likely outcome is that he will not be able to be sexual or loving with you, ever, even if he wants to. But on the slender chance that there might be a faint, flickering light at the end of the tunnel, that flame would be craving a giant expression from you, consistently and persistently, of love and sexual desire.

To this last point, I'm usually not a fan of what some here call the "grand gesture" -- something big a wayward does to make a strong, affirmative statement of sexual desire. But here I think you ought to at least consider this, though admittedly I have no idea what that might look like. The record of belittling and demeaning your BH's sexual prowess, that is going to be your biggest hurdle. It is fruitless to now try to say you didn't mean those things when you said them. Nobody is going to believe that. Your fruitful approach is to find the things in him that made you horny when you met and decided to marry, and amplify them in some way, with some sort of grand gesture (or repeated gestures) of sexual desire aimed solely at pleasing him and bolstering his sexual self esteem. My observation has been that women often under-estimate the degree to which a man's sexuality is highly fragile and will retreat if threatened or injured.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 7:45 AM, January 2nd (Wednesday)]

You don’t have to offer separation or divorce.

But you can demand change.

Your decision to have an affair doesn’t forfeit you the expectation that a marriage can be healthy and good IF YOU BOTH PUT THE WORK INTO IT.

Your decision to have an affair puts the marriage at risk, and YOUR decision is the reason we are talking divorce and separation. That is a consequence of infidelity and the Big D is a reasonable and acceptable outcome slash consequence of infidelity.

Just like reconciliation is a reasonable and acceptable outcome slash consequence of infidelity.

What is NOT a reasonable and acceptable outcome being the relationship you describe. The one your husband is offering and the one you are accepting.

You are going around in circles: On this day I said the sex was the best and the love for OM the most intense. I was lying. Today I am saying that the sex is best with you and the love for you the most intense. Now I’m telling the truth.

How can your husband discern between the two? If you were lying then, isn’t it logical he thinks you are lying now? After all – at least one of the statements is a lie. Why not both?

Offering to take a poly is plain and simple drama. Won’t work because polys don’t do emotions.

If your husband is so shell-shocked that he is coping the way you describe then maybe YOU need to create change. I guess many are suggesting an offer to separate is a way to create change. You have other options. If you don’t want a divorce or separation then I suggest you start talking about the other options.

MC?

Talk to a pastor?