SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

She is delusional. Tells me she is sorry for what she did, did not plan for it to happen, but that she really enjoys his company when she is away from home, and she could not understand why if it was 'just sex" that I could not just get it out of her system.

But she REFUSES to tell me exactly who this mother fucker is, and REFUSES TO commit to not staying in contact with him, and REFUSES right now to agree to not fucking him.

So now it us exactly a week after you first posted... Look at her attitude just a week ago! She thought that you should not think it was such a big deal. She enjoyed him, she enjoying sex with him, why would you mind? A week later, she is so much different? Do you really believe she has changed that much?

To her this was no big deal, just sex, right? So, how many others has she had no big deal sex with in all her travels? You mentioned that concern before. Have you actually asked her yet? Have you told her she will need to take a polygraph? Have you thought about what happens to your marriage if there have been others? How many others are you OK with?

So now it us exactly a week after you first posted... Look at her attitude just a week ago! She thought that you should not think it was such a big deal. She enjoyed him, she enjoying sex with him, why would you mind? A week later, she is so much different? Do you really believe she has changed that much?

To her this was no big deal, just sex, right? So, how many others has she had no big deal sex with in all her travels? You mentioned that concern before. Have you actually asked her yet? Have you told her she will need to take a polygraph? Have you thought about what happens to your marriage if there have been others? How many others are you OK with?

ABC, have you read any of this I have written. I think I have said at least six times that I am going to demand probably more than one polygraph test exactly for the reasons you have brought up, which was also I believe explained. Sorry I am not moving fast enough for you. I WILL get there.

ABC, have you read any of this I have written. I think I have said at least six times that I am going to demand probably more than one polygraph test exactly for the reasons you have brought up, which was also I believe explained. Sorry I am not moving fast enough for you. I WILL get there.

I am so sorry. I didn't mean to get pushy. I had remembered you saying you were concerned. I was just wondering if you have directly asked her if she has ever done this before? Have you told her she will be doing a poly in order to reconcile? Once you tell her, she may open up with more information.

I was also curious if you have prepared yourself for the possibility that these kinds of casual encounters while traveling for work were common for her? Do you see reconciling if this type of behavior has been going on for some time even before this guy?

Brother you are doing just fine. You seem to understand what is going on and what has gone on, and you have a game plan. You are setting boundaries, offering consequences, and most importantly setting out very clear guidelines for what you need to move forward. You have handled the problem of seeing the other man, you are making sure the OBS knows what's happening, you are considering a polygraph. You are ahead of the curve. So I think it's not a matter of you not moving fast enough for some posters, I think you are moving faster than some of them, and there advice is a little late. Stay strong brother.

I think you're doing really great! You can add that to your list of skills. Handles Infidelity like a Boss. Just what you always wanted, right?

I don't know how to phrase this correctly but I want you to remember that this isn't a financial transaction. Like Walloped said, you're in the doing phase. And that phase will end and the emotional shit will hit. A lot of your posts are concerned about finances, retirement, double income, job security etc. trust me, no one gets that more than me. That is how I operate too - I'm always viewing the financial implications of any scenario. I can't turn that part of me off. But just don't let fear guide your decisions - there ARE lots of well-paying jobs that she could get, there are other jobs that OM could get, etc etc.

Just try to remember that sometimes things can't always be factored down to a number. I'm not wording this in the right way. I don't know how to say it. And I'm NOT advocating R or D at all. Just keep it in the back of your head as you move through this. Life is not all about money or income or status etc. Not that you're saying that!! Does this make any sense?? Probably not.

TTA, I think you're okay with the OM and your wife at the same job when they're in different branches separated by hundreds of miles. The nature of work has changed. Lots of places have offices everywhere, and/or have virtual employees.

I can understand the idea of not wanting them working in the same office, where they see each other daily . . . that makes sense, but when they're in offices separated by hours of plane flight??? That's actually preferable to some 'quit the job' scenarios.

For those who'd disagree . . . think about it hypothetically. Suppose AP works in one office and WSpouse in another for the same company, but each is several miles apart. Now, following the rules some subscribe to here, the WS quits his/her job, and goes to work elsewhere, a new job, which just happens to be right next door to the AP's office. Or maybe WS unknowingly gets a job that has AP's office as one of its clients. Or maybe WS quits and starts working from home, and can go almost anywhere at anytime during the day while the BS is at work. If the WS makes decent money, they could even fly an hour or so to visit AP's state, fly back, and be home by the end of the work day. Those work scenarios are as bad or worse in my opinion.

I think her staying at the current job in your particular case is fine.

[This message edited by c24j at 7:13 PM, January 27th (Wednesday)]

Timetoact - Glad I got your attention. If you were my brother or my son and told me all of what you posted here I would grab you by the shoulders and shake the shit out of you. GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD! Yes, everything you say about not rushing to divorce her or make her quit her job right now makes sense. Informing OMW & kicking her out of your bedroom are actions that show strength. Here's the deal: you are posting just like you are thinking. You are putting it all out there for us - that's what we're here for - but it feels exactly like you are checking off things on a list that you think you should do. There isn't much emotion in any of your posts - not counting your response to me. Now, some men go nuts when they catch their wife cheating and throw her out - physically - & take off after OM to kick his ass. Maybe he burns her car or kills her cat. We all recognize overreaction but there is some middle ground here that I don't feel from you. What are you doing for you right now? You are still suffering in the wake of the worst betrayal a man can suffer - are you allowing yourself to feel any of this? When your wife came and gave you sex this morning did it feel like she was offering you a life-raft in a sea of shit? So how could you possibly turn that down? She is probably not even aware of it but what she did is pure manipulation.

Somewhere between throwing her out a window and calculating your net worth with or without her there is reality. The longer you push your emotions away the bigger the explosion when they gush out. We here all care but we are not enough. Find a counselor and just go an talk. Tell him/her what you are dealing with and the rest will fall into place. If you face this alone the pain, fear, and sorrow you are feeling will push you into making decisions that you are very likely to regret.

Drifter, I am trying to put it "out there" because there are those on here who know a lot more than me about this. I am doing that because I need opinions and answers. I am trying to act with my head not my heart. My heart tells me that I love her.

I screamed, I yelled, I threw a chair again star the wall, I basically chased her out of the house initially for a night, and I have an appointment to get some XANAX or something. I just don't see how describing how I cried between 2 & 3 PM really gets me any information and help I need. There are so many folks here who have all handled this a little different. I am trying to listen to it all, keep my mind on the goal here, the first of which I have been told and agree with is to end the affair, I am so mad I could break a rock but I must Chanel the anger and hurt into some outcome that I can live with. Most peolple do not make their best decisions in an un controllable rage.

I don't know if I answered you or not. I tried.

I am too tired to write much, except I know for sure OM is where he is supposed to be. And WW is still where she is supposed to be, in the spare bedroom with her shit all over the place. She did try to talk to me tonight but I was not up for it.

OM wife is who I talked to. Unless she is an accomplished Hollywood actress, the tears and crying she did and questions she answered made it clear who I was talking to. Let's put that to rest. I am intelligent know that. She begged me to help her, and she is going to communicate with me every time her husband goes away overnight and where he is. I will do the same for her. Can't hurt to keep this communcation ongoing for a while.

I'll post more tomorrow if I feel up to it. I told her I want her to be prepared to talk to me over then week end on what she thinks she should do to help us through this other than to stop fucking anyone else. I am not going to do all the work here. She needs to convince me why we should not separate.

I am exercising in the gym I have in my basement, I have lost a few pounds, I am checking my blood pressure twice a day, and I am limiting myself to one drink or glass of wine a day. If I do not feel up to going out on the road next week, I will take a vacation week.

My brother knows. My sisters do not. If I tell them there will be war, which right now.

This is overwhelming and that is why I keep posting because every time I think I am making progress someone comes up with something else I need to do.

I re read some of Walloped's thread. I don't want to go away right now to get away from her. I want to be in her face until I get all the answers I need. Maybe that is why I am not brreaking down as much .I don't fucking know.

I have to take a break. Tomorrow night I will start the confrontation of if this was the only one. I am going to give her every chance I can to come clean BEFORE I drop the polygraph on her.

TTA: You are getting all the best advice... keep an open mind even though it is brutal. I trust the people here... they know this shit backward and forward. Though they anger you, just spin on it for a bit. They are forcing your hand... to make you think.

Dig deep within yourself and go with it. That is the best path.

You are doing about 100 times better than I did when I found out. Standing up for what works for you will help you keep your self-esteem in tact no matter what your outcome is. The biggest injuries in the moments after JFO, I did to myself. I accepted blame, tried to be a better wife, allowed him to rugsweep, and didn't demand transparency. Because I did all the work and required none from him, the second affair happened 7 years later.

By then, I'd found this site. This time, I didn't internalize one iota of his affair behavior as being my fault. I stood up for myself. I knew if we split, it would hurt but I knew that one more minute of me sacrificing my dignity to keep my marriage would hurt worse. It's been five years and I still regret what I allowed the first time. But when I stopped putting up with blame I hadn't earned, boundaries that sent signals to other women, and bullshit lies and omissions that indicated that I wasn't viewed as a partner in his life, I took my dignity back. Five years later, our marriage is better than it's ever been because HE jumped through every hoop to save it because he believed I was done.

My point is not that you should reconcile or divorce. My point is that you standing up for yourself and refusing to sacrifice your dignity to keep a woman who isn't showing you that you are the priority you should be is going to be something you can be proud of no matter how it turns out. Standing up for yourself and knowing what you're worth is what you're doing for you. You are ahead of the game. Whether she recognizes what she may lose and puts saving the marriage first (and you choose to reconcile) or she doesn't and you divorce, you're going to come out of it knowing you did right by you. You will know that you can trust yourself no matter who you're with. And that is priceless.

This is overwhelming and that is why I keep posting because every time I think I am making progress someone comes up with something else I need to do.

I have followed your thread from day 1.... your nick is similar to mine so i thaught that maybe someone else, besides me and a couple of others, knows how to grab a bull by the balls without fearing to loose what was...

What i quoted is where the problem is..... YOU ARE STALLING. you need to hit the iron while it's still a flame,.... waiting , bashing or any other thing is just bad for you and others around you.

Do you have copys of D. papers ready to be signed?

Dont remember that....

Instead of wanting to ask for a poly, get the appointment on your own and tell her that on this date she needs to do it or she can start to sign the papers. POINT!

Now.... personaly for me cheating was and is a dealbreaker, i dont care for a poly cause for me it's over, done, kapput. Not my intentions to have mind movies or triggers in the future. D. is my only cure just like my signeture says....

I understand that we are all different, but on 1 thing i hope you agree with me, your WW needs a hard and bad wakeup call that shows her that ou are near being DONE. No more asking only actions.

I was extremely angry and I really didn't give a flying F about staying married or not, but I wound up banging the shit out of her morning and night. I didn't ask her to move out of the bedroom or bed and she clung to me and it felt good to me. Actually, our sex life still is a little better and more frequent than ever before to this day. I didn't look on the internet or read a book about how-to for at least six months down the road when I still wasn't "over it" yet and thought I should. But from the first few minutes of me confronting her, she was doing everything I asked and more, and if she wasn't, I don't know if it still would have happened that way.

My point is I don't think there's anything wrong with the physical aspect. You feel better for at least a little while, and it is a release, and it feels good for her wanting you and showing it. I see nothing wrong with it. There was a bit of a feeling of I was angry with her yet I was "rewarding" her, but I wasn't going to cut off my nose to spite my face.

Also, my wife didn't tell anybody about the affair. She confided in no one during the affair. All of her older friends would have discouraged her, I'm pretty sure, and her newer friends she just wasn't close enough to confide. Prior to my wife's affair, my wife hated cheaters. Even if it was only a celebrity hearing about it on TV, she would always make a comment about how disgusting it made her.

On the other hand, I never liked cheating, but if I heard out somebody cheated, I just would shrug and not care much about it. I did have a friend who was cheating and I couldn't stomach being with him after that.

In the few days or weeks after I found out about my wife's affair, it occurred to me that I had not heard in a while that she was disgusted about cheating. I asked her about it and she said she felt like she couldn't say that anymore because it would be hypocritical of herself. To this day she still never says anything.

I didn't expose anyone I knew and I didn't ask her to. I didn't feel I needed any support and she was doing everything I asked plus some. She asked me not to tell anyone else, but I told her I would if I want to or if I need to and if she was so concerned she should have thought about that first. She told me but she didn't think she'd ever get caught, which made me laugh out loud when she said it and even now I laugh out loud as I'm typing this, some of the wacky shit she said. Anyway, I never did tell anyone else because I didn't need the support and I didn't think it would help anything and maybe even hurt the situation, because I think my family and even hers would never look at her the same. I certainly didn't ever want my kids to know. Aside from the cheating she was a devoted mother to them, and even when she was cheating behind my back she still did a lot for me. I was able to read all of her messages and there was never anything bad about me.

I did tell other man's wife, and I did call up other man's job and talked to his supervisor and made sure he got fired. Other man was the opposite of your wife's other man, he hadn't done well professionally, he had been unemployed for a couple of years and had only recently started working when I found out. I could see from the emails and messages that he was doing it from his job, and he wrote some really raunchy stuff, and long. It was a smallish company and other man believe it or not was in an IT support position of some type as far as I could see. I asked my wife to give me all the info. After he was fired, I called him up and told him if I ever heard from him again he wouldn't get off so easy.

My point there is you owe nothing to this other man and he gets what he deserves. I got some satisfaction from that.

You know I posted before about consequences, but the consequences I cared about was, as I said, everything related to the affair has to go, so the group she met in other man, anything that triggered me about songs and music and other things. Dropped a ton of fake friends from facebook.

I'm not telling you to change what to do, I'm just telling you a couple of things that helped me.

[This message edited by wk55hn at 4:20 AM, January 28th (Thursday)]

I think you're handling this really well! Don't let anyone feel you pressured into doing anything. Take your time and follow your plan. Best wishes!

I just want to say that I think you are doing great and I understand why you aren't doing some of the things that have been suggested.

People process things differently. You went right into divorce mode from the start and then eased off when you saw her coming around. More often we see people go into "save the marriage at all cost mode" in the beginning... You way worked great for you and got you out of limbo/the fog earlier than most people.

As far as her quitting work that all depends on you too. When she starts taking business trips again you will either feel so stressed that you would rather have the financial hardship or you will will feel somewhat ok. Time will tell on that one.

I'm glad you have been in contact with OBS and that you are working together to end this.

I think my only lingering suspicion is if she has had other A... The only reason I suspect this is that you said she was the aggressor...and that odd first reaction to being caught (where she thought she might be able to keep you and the "side thing". I know you are going to push the polygraph so this suspicion should take care of it's self.

Again, you are doing great. Take the advice you want/need and dismiss the rest.

Timetoact... Yes... Follow your heart but let it be ruled by your head! You know your wife better than anyone else. Everyone here will give suggestions but seriously... I think you have your bases covered for now.

Look up Hysterical Bonding... I used to get hard when my wife would walk by after I found out initially. It is a caveman urge I didn't know about at the time. I read up on it and THEN understood... I just felt a need to mark my territory. Now that I know she is out the door... Those urges have passed. It is only business between us now.

Good for you keeping in contact with the OMS... Between you both I think you'll learn more as time goes by.

Stay strong! I'm in your corner!

I think my only lingering suspicion is if she has had other A... The only reason I suspect this is that you said she was the aggressor...and that odd first reaction to being caught (where she thought she might be able to keep you and the "side thing". I know you are going to push the polygraph so this suspicion should take care of it's self.

Freeme, what you wrote above is the bigger issue to me right now, and that is what convinces me that unless WW confesses on her own IF there is anything else that there is no alternative to the polygraph. I have wracked my brain, but if she had any ONS out of town or even more there is no other way I find out without a confession. And if i get a confession, how do i know if that is all.

I truly believe this OM affair is dead, and I have until end of March before there is any chance of them being in same state or region of the country. She is giving me EVERYTHING ( ITINERARIES, AIRLINE CONFIRMATIONS, HOTEL CONFIRMATIONS), and she knows i will be checking. OM wife is going to do the same thing and he apparently is Ok with giving his wife the same thing.

MIND BLOWN

I'm not ready for this Hysterical Bonding yet. She tried to go further this morning and I pushed her away. I need to know the whole truth before I know if want to reclaim anything. That is the way I feel right now. May feel different tomorrow morning when i see that body parading in front of me.

TTA: You are getting all the best advice... keep an open mind even though it is brutal. I trust the people here... they know this shit backward and forward. Though they anger you, just spin on it for a bit. They are forcing your hand... to make you think.

HG65, I am angry, not at anyone here. I am smart enough to know that every single person is providing input based upon their own personality and their own experience. I have read a lot of other threads by now, and there are many on here still with their wives who have done a hell of a lot worse. No one here will force my hand . my WW may force my hand but the result of all this will be decided between my WW and I, not by advice, no matter how well meaning it is.

People process things differently. You went right into divorce mode from the start and then eased off when you saw her coming around. More often we see people go into "save the marriage at all cost mode" in the beginning... You way worked great for you and got you out of limbo/the fog earlier than most people.

FreemeYou are close to exactly correct. Im not sure if I was in any exact mode, but what you said is pretty damm close.One thing IS for sure. IAM NOT IN SAVE THE MARRIAGE AT ANY COST MODE. BUT I AM ALSO NOT IN DIVORCE AND BURN THE HOUSE DOWN WHILE NOT THINKING TOTALLY THROUGH ALL OF THE RAMIFICATIONS. IF I CAN MAKE A SPORTS ANALOGY, SOME PEOPLE CAN PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN, AND OTHERS WITH THE SAME INJURY CANNOT[/italic