Hi all. My wife of 9 years and 3 children had an affair starting with a one night stand at the beginning of March, 2014, that later developed online and eventually in person into a full-blown "true unconditional love", "soul mates", "most emotionally intimate ever" sexual affair. The OM is married (reasonably happily enough to fear exposure), lives halfway across the country, and is also working with my wife on a legal case (they are both attorneys). Basically, they both knew their relationship would never be more than it was at the time - frequent, intimate, sexually explicit, mutually supportive messaging with occasional hook-ups for a day or two out of town, coinciding with business.
Our marriage was definitely troubled prior to the affair (and no, that's not just her opinion). I had been depressed for several years, and had been a less-than-stellar partner and stay-at-home dad. Our intimacy levels had tanked, and our sex life, while not infrequent (averaging once a week over the last 3 years), was beset with issues of high desire/low desire, pressure for sex and intimacy from me (something I know now was deeply destructive and moronic on my part), and very little emotional intimacy in the bedroom. However, my WW did a frankly crappy job of communicating her unhappiness/loneliness/frustration with me, mainly because, as she explains now, she was in deep denial herself, and was just going along in cruise control in the marriage, not bothering to analyze her feelings about me or the marriage. When she did talk with me or about me and my issues, she explained her position in term of her heartfelt concern for me and her desire to see me get better and get bus y doing something that I find fulfilling that will make me happy. She never expressed any resentment or impatience or weakening of her commitment to the marriage.
Anyways, D-Day for me was May 3rd, 2 months after it started. I just walked into it via her iPad, which I picked up because the battery in mine was dead. I turn it on, enter the password (which I created for her - a recurring theme in this story), and up popped a long chain of messages back and forth on my wife's cloud-based legal practice management webpage. The first message I saw was from my WW: "50 years with you would not be enough for me." Ouch. Scanning back over the messages was an education in betrayal and deceit and manipulation and, from her perspective, intense, unconditional, mutual love, along with intense lust. I don't know how many BS's have had the unfortunate privilege of having their WS' affair written up in graphic detail, almost from the beginning, but I can say for certain that it made D-Day that much more painful. I didn't get a chance to save most of the conversations before my wife came looking for her iPad and i had to confront her. Unfortunately her response to my discovery was stonewalling, protecting the intimacy of her affair, and her claiming (as so many WS's before her) that there were bigger problems than the affair, which happened because her commitment to the marriage was very weak. Ironically, a couple of weeks prior to D-Day, my wife decided we would benefit from marriage counseling, and we were to have our first meeting 4 days after D-Day. She retreated and talked to her best friend, who told her she thought my WS had been unhappy with me for years. She then came back the next day and said that she was done with date nights with me, "all the hostility, demands for intimacy or details about the affair". She said she would need an environment of acceptance and vulnerability. She later wrote that she "actually was
prepared to accept that (she) wouldn't have (my) trust again." Missing was much of any remorse for her betrayal and deceit (yeah, she said she was sorry about the lies, but that's about it) Needless to say, her reaction was about the worst case scenario to me exposing her affair. The hostility of which she speaks was only present after D-Day, although it would continue for weeks as she continued to stonewall and I continued to vent. In retrospect, I wish I had outed the OM to his wife right away. I wasn't sure at first how that would effect her client , and there was an issue of privileged info, but it could have been done. I know, dumb, dumb, dumb. I let myself fear for my marriage and let my wife basically threaten divorce if I exposed the OM or if I insisted on what she called "demands for emotional intimacy" (i.e. demands for transparency about the affair). She claimed that she didn't have "emotional trust" in me, and she feared that if she opened up, that I would manipul ate her or intentionally hurt her.
Anyways, we went to a couple of marriage counselor meetings before she called me after her solo meeting and said that we needed a new counselor. Lots of reasons were given, but the one that stuck with me is the counselor told her that in a marriage, you can have trust, or privacy, but not both. That was unacceptable to her, so we had to get a new counselor. 2nd counselor (recommended by a friend of hers) was much more sympathetic with WS, even going so far as to say it was understandable that my WS was stilll in contact with the OM, because "our marriage is a desert", and her affair is "an oasis", and she is rightfully fearful of jumping back into the desert. After a few sessions with her, along with her kicking me out of a session and saying unequivocally that I had a certain personality disorder which I did not have (and which I refuted point by point in an email), I had to stop our sessions with that counselor, and now we are going to start with counselor #3 (actually #3 would have been #1 but she had been out of town at the time).
A few days after D-Day my wife told me that she had "friended" the OM (by which she meant she had given him the "let's just be friends" speech), and he agreed to give us distance while we sorted through our issues. She proposed a 30 day freeze in all contact with the OM and counseling twice a week, then reevaluate where she stood after 30 days. I told her 30 days was hardly enough, and we both agreed to leave the particulars of our counseling effort to the counselor. Her rejection of one counselor nipped that idea in the bud.
I didn't believe my wife's story about now being "just friends" with the OM, and I was repeatedly asking her to tell the truth because I could tell she was lying. She complained that my hostility and pushiness were doing more damage to her commitment to our marriage than the sexual and intimacy issues that precipitated her affair. I told her that her views of our marriage were suddenly, post D-Day, much, much more negative, and that it seemed incongruous with her view of the marriage from even a moth or two earlier. She wrote to the OM early on in the affair that "I have never regretted marrying (my spouse), and I wouldn't imagine ever leaving him. The things (he) gives to me are things that someone that's too much like myself could never give to me." Even 6 days before D-Day, she says that, "(BS) is actually doing better than he has in a long time. He's lost 17 lbs. He's had more self awareness lately than I can ever remember."
However, as her love affair with the OM became more and more intense and passionate, and emotionally intimate, as she fell deeper in love/lust with him, her views of me and our marriage became less and less enthusiastic. Especially sexually, she started to become repulsed by me, and could only have sex with me if she had few drinks, was ovulating, or if the lights were out and she fantasized about him. It wasn't just me she didn't want near her sexually. She wrote to the OM a few weeks before D-Day that she had, "lost interest in one night stands and other men simply because they could no longer compare to you." A few days later she said to the OM that "I think it would make me physically sick to sleep with (a particular guy she liked in the past). It's one thing to think that I'm not interested in a one night stand, but a little disturbing for me to actually be repulsed by the thought of one. You've really changed my life." Clearly, her love/lust for the OM was making physic al, sexual, or emotional intimacy with anyone else difficult or impossible. Strangely, she claimed that she took pains to ensure that her feelings for the OM were not a product of or intensified by her issued with me and our marriage. She just completely didn't think about the other way around.
Further proof of deep affair fog: When I asked her how she thought she could get away with the affair, she said that she believed she wouldn't be caught. This is a convenient self-deception that allowed her to rationalize that if she was never caught, then I would never know, and if I never knew, then I wouldn't be hurt by her affair. But then I DID find out and was very, very hurt, so suddenly her rationalization fell apart. I also asked her how she could have thought that marriage counseling could have been productive while she was carrying on a secret love affair at the same time. She seemed not to be bothered by this contradiction, and claimed that she thought it would help us communicate better help establish better boundaries. The fact that sexual intimacy with anyone but the OM had become repulsive to her didn't seem to concern her.
I told her that her sudden pessimistic turn about our marriage was likely cognitive dissonance resolution in action. As is usually the case when you point something like that out, she doubled down on the self-deception.
About 2 weeks after D-Day I found that she had changed the password to her old and currently unused personal email account, an account that predated us as a couple, with a password that she had given me, and explained where the password came from. Instant red flag. Later I went to her office (I have a key) and looked on her desktop. I found some possible passwords written down. I got it right on the first try. Lo and behold the affair had never taken a break, and the OM had never laid off of her. My WS apologized to the OM, saying it was sad that I had invaded their privacy. She mentions the proposed hiatus, and expresses that it would be very difficult to make it through the 30 days. 2 days after she had told me that she and the OM were now just friends, they exchanged the most damaging email messages of the entire affair. The OM suggests telling me that he and his wife had an open marriage, so exposure wouldn't bother him. My WS agrees with the idea, admitting it's manipula tive, but that she "isn't afraid to call a spade a spade". Then he tells her "Like you, I am ordinarily an honest person, and I place a very high premium on honesty in my relations with others; but, in the case of you and me, there are few deceptive acts I would not engage in to keep us together. And, you know, I feel no guilt or shame about this.
None." My WS replied, "Yup, I'm in agreement." It's pretty hard to weasel out of that declaration of deceitful intent, and even harder to figure out a way to get over this and ever be able to trust her again.
Needless to say, me finding out about her continued affair and her continued deceit about it kept me pretty hostile with her, but I also knew that I couldn't confront her, as she would immediately react with feeling violated and spied upon. So for a couple of weeks the stalemate continued. I monitored her e-mails and saw her and the OM plan a rendezvous on Jun 1st. When it became clear that she was intent on seeing him in spite of everything I knew and suspected, I just decided I'd had it with her and with the secrecy and I confronted her with my knowledge of her e-mails. As predicted, she acted as the violated party and got angry and immediately said she wanted a trial separation, which was fine with me.
All through this last 6 weeks, my WS has continued to see her affair as a sign that she was already checked out of the marriage (even though she decided at the time to have a one night stand in order to "tide her over" while she waited for me to get better). I think her affair was honestly unplanned, took her by surprise, and she lost control of herself and got carried away with the affair's intense emotional intimacy. She now says she has finally ended her affair, but says that she did it because it was necessary prior to separation, not for me or for our marriage or for the sake of counseling. I sort of believe her - mainly because I can monitor everything she does electronically. She is in occasional contact with him - they still are working on a case, though she has pushed it back for 5-6 months. They stopped texting and emailing outside of work-related stuff.
I think I'm safe in assuming that in spite of the affair ending, my wife is still in the affair fog, right? Perhaps it will never end, in which case divorce is inevitable. She is trying a trial separation within our house, moving into a guest bedroom. She still says she feels emotional stress when she's around me, and that she is happier with me not around. She still says that my hostility needs to stop, but I think she feels hostility from me even when I'm not feeling it or saying anything provocative. Is this emotional stress or tension she feels around me her anger and hostility towards me for forcing the affair to end (obliquely, anyways), or is it her guilt or shame at her affair (mostly unexpressed as of now) pressing on her subconscious. She claims that she is unable to be empathetic with me because she feels totally threatened by me - she claims she thinks I want to hurt her (which I do not). Do you think I'll be waiting around forever for her to face up to what she h as done, or is this more or less a permanent change? I can't believe my previously honest and moral wife has transformed into a sociopath, but her words and actions speak for themselves.
While I don't have any illusions about our marriage prospects, I do wonder - if the hostility she perceives decreases and counseling (which we are going to continue) gives her a feeling of safety in which to express herself, is there any chance she will confront what she has done? She says right now she wants counseling in order for us to live together more peacefully for our kids' sake (I agree), and maybe later we could try honest to goodness couple's counseling. Do you think that "later" will ever come? Or should I just file for divorce right now? For the sake of my kids, I think of divorce as a last resort. My WS and I haven't been able to do counseling with any consistency. If that has any chance of working, then I'd prefer to wait it out and see what happens.
One thing is for sure: if the affair continues at any point, or if she gives up and files for divorce herself, I certainly have a whole hell of a lot of incriminating evidence to expose her affair with, including to the OM's BS, and I won't hesitate at that point to use it.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Mad SAHD
Our marriage was definitely troubled prior to the affair (and no, that's not just her opinion). I had been depressed for several years, and had been a less-than-stellar partner and stay-at-home dad. Our intimacy levels had tanked, and our sex life, while not infrequent (averaging once a week over the last 3 years), was beset with issues of high desire/low desire, pressure for sex and intimacy from me (something I know now was deeply destructive and moronic on my part), and very little emotional intimacy in the bedroom. However, my WW did a frankly crappy job of communicating her unhappiness/loneliness/frustration with me, mainly because, as she explains now, she was in deep denial herself, and was just going along in cruise control in the marriage, not bothering to analyze her feelings about me or the marriage. When she did talk with me or about me and my issues, she explained her position in term of her heartfelt concern for me and her desire to see me get better and get bus y doing something that I find fulfilling that will make me happy. She never expressed any resentment or impatience or weakening of her commitment to the marriage.
Anyways, D-Day for me was May 3rd, 2 months after it started. I just walked into it via her iPad, which I picked up because the battery in mine was dead. I turn it on, enter the password (which I created for her - a recurring theme in this story), and up popped a long chain of messages back and forth on my wife's cloud-based legal practice management webpage. The first message I saw was from my WW: "50 years with you would not be enough for me." Ouch. Scanning back over the messages was an education in betrayal and deceit and manipulation and, from her perspective, intense, unconditional, mutual love, along with intense lust. I don't know how many BS's have had the unfortunate privilege of having their WS' affair written up in graphic detail, almost from the beginning, but I can say for certain that it made D-Day that much more painful. I didn't get a chance to save most of the conversations before my wife came looking for her iPad and i had to confront her. Unfortunately her response to my discovery was stonewalling, protecting the intimacy of her affair, and her claiming (as so many WS's before her) that there were bigger problems than the affair, which happened because her commitment to the marriage was very weak. Ironically, a couple of weeks prior to D-Day, my wife decided we would benefit from marriage counseling, and we were to have our first meeting 4 days after D-Day. She retreated and talked to her best friend, who told her she thought my WS had been unhappy with me for years. She then came back the next day and said that she was done with date nights with me, "all the hostility, demands for intimacy or details about the affair". She said she would need an environment of acceptance and vulnerability. She later wrote that she "actually was
prepared to accept that (she) wouldn't have (my) trust again." Missing was much of any remorse for her betrayal and deceit (yeah, she said she was sorry about the lies, but that's about it) Needless to say, her reaction was about the worst case scenario to me exposing her affair. The hostility of which she speaks was only present after D-Day, although it would continue for weeks as she continued to stonewall and I continued to vent. In retrospect, I wish I had outed the OM to his wife right away. I wasn't sure at first how that would effect her client , and there was an issue of privileged info, but it could have been done. I know, dumb, dumb, dumb. I let myself fear for my marriage and let my wife basically threaten divorce if I exposed the OM or if I insisted on what she called "demands for emotional intimacy" (i.e. demands for transparency about the affair). She claimed that she didn't have "emotional trust" in me, and she feared that if she opened up, that I would manipul ate her or intentionally hurt her.
Anyways, we went to a couple of marriage counselor meetings before she called me after her solo meeting and said that we needed a new counselor. Lots of reasons were given, but the one that stuck with me is the counselor told her that in a marriage, you can have trust, or privacy, but not both. That was unacceptable to her, so we had to get a new counselor. 2nd counselor (recommended by a friend of hers) was much more sympathetic with WS, even going so far as to say it was understandable that my WS was stilll in contact with the OM, because "our marriage is a desert", and her affair is "an oasis", and she is rightfully fearful of jumping back into the desert. After a few sessions with her, along with her kicking me out of a session and saying unequivocally that I had a certain personality disorder which I did not have (and which I refuted point by point in an email), I had to stop our sessions with that counselor, and now we are going to start with counselor #3 (actually #3 would have been #1 but she had been out of town at the time).
A few days after D-Day my wife told me that she had "friended" the OM (by which she meant she had given him the "let's just be friends" speech), and he agreed to give us distance while we sorted through our issues. She proposed a 30 day freeze in all contact with the OM and counseling twice a week, then reevaluate where she stood after 30 days. I told her 30 days was hardly enough, and we both agreed to leave the particulars of our counseling effort to the counselor. Her rejection of one counselor nipped that idea in the bud.
I didn't believe my wife's story about now being "just friends" with the OM, and I was repeatedly asking her to tell the truth because I could tell she was lying. She complained that my hostility and pushiness were doing more damage to her commitment to our marriage than the sexual and intimacy issues that precipitated her affair. I told her that her views of our marriage were suddenly, post D-Day, much, much more negative, and that it seemed incongruous with her view of the marriage from even a moth or two earlier. She wrote to the OM early on in the affair that "I have never regretted marrying (my spouse), and I wouldn't imagine ever leaving him. The things (he) gives to me are things that someone that's too much like myself could never give to me." Even 6 days before D-Day, she says that, "(BS) is actually doing better than he has in a long time. He's lost 17 lbs. He's had more self awareness lately than I can ever remember."
However, as her love affair with the OM became more and more intense and passionate, and emotionally intimate, as she fell deeper in love/lust with him, her views of me and our marriage became less and less enthusiastic. Especially sexually, she started to become repulsed by me, and could only have sex with me if she had few drinks, was ovulating, or if the lights were out and she fantasized about him. It wasn't just me she didn't want near her sexually. She wrote to the OM a few weeks before D-Day that she had, "lost interest in one night stands and other men simply because they could no longer compare to you." A few days later she said to the OM that "I think it would make me physically sick to sleep with (a particular guy she liked in the past). It's one thing to think that I'm not interested in a one night stand, but a little disturbing for me to actually be repulsed by the thought of one. You've really changed my life." Clearly, her love/lust for the OM was making physic al, sexual, or emotional intimacy with anyone else difficult or impossible. Strangely, she claimed that she took pains to ensure that her feelings for the OM were not a product of or intensified by her issued with me and our marriage. She just completely didn't think about the other way around.
Further proof of deep affair fog: When I asked her how she thought she could get away with the affair, she said that she believed she wouldn't be caught. This is a convenient self-deception that allowed her to rationalize that if she was never caught, then I would never know, and if I never knew, then I wouldn't be hurt by her affair. But then I DID find out and was very, very hurt, so suddenly her rationalization fell apart. I also asked her how she could have thought that marriage counseling could have been productive while she was carrying on a secret love affair at the same time. She seemed not to be bothered by this contradiction, and claimed that she thought it would help us communicate better help establish better boundaries. The fact that sexual intimacy with anyone but the OM had become repulsive to her didn't seem to concern her.
I told her that her sudden pessimistic turn about our marriage was likely cognitive dissonance resolution in action. As is usually the case when you point something like that out, she doubled down on the self-deception.
About 2 weeks after D-Day I found that she had changed the password to her old and currently unused personal email account, an account that predated us as a couple, with a password that she had given me, and explained where the password came from. Instant red flag. Later I went to her office (I have a key) and looked on her desktop. I found some possible passwords written down. I got it right on the first try. Lo and behold the affair had never taken a break, and the OM had never laid off of her. My WS apologized to the OM, saying it was sad that I had invaded their privacy. She mentions the proposed hiatus, and expresses that it would be very difficult to make it through the 30 days. 2 days after she had told me that she and the OM were now just friends, they exchanged the most damaging email messages of the entire affair. The OM suggests telling me that he and his wife had an open marriage, so exposure wouldn't bother him. My WS agrees with the idea, admitting it's manipula tive, but that she "isn't afraid to call a spade a spade". Then he tells her "Like you, I am ordinarily an honest person, and I place a very high premium on honesty in my relations with others; but, in the case of you and me, there are few deceptive acts I would not engage in to keep us together. And, you know, I feel no guilt or shame about this.
None." My WS replied, "Yup, I'm in agreement." It's pretty hard to weasel out of that declaration of deceitful intent, and even harder to figure out a way to get over this and ever be able to trust her again.
Needless to say, me finding out about her continued affair and her continued deceit about it kept me pretty hostile with her, but I also knew that I couldn't confront her, as she would immediately react with feeling violated and spied upon. So for a couple of weeks the stalemate continued. I monitored her e-mails and saw her and the OM plan a rendezvous on Jun 1st. When it became clear that she was intent on seeing him in spite of everything I knew and suspected, I just decided I'd had it with her and with the secrecy and I confronted her with my knowledge of her e-mails. As predicted, she acted as the violated party and got angry and immediately said she wanted a trial separation, which was fine with me.
All through this last 6 weeks, my WS has continued to see her affair as a sign that she was already checked out of the marriage (even though she decided at the time to have a one night stand in order to "tide her over" while she waited for me to get better). I think her affair was honestly unplanned, took her by surprise, and she lost control of herself and got carried away with the affair's intense emotional intimacy. She now says she has finally ended her affair, but says that she did it because it was necessary prior to separation, not for me or for our marriage or for the sake of counseling. I sort of believe her - mainly because I can monitor everything she does electronically. She is in occasional contact with him - they still are working on a case, though she has pushed it back for 5-6 months. They stopped texting and emailing outside of work-related stuff.
I think I'm safe in assuming that in spite of the affair ending, my wife is still in the affair fog, right? Perhaps it will never end, in which case divorce is inevitable. She is trying a trial separation within our house, moving into a guest bedroom. She still says she feels emotional stress when she's around me, and that she is happier with me not around. She still says that my hostility needs to stop, but I think she feels hostility from me even when I'm not feeling it or saying anything provocative. Is this emotional stress or tension she feels around me her anger and hostility towards me for forcing the affair to end (obliquely, anyways), or is it her guilt or shame at her affair (mostly unexpressed as of now) pressing on her subconscious. She claims that she is unable to be empathetic with me because she feels totally threatened by me - she claims she thinks I want to hurt her (which I do not). Do you think I'll be waiting around forever for her to face up to what she h as done, or is this more or less a permanent change? I can't believe my previously honest and moral wife has transformed into a sociopath, but her words and actions speak for themselves.
While I don't have any illusions about our marriage prospects, I do wonder - if the hostility she perceives decreases and counseling (which we are going to continue) gives her a feeling of safety in which to express herself, is there any chance she will confront what she has done? She says right now she wants counseling in order for us to live together more peacefully for our kids' sake (I agree), and maybe later we could try honest to goodness couple's counseling. Do you think that "later" will ever come? Or should I just file for divorce right now? For the sake of my kids, I think of divorce as a last resort. My WS and I haven't been able to do counseling with any consistency. If that has any chance of working, then I'd prefer to wait it out and see what happens.
One thing is for sure: if the affair continues at any point, or if she gives up and files for divorce herself, I certainly have a whole hell of a lot of incriminating evidence to expose her affair with, including to the OM's BS, and I won't hesitate at that point to use it.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Mad SAHD
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