What I’m going to suggest is going to initially sound counterproductive to reconciliation, but bear with me.
If you view something as inevitable or unbreakable then that can lead to a certain carelessness in how you treat it. Like… if you were asked to carry a Faberge egg across town you would take a lot more care than if you were asked to deliver a bag of golf-balls. IMHO you need to take a comparable stance towards your relationship. It’s delicate and needs to be handled that way or else it will break.
To me the KEY to reconciliation is the realization that it’s a choice. It’s one option of several. I think that realizing and accepting that your partners infidelity has caused a strain that MIGHT lead to you two separating is the very key to successful reconciliation. It requires that you both sit down – individually and together – and remove all the excuses for remaining together (family, kids, the dog and two cats, the cosigned lease on the car…) because all these reasons can be managed IF you were to separate, and be left with only one remaining statement: You are together because you WANT to be together.
Once you accept that you realize that your relationship is in it’s core based on choice.
So my first piece of advice would be to be open to the FACT that separation isn’t your worst option. That he realizes that you are open to true reconciliation or separation, and that anything less than true reconciliation is a dealbreaker – something that is not clear if you are both committed to being together no matter what.
Then there is the "no emotions" factor…
That is minimizing on his behalf. It’s a way to hurt you less, and it’s common in the early days post d-day. Think of it this way: If it was "only" physical and no emotions… why is he risking it all for so little? Why was he going to this extreme purely on a physical urge?
There were emotions. Guaranteed. Maybe not romantic emotions like love and care and all that. But there were emotions of power, ability, validation…
You can easily find threads here where the WS claims "no emotions" only for the BS to lament that their spouse did this purely for sex, only to discover later that there were emotions, and then the BS lamenting that their WS did it for emotional reasons… It’s a no-win situation. Your partner had sex with that woman for a mix of emotional reasons and physical satisfaction.
It’s the same with the awkward and "not successful" comment. There are suprisningly few WS that admit that the sex was great. Usually the OM had erectile issues, or neither orgasmed or whatever. It’s a way to minimize the events.
Fact is they had sex. The level of infidelity is not impacted by the level of enjoyment or the pages of the Kama Sutra covered.
So far I have pointed out two factors where the affair is being minimized.
Experience shows that it’s at a unicorn-level of rarity that the whole story is shared early d-day. They met at that party and according to what he says had sex once at the hotel that night. Since then only e-mails and chats.
Verify that.
Verify that there has 100% not been any further contact other than the contact admitted.
Go through his agenda for the last three months, his financials… confirm that there hasn’t been a meetup or whatever.
To reconcile you need to begin from a base or foundation of TRUTH. You need to know what you are working from, and he can’t have a single factor where he believes he got away with something. IF they met for lunch in January you need to know. If they interact at work you need to know. You can work from facts and that’s what creates the building blocks for your future – with or without him.
