Hi Dan
Checking back in with you.
I think you should definitely do a poly. But not right now. I think you still have a lot of work to do nailing down the timeline and having discussions.
If you want, tell her that you’ll be scheduling one in January and in the meantime you will be working with her to nail down what she says is the truth. Let her know The poly will confirm what she is telling you.
I can’t tell if you talked to her about any of the things I mentioned on page 32. It’s ok if you haven’t. I know how hard this all is.
But I still do think there are some things you need to say to her and groundrules you need to set. I’ve simplified and summarized for you some of the things I wrote before and added a few from your most recent comments below.
Hopefully they help you.
Finally you might want to start thinking about when you will be willing to let her back in the house or if you want to at least tell her when you will checkpoint again on that subject. Of course having her there allows you to keep a closer eye on her but it may also increase your stress level. But if you are going to wonder where she is anyway, it may help to have her right there even if you are living in separate bedrooms.
Just something to think about. If you do let her back in it will be important to set explicit groundrules on a number of subjects that we will be glad to help you with.
With that said, here is the list of subjects I’d suggest you discuss with her. Let me know if any don’t make sense to you and I’d be glad to elaborate. You are getting great advice here. You definitely have plenty to think about from all the posters who definitely care about you and your happiness.
- your actions have broken my heart. It is up to you if you are willing to do the work to repair it. It is up to me to accept the work you do and give the gift of R someday if I ever feel I can
- over the next days and weeks we need to nail down the truthful timeline. We need to type it up online and modify it based on our discussions so I can review it when questions pop in my head. Once we do we will schedule a poly to verify. You should include any other infidelities you have had over the years as I will be asking about that on the poly.
- you will need to be in IC a long time to figure out why you felt it was ok to do what you did. I will need to do the same to learn to work thru the pain you caused me
- my trust in you will take a lot of time to rebuild if we decide to stay together. You can imagine that any interaction you have with any men in the future will always now make me uncomfortable. You have a lot of work to do on boundaries before I will ever trust again.
- 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. Your work in IC will have to explore how you submitted this man almost immediately. I am so hurt by this.
- if there is ever something missing from our relationship I will need to feel safe that you will bring it to me and not just have sex with a random dude as the answer. Why you chose this path is still incomprehensible to me.
- I am assuming that if you were going to go pantiless to the party that you were at least going to allow him to see what was under your dress and 99% sure that you would have allowed him to penetrate you either manually or with intercourse that night. I’m not sure how you prove otherwise and feel you should be honest about this if we are going to start healing
- while I cannot guarantee our future together I will guarantee that anything you are not honest about will work against that possibility
- the work you need to do is regardless of the outcome of us. So please stop trying to control the outcome and do what you need to do to work on repairing you and healing us without thought as to whether we will ever be together again.
- please create a plan, a real written plan, to fix you, repair our family and help me heal. Then Review it with me.
- please get help with this plan and defining what you need to do to help us recover from your infidelity. You cannot know it all. You are not an expert at fixing relationships after infidelity
- any communication going forward that you have with the OM or those who encouraged it will make it more and more unlikely that we will ever be together again
- I appreciate that you took the action to resign. I would like to know in detail what was said between you and your supervisor and how you left it. Also please don’t take any more life changing steps without fully discussing them with me. We need to be on the same page every step of the way
- you need to account for your whereabouts. You can’t go places without telling me our SIL/BIL. If you do and we dont know where you are, I will assume you are with the POSOM. I dont think you want that.
- if you try to sour my relationship with our daughters in order to build up your own that will make it impossible for us to R. I’m willing to encourage them to work with you but not if you are disparaging me to them in any way
- please write me another letter In which you describe what you think I must be feeling right now. State What you would feel of the roles were reversed. I’ll give you a hint, I feel completely rejected by you, like I was not good enough for you and so you needed to find what you were missing with someone else.
- also I would like to know in that letter if you are thankful I stopped you from going further or if you wished I had stayed out of it and let you go thru with what you obviously were going to do
- finally you should know that not only does your A hurt me but also the deceit against me, the lies you told, is equally painful. The fact that you were so easily able to lie to me to the extent you did and how that you made me feel unwelcome at your holiday party will stick with me for a long time. It’s almost as bad as the infidelity itself. We were supposed to be a team looking out for each other’s feelings. Protecting them. Instead You completely hurt mine by making me feel like a fool in front of your friends. That will take as long to forgive as you touching another man.