SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

My wife cheated only once and it was out of town at a conference with a stranger 26 years ago. They call that the accidental affair.

Met all the criteria:
This usually occurs when a spouse is away from home (new location), usually a business trip and occurs because of a combination of poor boundaries (loosened), drinking or drugs, excitement, and anonymity, high-risk situation, and opportunity, curiosity and close proximity to strangers, one who might befriend them during the meeting, and a creation of false intimacy. )

She confessed and answered the questions I had at the time - but because of the brain fog I had, there are remaining questions. For the first few years, I would have flashbacks on the month anniversary of when it happened. Then I haven't had any for years. This year the flashbacks came back and I've been ruminating about them for weeks and running the loop in my brain imagining what they did. I had the desire to know all the gritty sexual details, but experts say not to ask because you can't unknow it and it could make the flashbacks worse - instead of imagining what happened, then you would know for a fact. I don't know if she told him she was married, but she participated, so I guess it doesn't matter.

The man lives in another state. The only thing I know about him is his name. Since the flasbacks have been so severe, I am considering writing an anonymous letter to him. Not asking specifics, but just letting him know that I know and how it affected me.

What are your thoughts

If you only know his name I am not sure you will be able to find this guy. Personally I think 26 years later is too late to contact him. I don't think you will gain anything from doing this. Im so sorry that you are still struggling all these years later. I told my husbands affair person exactly what she had done to me & my family and it made no difference. These sorts of people rarely care.

Don't bother. If he knew she was married,he doesn't care how it affected you.

Which leads me to ask why don't you know if he knew she was married? Your wife knows.

If you have questions, ask her. She should be willing to answer all of your questions.

Experts? A lot of the time they think they know,but unless they've been betrayed,they really know nothing.

It's up to you if you want sexual details. Often,the wondering is a lot worse than the truth. Many BS here have the sexual details,and are glad they do. Also, it means she has no secrets with OM. Right now,she does.

Was he married? If so, you can right a wrong and let her know about the affair. It doesn't matter how long ago it was. There's no statute of limitations on doing the right thing.

I'm curious as to what work your wife did to become a safe partner. It sounds like she blamed a lot of external factors,rather than taking full responsibility. This may be why it's bothering you,after all this time.

[This message edited by HellFire at 10:26 PM, Sunday, October 9th]

Grace,
He was a psychologist and I knew what state he lived in. Easy to search Databases.

Helfire,

Still debating about asking the sexual details, but have time set aside with her to ask the other additional questions.
When she told me, she expressed true remorse.

Expressing remorse is a great start. But what work did she do to ensure it wouldn't happen again?

Was she completely transparent?

Did she answer all of your questions without anger or defensiveness?

Was she tested for stds?

What steps did she take to reassure you if she traveled for work again?

Did she tell the OM no more contact was acceptable?

Did she get IC to figure out why she allowed herself to do this?

It sounds as if there was some major rugsweeping going on. Which also might attribute to your having trouble with it now.

IMHO it’s never a good idea to contact the OP and with the affair having taken place 26 years ago I don’t see any possible profit for you to do so. None at all.
Do you think he’s been fearing this call all those years? Do you know if he’s married to the same woman or even if he was married at the time? What is it you possibly want to gain from contacting him? Think a letter from someone will put any fear of God in him?

Remember – his position to cause you more pain is immensely better than whatever position you might think you have to hurt him.
He can say things – intentionally or because he doesn’t remember better – that cause you more pain and more damage to your marriage than you have already experienced.

I agree with Bigger. Some cheaters just don’t care AND will say things just to cause you more pain, whether true or not.

I would advise that no contact is your best choice.

Contacting him now is a bad idea. Just what do you expect to achieve?

Also a terrible idea was the rugsweeping. It does not appear that the strategy of not asking details has worked out well if 26 years later you still think about it. Why would you want to unknow the truth and exactly what you are being asked to forgive. One's imagination is very capable of creating the absolute worst scenario and will for many of us.

If your wife confessed immediately and really did no lying then there was a basis for you to believe her. It sounds like you wanted to know the extent (details) of the betrayal but were talked out of it by your wife? Counselors?

Since the OM may now be very hard to find, and such a long period of time has elapsed since your wife demonstrated this lack of judgement and respect for you, and disregarded the vows she made to be faithful, I'd recommend letting it go.
In my own case, my wife indulged a multiple months long illicit liaison with a man who was both a surgeon at the hospital where she worked as an RN, and her immediate supervisor. If I had known of this circumstance at the time of her affair, and had known it was conducted in a less than covert manner on hospital premises in a suite for Resident on call, I would have brought legal action against the hospital management and made a legal challenge to revoke the MD's state licence on the grounds of moral turpitude. Unfortunately, I only discovered the affair, when my wife confessed to me two months ago..and the affair took place in 1972, fifty years ago. Plus, in a quirky instance of karma, the surgeon died of an aggressive form of prostate cancer in 2007 at the young age of 67. I consider my score with him settled by fate.. the only question which remains is does my wife deserve a second chance, a difficult and weighty question because of her deceit and lies perpetuated to keep her affair hidden, and the awful reality that our first child is from his loins, not mine..I am so upset I can barely stand to see my wife or talk to her... But on the other hand, it would be such a difficult..almost impossible task to divorce and start over as I get ever closer to 80 years old.

I am so upset I can barely stand to see my wife or talk to her... But on the other hand, it would be such a difficult..almost impossible task to divorce and start over as I get ever closer to 80 years old.

OldBeachOwl, Not impossible just messy, but your life is pretty messy right now anyway thanks to your WW choices. I can't imagine what this disclosure has done to your relationship to your son. Have you spoken to a family law attorney to see what it looks like? It may not be as impossible as you think. Yes, you'll lose half but so will she. Do you want to spend your last years tied to a woman you can barely stand to see? That feeling isn't going away for years, especially with a wife that isn't particularly remorseful.

tom1224,
AP holds no answers for you here. This is something you need to get out in the open and deal with your wife and counselors. Holding it in just makes it worse. Was there any particular reason for the resurfacing? That can help guide how best to deal with it. Your wife needs to know you are struggling. She needs to help answer those questions before you can put this behind you again. If you can.

Not asking specifics, but just letting him know that I know and how it affected me.

Why would you do that? Do you think he's going to feel bad? Do you imagine he would apologize or something? How would that make anything better for you?

The bottom line here is that the guy got laid at a conference more than a quarter century ago. He's unlikely to remember much about it because it's not important to him the way it is to you. Meanwhile, you're allowing a stranger unfettered access to your pain. APs are typically okay with their own behavior. They've worked out rationalization which allow them to mess around with married people and then move on with their day. He might have changed, sure. Why not? That still won't erase the past.

I had the desire to know all the gritty sexual details, but experts say not to ask because you can't unknow it and it could make the flashbacks worse - instead of imagining what happened, then you would know for a fact.

After many years of pondering on it, I've come to believe that the experts are right. People will say, "oh, the imagination can be worse" or whatever, but the imagination lacks gravitas, and just because the vast, vast majority of us are given to rumination, doesn't mean it's a preferable state of being and that we don't need to STOP ruminating. Believe me, my therapist and I did rounds over rumination. I was so convinced that there's purpose to it, that I could somehow think my way to healing. There's not. It doesn't work that way. It's just a traumatized brain, stuck on the flotsom and jetsom of traumatic data like a stuck vinyl record. There's a reason people call it "morbid" curiosity. It's just another form of self-torture, like we don't do enough of that already after an infidelity.

Oldbeachowl:

But on the other hand, it would be such a difficult..almost impossible task to divorce and start over as I get ever closer to 80 years old.

Here's a suggestion. "Wife, the depth and degree of disrespect you have shown me is beyond contempt. The rage and loathing I feel for you is something I cannot describe in words. I feel as if my whole life has been stolen from me. At this point, both of us are too old to start over as single people living separately, and I wish to preserve as many of our assets as I can for our heirs. However, given what I have learned, I absolutely do not wish to live out my final years as your husband. Therefore, I will pursue a divorce, and would at least appreciate the courtesy by you to not oppose it. I will not seek to have you (or me) ejected from the home that we own. I will no longer share a marital bedroom with you, however. From this point onwards, we will be roommates."

By the way, I'm curious to know how you found this out.

Also, your son should learn as much as he can about the medical issues of his biological parent. This information could be invaluable to his own health care.

Oldbeachowl:

She told me two months after it happened.

She told me two months after it happened.

Any idea what triggered it resurfacing? Generally something does, whether it was a movie with similarities, a visit to the same town something had you re-walking the neural pathways to these memories. Once you start than the loose ends stand out because you are no longer in the shock that you were on Dday. That's what happened to me. Things that were said that never stood out at the time, but I can see as a screaming red flag now. Things I knew at the time but suppressed in the decade+ since. We divorced rather quickly back then and we've interacted maybe a dozen times since. My only concern was how the resurfaced trauma impacted my current relationship.

Have you spoken with your wife on this resurfacing? What was her reaction?

What about IC?
Both of those should be more helpful than contacting an AP who might not even remember your WW if he made a habit of out of town affairs. There is something to be said for drafting a letter that you don't send. That can help define how you feel about the AP and help let go of the anger.

Tom,

I would suggest something more direct like visiting him in person, or a letter for his betrayed wife or significant other.

I spoke with OM1, even when they lie there is an element of truth. It was nice to hear him make up stories and explanations I didn't ask for, it was even nicer when he moved away after meeting with him although I know where he and his are. I don't regret instilling fear in him.

The shortest root to your getting the truth is to ask your WW to write out a timeline in complete detail with the sex described fully. Then take her for a polygraph.

My WW and OM1 were about 33 years ago and I can tell you they still remember almost everything. This is especially true if your WW is not lying and this is her only affair.

Do you feel your sex life with your WW has been less than it could be for all these years because of the affair?

For any persons following my post. I was about to send my son a genealogy DNA kit for his birthday as I know he and his wife are building family trees of their respective forebears and I thought a gift like that would be really appreciated in providing more detailed information on his English side of the family, as I am from London. My wife went very pale and begged me not to send him the Ancestry package.... Immediately I knew something was up and the sordid story soon came out I believe I have most of it,..and looking back I now realize she started this affair at a new Years Eve party for ER staff, after flirting with the surgeon, incidentally a married man eight years older than her. As far as I know my son is still oblivious to his other heritage, although since he is a computer science doctorate qnd worked for military intelligence in the Air Force, he may well already be fully aware of the situation. I plan to talk with him in person at Thanksgiving.

Tom1224, I've seen lots of posters here in your situation. Affair a long time ago discovered, stay with partner and move past the affair, but then 20, 30, even 40 years later you revisit it. What triggers it? I think there is a certain amount of stock-taking going on later in life, and also a different perspective that all of those years brings on. You are smarter, more experienced.

Whatever. I wouldn't send a letter to the OP letting them know how much they hurt you. They may or may not care. Probably not. If I was to send something, a message, it would be about them. What a lowlife POS thing they did way back then, and how no matter what everything else thinks, the two of you know the truth. You know who he is.

I confronted right after the affair. It was the right thing to do for me. If you feel the need to be heard, then maybe you need to be heard.

One thing I learned from martial arts, though, is that whenever you strike, you leave an opening in your guard. Always. Think it through.

OldOwlBeach, I have a cousin I didn't know I had, discovered due to a 23AndMe kit she bought.

Your kids deserve the truth.

HouseofPlain,
Appreciate your comment.

OldBeachOwl: Both our kids were born before she cheated.

Grubs:
That's exactly what I did. Wrote a letter to OM, put it aside, read it again, then trashed it. It DID help. I didn't talk to her yet about the flasbacks, which started only two weeks ago (haven't had any since about 2 years after it happened.

"Any idea what triggered it resurfacing?"
Not really. December is the anniversary of when it happened.

"Have you spoken with your wife on this resurfacing? What was her reaction?
Not yet, I made an appointment with a counselor to talk about it, and go over the questions I wrote down that I want to ask her to get a neutral party to hear them, go over them with me, and discuss the best way to approach this.

Survus: It was a one-time fling while at the conference. He lived in a different state and she told me that she realised that it was "unlplanned, spontaneous, situational" and they didn't exchange any contact information - all she knew was his name.

Hellfire:

"Which leads me to ask why don't you know if he knew she was married?"
My wife just about always wore her wedding ring. What if she took it during the conference? At this point I don't care whether he knew or not. You are right - she knew and if he knew he is a POS for having sex with a married woman (but in a chance meeting, who would care?). If she didn't tell, or took off her ring, no foul on his part. When we discussed the cheating, she told me that she didn't go to the conference intending to cheat, but the perfect storm of being away, poor boundaries, excitment, anonymity, curiousity, etc. fueled it.

Let's keep this thread on topic.

OldBeachBowl - if you want to share your story then go ahead and start your own thread. Its never good nor beneficial when someone hijacks a topic or thread.

Tom1224

We have had posters that have done exactly what you want to do and I can’t remember a single one that got the closure or reply they wanted or expected.

For one you don’t really know much about OM. Was he married at the time or not? Is he a womanizer that would take this letter like drinking a glass of water, or is he a moral man who did a one-off, never repeated encounter with your wife? If he was married, is he still married to the same woman? Did he know your wife was married? If he was married does his wife know? Too many factors that would make a letter totally meaningless.
An affair that long in the past won’t affect his job, his profession and probably not his marriage (assuming he was and is married the same woman). After all – an anonymous post to a mental-health worker… Who says he shares it with his wife, and wouldn’t it be easy to explain how the mentally challenged people he deals with are… mentally challenged… and do this sort of stuff?

Then there is the reply if you were to put your name on it.
The "normal" response to what people experience as an attack is defense and aggression. Somebody hits out at you your response tends to be to hit back. Only he has no reason to hit back with the truth.
We have had that here… The response that says the wife told OM he was the biggest she ever had, better than the husband, came back for more, did all sorts of kinky porn-star-grade actions. That the wife initiated, that she wanted to marry him, that she moaned about how bad her man was… things you have NO WAY of refuting, things that can drive you crazy because OM said them, but your wife denies. Things that will make reconciliation – an already hard process – that much harder.

Honestly friend – there is no benefit at all for you to contact OM.