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Where do things stand now with the M, buzzy? Are both affairs over? Are both of you now NC with your APs?

If you are okay with having the RA and you feel better now that you've had it, why are you here? Most come to SI for support and guidance; IMO you seem to want to promote an unconventional agenda.

To each his or her own, of course.

The best way to heal from from being betrayed - and I personally think it's the only way - is to recognize the anger, fear, grief, and shame and process those feelings out of your body.

Covering up mind movies with your own cheating is worse than rug-sweeping, because it adds to your burden the pain of betraying to the pain of being betrayed.

Your choice, of course. And it qualifies you for starting certain types of threads in the WS forum, so there's that.

What works for one may not work for another. If a RA is your choice, that’s your choice and you need to follow your own path.

I would not make that choice to have a RA but it is my choice and for varied reasons an RA would cause me more pain than my H’s affairs.

I just want to point out you have now added another set of issues to the marriage and while your wife “deserves” it because she chose to cheat first, it could be that if you have a chance to reconcile, it could be undermined due to your affair. You may not view this as an issue. Respectfully I don’t blame you. If your wife can it reconcile because you cheated then maybe the best solution is D.

But it is now part of your marital history unfortunately.

Your choice, of course. And it qualifies you for starting certain types of threads in the WS forum, so there's that.

And there it is. The ONLY real benefit to being a madhatter, lol. Everything else is sickness and waste.

LaLaGirl.

Very good point, no I am not here for any "agenda" purposes.

My Wife is NC with her AP. The damage that I did to him with his family put an end to that and the very in his face threat of violence sent him running.

I still "see" my AP out and about and we are both members of the same running club and gym, my ife does not like this but I have offered to pay for her membership of both the club and gym but she declines, I will not give up my passions to placate her, after all she brought it on herself.

The reason I posted is because although we are in R i still cannot fully forgive.

I still "see" my AP out and about and we are both members of the same running club and gym, my ife does not like this but I have offered to pay for her membership of both the club and gym but she declines, I will not give up my passions to placate her, after all she brought it on herself.

As the WS, this would be a a hard no for me. I could see myself being understanding in all the other ways, and would still very likely (hard to know it hypotheticals) still want to go towards R knowing it would be more complicated.

You wanted NC for her and her AP, which is what we would advise any WS. NC is paramount and a measure of excluding the interloper from continuing to be in the picture. She has a right to ask the same. You don't have to give up your passions, you can simply join another gym and do the running club there. Nope, I am sorry, NC is required as a safety measure on both sides. Asking her to join is really just rubbing it in her face, no way am I going to the same gym as a woman my H had a revenge A with. Hard pass. You are being unreasonable here.

A lot of my friends are members of my running club which has nothing to do with my gym, I would possibly be willing to change my gym but not my running club.

I am sorry, you should have thought about that before you got with a lady in your running club. There are many WS here who needed to leave jobs, some of them lucrative. There is no safety in a marriage where there is still interaction with the AP. Like I said, I could get past a lot of things, but I could not move forward in that situation. I get why you feel entitled to call the shots, but you have given up some of that power imbalance by cheating in retaliation.

Have your friends move to your new running club.

[This message edited by hikingout at 11:15 AM, November 4th (Monday)]

I support you Buzzy. She broke your marriage and your heart. This is the price people pay. It’s sad. It won’t unbreak your heart but if you feel better, if your AP knew before hand then maybe, just maybe, you evened things out in your mind.

What are the two of you going to do about your marriage? Right now no one has clean hands. You need IC, she needs IC and both of you need to be very realistic about where you are headed as a couple.

Well one thing my RA did was give my NPD STBX full reign to blame me for being just like him when he is STILL not remorseful and thinks I'm just like him. Yeah

If the RA was to reset the "balance the marriage", then why do the NC rules apply to her but not to you?

Doesn't seem balanced to me at all.

It's more like you are rubbing your affair in her face and she can't say nothing about it at all. Don't get me wrong, she wasn't right in having her affair but that doesn't give you a free pass either.

Maybe it works for some, everyone is different I suppose. I personally would not cheat even if I thought it would have "balanced the score" and gave reconciliation a better chance or taught my XH empathy somehow. I am not a cheater. I would have to live with myself at the end of the day.

No matter what he put me through, I can at least have the comfort that I did not behave in a way that went against my moral beliefs.

A WS wrote this recently in another forum (different topic):

Two kinds of people. People who learn from pain and choose not to cause pain. People who inflict pain even though they know pain to escape their own. Which do you want to start being. Yeah, to me it is black and white. It was only grey when I was still a cheater.

At first I thought the initiator of this thread (revenge affair) was a troll. To knowingly cause pain escapes my logic. If true, it only tells me that the original affair uncovered issues that should've been dealt with long ago.

How very cruel.

Buzzy, I totally get the desire to revenge cheat. If my ex hadn't shitcanned me for the AP the moment I caught her little side project, I'm confident that I would've done this very thing, or at least I would've been thinking about it on a daily basis. Also, I'm not going to knock a revenge affair as being 100% destructive to future reconciliation. As others have said, what doesn't work for some might work for others. I'm a big proponent of the "different strokes" mentality. Though I must say, I don't think it would've helped me in my particular circumstances had she stuck around to prolong that farce.

Let me throw this out there: do you really think you're going to get over this and be happy with this woman again? You've already revenge cheated on her and rubbed her face in it. You've threatened the other guy and blew up his spot. You've pretty much hit all the scorched Earth tactics to knock these people out of their treacherous cloud, again something I can fully understand, but you still find yourself questioning the marriage, resenting her, etc. You've got to ask yourself if this is truly something you can get past. Are you just sticking around because you stubbornly want to maintain status quo? Do you actually love this person, or do you not want to lose a bunch of money and things, or split time with kids if that applies, in a divorce?

Sometimes you can't come back from these events and it's better to just call it quits. You'd know better than the rest of us if that's the case, so give it a lot of thought. Divorce isn't the end of the world and can actually be a shiny new beginning if you play your cards right and stumble ass backwards into a bit of luck.

There's no excuse for what she did and nothing can change that. There's also no excuse for your actions. It doesn't sound like you're serious about trying to R and that's ok. If the damage is too much then just move on. It doesn't sound like things are heading in a good direction.

You decided to have a RA within a week of dday, that sounds more like lashing out. I know that my head wasn't screwed on straight at that point, but these are choices that you're going to have to live with down the road even if she's not a part of your life. Take some time for yourself and figure out who you want to be in the future.

A revenge affair doesn't make the score Husband - 1 : Wife - 1

It makes the score Infidelity - 2 : Marriage - 0

I don’t agree with revenge affairs but I do agree with this sentiment:

No once she strayed the marriage contract was damaged if not fully broken which meant i was not fully bound by the contract.

It is indeed a contract, and if you’re religious a sacred one. That’s why it is called a sacred covenant. And adultery shatters the covenant, meaning the betrayed spouse is no longer bound by it.

Correct so far.

However an RA is essentially a bitter-tinged cake eating strategy — it doesn’t “even things up”; it just adds more complexity. If you’re “reupping” by talking about reconciliation then you’re in the process of creating a new covenant, in which case an RA would be a direct violation of that, and it would then be on you. You would now be the moral reprobate in that scenario.

Think about it - yes, every wayward spouse that wants to save the marriage (whatever their motives) will beg for forgiveness. If you provide it half heartedly with your fingers crossed, then you’re the ethically dubious one in that equation.

You are not required to shackle yourself to pain, but that doesn’t give you a free pass to inflict some of your own. And if you were to have an RA with another married woman are you telling me you would be okay being the source of the same pain your WW inflicted on you to another married man? If the RA was with a single woman, you’re telling me you could negotiate NSA sex with that woman without hurting her? You think a single woman would enter into a relationship with you just for some quick thrills? No, she’d be expecting a real relationship — only to learn it was just a way of validating yourself. You think that would not inflict pain?

The better approach would be to simply cut your losses, tell your wife it’s a deal breaker, separate, and then go have honest relationships with other women. In my view you’re under no obligation to remain “faithful” during a separation waiting for a divorce after she already took unilateral action and spiritually divorced you with adultery.

That is the approach I have been contemplating but I’m waiting a bit longer to see if my WW will truly put in the effort and do the things I’ve asked her to do.

[This message edited by Thumos at 12:25 PM, November 4th (Monday)]

Just get divorced. Dragging somebody into your mess of a marriage is just crazy to me.

Even if you don’t want to divorce, you really think you’re right to continue throwing this in her face by maintaining contact with your AP?

I totally get the feelings of wanting to get revenge. If it made you feel better, great, but now you’re just being childish.

what plannine said.

Think of it as a set of scales with the WS on one side and the BS on the other

because we all know marriage is about evening the scales... barf, buzzy, just barf.

Buzzy, you don't discuss much about what you are doing to heal the M. If you are working on R, what does that look like?

For your sake, I hope the RA works, but I think you have established a very bad precedent. Essentially what you did was say, "you hurt me very badly, and as such, I now have justification to hurt you".

So if your WW had slapped you, would that make it OK to slap her? If you do something that now that hurts her, does she have justification to retaliate in the same way? Does this sound like a M to you? I don't think "evening the scales" really works in a M, at least, not in that way. I think it only makes things harder.

I believe there is a saying about "an eye for an eye" and everyone being blind.