Hi Dan
You are getting a lot of good support here. You are also a strong man who has an innate sense of what he will and will not stand for. Even the strongest of BS need people to lean on in the darkest times. I hope you have such a person or persons to support you in real life.
That said, even if you do, I suggest you look this week for an IC to work with one on one. Whether you are headed towards D or R it will be good to have professional support during that process. Find one who specializes in infidelity. Start looking now because they probably won’t be able to see you until after the new year. Add this to your growing list of todos.
I see you are putting together your own list of requirements for your WS. That is good. But as others have said, no matter which way you go, and it will be a while before you know, this is a long road and there will be plenty of time to discuss such things with your wife.
Before you do, I’ve had some thoughts while reading your thread and I want to share them with you. I think you should make some statements to your WW. You know, to make sure you are at least on the same page of how things will be in the near future going forward.
I know you probably have said some of these things to her, and some of them may not resonate with you, so take what you need, if anything, and leave the rest.
Finally, this should not be a discussion, but a relaying if information. So writing it down and sending it, emailing it perhaps, in however she can receive it using her nieces phone is probably best.
So here is my list. I’ll write it in the format of you saying these things to her. I hope it helps.
- your actions have broken my heart. Our marriage will never be the same again. We may or may not have a relationship going forward, or a marriage, but if we do it will be different. If we do, I’d be hopeful we could build a happy one, maybe even a better one, but I am no where near the point of knowing if I can even try for that. Please understand and respect that
- right now i have a lot of information but it’s not clear to me what I’m even looking at. It will take me a good while to even process it. Please allow me this time to gain an understanding for myself what has happened
- from what I do know, it seems this all occurred amazingly quickly. From meeting one day to literally dating the next to sharing emotions the next to having physical contact the next, all within less than a week. That’s quite unbelievable. I don’t believe you didn’t know this man before Dec 3 and this could happen so quickly. You can understand why I don’t trust a thing you say right now and believe you are either lying or holding back truths to somehow protect yourself. Anything you are holding back or lying about only hurts both of us.
- if you knew this man prior to his arrival, either thru inter office communications (voice email etc) before he arrived or even of his reputation from others in your office, you need to reveal that to me. What was the nature of your relationship prior to dec 3.
- the fact that you were able to betray me so quickly is a completely scary thing to me. You must be missing something inside you to make you so easily drop in the gutter 20 years of a loving marriage. And it was NOT the fact that I’d never go to Thai food with you that caused this. This makes me question whether you ever loved me or are/were in love with me. That is something you will have to convince me is not true if we are ever to be together again. That could take years.
- the proper response to not being happy in your marriage is to ask your partner, who has vowed to work to make you happy, for help in fixing what is missing in our marriage. It’s not sticking your tongue down the throat of some French Canadian guy at work and feeling up his junk. No marriage in the world is perfect. There were probably things that I would like to work on in our marriage too but I never once thought it would be helpful to us for me to find some willing coworker and slip my hand up her shirt while telling her my wife doesn’t understand me. I respected you and thought you were one of the smartest people I know. It simultaneously kills me and confounds me how you thought this was ok to do.
- the fact that you were so quickly skillful at hiding this from me and lying to me makes me feel like this is not your first time doing this. Just the fact that you knew to change his name to a woman’s in your contact list shows real premeditation. Right now I am going with in my mind that this was not your first cheating rodeo.
- and that brings me to honesty. Right now you are probably trying to minimize what you have to confess to. Trying to “know what I know” so you don’t reveal anything you don’t want me to know. I want to impress upon you as best I can how wrong of an approach that is. If you want a chance with me, now is the time to reveal everything. If In year 2 of our marriage a man winked at you in the supermarket and you winked back, you need to write that in your timeline. If you had another affair 10 years ago or a ONS, you need to tell me and provide the details. You are currently on the worlds biggest leap of faith, wife, and if you cannot be honest about it, when you land I will be long gone.
- which brings me to the most important point I have. You need to let go of the outcome. We may never be together again. Conversely We may have a long and relatively happy marriage. Neither you nor I know the future right now. I will make absolutely no promises about what the future holds. You need to make the outcome not matter to you because you cannot control it. So let it go and stop trying to control it. You need to simply start doing the right thing. You need to do the right thing from here on out to make you a better you. You need to take steps to fix what broke inside you. You need to take steps to repair the damage you did even if we don’t end up together and you need to take steps to help me heal. And above all, you need to be honest. Even if you think the honesty is going to hurt me more. Because I will not be in another relationship built on lying and cheating. So tell me about the past and what you did wrong. At some point if we decide we can be together I will be open with you too. But I’ve not cheated on you, so this is your time to be as honest as a person can be. No minimizing what you did. Do it because it’s the right thing to do and for no other reason. It will help you no matter what happens to us.
- so that means you need to work on and create a plan, a real written plan, to fix you, repair our family and help me heal. I’m going to give you some advice and counsel, if you haven’t already googled and bought books on how to help your spouse heal and how to repair the damage from your affair and how to set appropriate boundaries with other men you are already behind. There are books and other resources out there to help guide you on this journey, much of which you will be taking on your own. I won’t do the work for you. You have to figure it out for yourself. So start writing up all the things you think should be in this plan. If I decide I can put off Divorce and see if we can try and reconcile then at some point we will review this plan together.
- which brings me to a further point. Having an A is easy. It uses our basest instincts as humans. Raw emotions and physical pleasure combined with raw evil. Repairing the devastation from an A requires almost the exact opposite. It takes intellect and emotional Intelligence, perseverance and true empathy. Those things are less innate then the things I just described to actually perpetuate the infidelity. I don’t expect you to know inside of you exactly how to do those things. But I expect you to actively seek out the help you need to learn and make them happen. Think of it this way. Any one with the mildest coordination can pick up a gun and fire it at my chest, damaging me forever. That same person will most likely have no understanding of how to repair my damaged heart from the wound. But I’d expect them to work their hardest to bring in the emergency personnel and trained professionals to help them save my life. If you want a chance to save us and our family, you’ll do that.
- as far as our living arrangement I will learn more about our rights as I talk to lawyers this week. I probably cannot keep you out of the house. But I do need some separation from you so even if we are under the same roof we will not be sleeping in the same room for a long while. My preference would be for you to have a separate apartment nearby that you can stay in. After a while perhaps we can swap places occasionally so you can parent with the girls. I feel I need space from you right now. And of course that kills me. I miss my wife and the person whom I would run to when I was in such pain. But being near you is not easy for me, so my hope is you can agree with such an arrangement. Of course if you are looking at this as an opportunity to “hook up” with your boyfriend then simply let me know and I will get the divorce papers served to you by Friday. Wife, I must stress to you, although I shouldn’t have to, if you have any communication with that PIECE of SHIT ever again I will end our marriage as soon as I can. If he sends you a text, do not respond and tell me. He should be as blocked from our lives as humanly possible. If you want to pursue a relationship with this man, let me know now and I will free you to do so. If you want a chance for us you will be as transparent as any person can about communication with him. That also includes anyone at your work or outside who knew you were having an inappropriate relationship. Anyone that knew and did not try to stop it needs to be out of our lives forever.
- as I said I want you to have a relationship with our daughters. If we D the time we each spend with them will be negotiated by lawyers. Whether we D or If we stay together you are going to have to work to rebuild how they see you as a mom and relate to you going forward. That is completely up to you. I will encourage them to try their best. However if you at any time try to convince them any of this, your affair, was in any way my fault, I promise you that you will lose my support. I have no problem discussing how two loving people work thru issues in a relationship or marriage. But cheating is always wrong and never the fault of the betrayed spouse, if you try to convince them otherwise we will have a real problem.
- the last thing I can think of to say is this. Your improper contact with another man, your affair, has devastated me. I cannot tell you the pain I am feeling over the fact that you gave your heart and body to someone else. And that if i hadn’t stopped it would have escalated even further Friday night and if i didn’t discover it would still be happening right now. But you may be surprised that your interaction with “Jennifer” isn’t the only aspect that drops me to my knees.
No, one other awful thing is that this was supposed to be a night for us. One that I was looking forward to together. To meeting your new work friends and connecting with you. Instead while I was looking forward to being with you, you were looking forward to being with someone else. So much so that you made me feel bad about attending. You made me feel literally unwanted. You actually tried to trick me into not going, not because you thought I might be unwell as you indicated, but because you wanted to escalate your affair with this man even further. You were completely deceptive. You made me question what I had done wrong to make you not proud to show me off to everyone.
You stole a night that should have been part of the story of our marriage and gave it to someone else. If others there knew about what you and the piece of shit were doing, then you also made me play the fool. You literally made people laugh at me behind my back, or at the very least feel sorry for me. Who did you buy that new sexy dress for? Who did you put on the sexy lingerie under it for? I’m 100% sure it was NOT for me. I know you said that you never promised him that you’d have sex Friday night, but that does not mean it would not have happened if I wasn’t there. How do I recover from that? How do I ever trust that you will not do this to me again?
This is your job in the coming months and years to answer and repair. And you need to do it, again, as a leap of faith, by letting go of the outcome. Whether or not we are ever together again, you need to do this because it will fix what is broken inside you and make you the person I always thought you were.
The wife I knew would take such a challenge head on because it would be the most important thing in the world to her regarding the most important people in the world to her. I have no way of knowing if you are still that person. It will take me a long time to find out.
I hate that we are here. I am trying my best to do what’s best for my family and me. I need you to do the same.
[This message edited by Stevesn at 1:09 AM, December 17th (Monday)]