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Ok I have just found out they are planning to take a ride together tomorrow while I am at work and she is off and I think her husband is at work till noon. I most certainly am not a mean person, that is why I dont do the exposure. It is going to ruin many lives all because of my husbands and her mistake, not mine. I plan to have evidence of what they are doing to show her husband. My husband is being extremely careful with his second phone right now, I havent been able to find it in a few days. I wanted at least a few texts for her husband to see. I am just not sure anything is going to destroy this fantasy.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
Ok I have just found out they are planning to take a ride together tomorrow while I am at work and she is off and I think her husband is at work till noon. I most certainly am not a mean person, that is why I dont do the exposure. It is going to ruin many lives all because of my husbands and her mistake, not mine. I plan to have evidence of what they are doing to show her husband. My husband is being extremely careful with his second phone right now, I havent been able to find it in a few days. I wanted at least a few texts for her husband to see. I am just not sure anything is going to destroy this fantasy.

Keeping their affair a secret is mean. You are helping them destroy 2 marriages. You are helping "ruin" their lives, yours and the OW's husband by enabling their affair. Helping cheaters hide their affair is not compassionate. There is nothing compassionate about enabling an affair.

We cannot help you if you can't follow a plan. Exposing to one person will not be effective.


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

Exposure 101


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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
Ok I have just found out they are planning to take a ride together tomorrow while I am at work and she is off and I think her husband is at work till noon. I most certainly am not a mean person, that is why I dont do the exposure. It is going to ruin many lives all because of my husbands and her mistake, not mine. I plan to have evidence of what they are doing to show her husband. My husband is being extremely careful with his second phone right now, I havent been able to find it in a few days. I wanted at least a few texts for her husband to see. I am just not sure anything is going to destroy this fantasy.
oh my, I so beg to differ with you. It is mean to not expose, so let us not make facades.

It is certainly EASIER not to expose. It is the devil you know sort of thing to continue on choosing a paycheck and a house for a while while you kick the can down the road and hope that your husband will come to his senses.

But that is all serving YOUR interests and not your marriage. It is mean to the OW husband. It is enabling your husband. And it is a horrendous thing to do to yourself. Not judging. I did it too until I found this site. But it is Not the high road, believe me.


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Is it me who is being selfish? I guess it is. The two of them continue this even though they know it hurts me. They lie to each other. My husband tells her everything about me including lies to make her think how horrible I am. They somehow justified everything while I laid in the hospital for a week very sick. I am not choosing this, but they have put me on this path. It is not easy to choose to not go bankrupt, get my son through college, pay the bills, etc, all the while being hurt by the one person who I loved and trusted for 38 yrs. I dont think I am taking the high road. But you are right Blindsighted it is a horrendous thing I am doing to myself. I feel terrible for my part of the marriage failure. I feel I have caused this by being a terrible wife. I have told this to my husband many times as we try to talk this out. I feel our marriage is over and has been for a long time and I know it is for him. Frankly, it is a no win situation. When I do this exposure it will be the end. He is completely and emotionally in love with this person and I dont believe it is a fantasy between the two of them. I want to save our marriage but what if it cant be saved?

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What if it can't?

You will be just fine. You will buy a kayak and be just fine. If you choose to be that is, because while some of this is happening to you, the rest you are choosing. You are choosing to enable this and give your marriage the worse chance of survival. You are choosing to stick around and let WH and O W destroy you. While you are not choosing *and do not deserve* the affair, you are choosing how to handle it.

You are in control of your own life you know.

I am not going to post again until I see you take action. This is many pages of blogging and I do not have time for that. If you are not serious about saving your marriage or yourself, nobody here can help you. Dr Harley has a plan that is your best shot, yet you want to hang around and blog instead. Do you see how many posts MelidyLane has made? Do you think she has seen this a time or two? After all these pages you are still trying to convince us that your case is unique as if you are the expert here. I personally don't have time for that and don't want to stick around to see you enable this affair. Good luck to you.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
When I do this exposure it will be the end. He is completely and emotionally in love with this person and I dont believe it is a fantasy between the two of them. I want to save our marriage but what if it cant be saved?

You have this backwards. If you don't do this exposure your marriage is over. AS you can see your own methods have not worked. We have saved our marriages using these tactics and are trying to help you.

I am sorry you choose to live like this. Enabling this horrible marriage wrecking affair is a terrible thing to do. You make yourself an accessory to the crime. By helping them hide their affair you become a volunteer, not a victim.

Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. Ephesians 5:11


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

Exposure 101


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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
Her husband is no coward I am thinking as this has happen to him before, he is just a man in the dark.

I absolutely cringe when I see a BS here who hasn't/won't exposed to the OP's BS. That's about as screwed up and cruel as it gets.

You are victimizing the OW's BH. You are now a party to the crime.

Why? To help the affair. There's no way around that.




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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
Frankly, it is a no win situation. When I do this exposure it will be the end. He is completely and emotionally in love with this person and I dont believe it is a fantasy between the two of them. I want to save our marriage but what if it cant be saved?

Do you think Dr Harley or we are ignorant to the challenges of dealing with a spouse who is an affair?

This is NO DIFFERENT than any other person who Dr Harley has helped in the past.

You need to just stop going around and around in circles to continue telling us why this won't work because none of your justifications make sense. Enabling the affair has not worked. Period. The affair continues and your health has suffered.

Again, we cannot and will not help you continue in your Plan C. And I have to warn you, the forum will lock your thread if you are not here to implement Marriage Builders.


Ddays 2007 and 2011
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I am very sorry to be wasting your time, I was just looking for someone who might have dealt with a first love/lost love, thinking this might be something different. Thank you for all your suggestions. I will not come back until I have expose their affair.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
I am very sorry to be wasting your time, I was just looking for someone who might have dealt with a first love/lost love, thinking this might be something different. Thank you for all your suggestions. I will not come back until I have expose their affair.

WE have dealt with it a thousand times. You aren't wasting our time unless you won't take the advice. We are trying to help you save your marriage. We can't do that unless you take it as seriously as we are. Do you want what we have? Or not?


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

Exposure 101


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wifeinstrife, what you are telling us is the same exact thing that most betrayed spouses seem to buy into (at first). You are deep in the fog because you've been going through this for so long, but the solution is also the *exact* same for every.single.affair. Long term or short term, old love or new love. It simply has NOTHING to do with the road to recovery from an affair.

Have you read this? The Love Bank

****
DO NOT READ any further until you have gone and read that link above.

Did you read it?

It's as simple as this: Your husband's "first love" isn't the love of his life, YOU are!

But you see, he didn't put up boundaries around your marriage, and so that old girlfriend found a way in since she still had a positive lovebank balance in your husband's account.

Dr. Harley has said MANY times that relationships that do not die a natural death keep a positive Love Bank balance, which is the reason that logical people need to protect their marriages from ever having contact with old lovers.

It's as SIMPLE as this. All of this reasoning in your head (and blogging to us) doesn't change the simple facts. 1) Your husband didn't keep his boundaries up against an old lover 2) He had a garden variety run-of-the-mill affair 3) You two CAN recover from the affair and build a genuinely passionate marriage that is better than anything you could imagine 4) In order to do that, the affair must be killed (EXPOSURE).

You have waited a long while to take action. So please go back and re-read unwritten's post number 2887750. You HAVE to take action...sitting there paralyzed like a deer in the headlights stalling to make a decision is availing you of nothing...in fact, with your plan of action, your decision is going to soon be made for you. frown

Making no decision IS making a decision...the decision to give up all of your control.


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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
I am very sorry to be wasting your time, I was just looking for someone who might have dealt with a first love/lost love, thinking this might be something different. Thank you for all your suggestions. I will not come back until I have expose their affair.
Have dealt with it in a way I wish I never experienced. Nothing beautiful or special about it if it needs adultery to exist. It is rotten in the core. If you don't expose, people might see the sweet sugar coat that covers the rotten core. Expose, let light shine on it, so it can be seen for what it really is.

If you have an serious infection, you don't cover it with a pretty bandaid. You take antibiotics and fight the infection right away.

Again, there is nothing special about this big love love if it needs something stinky and rotten like adultery to exist.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
I am very sorry to be wasting your time, I was just looking for someone who might have dealt with a first love/lost love, thinking this might be something different. Thank you for all your suggestions. I will not come back until I have expose their affair.

Not one affair is different. Not one affair is special.

How do we know this?

We have seen this. WW all do the same things. The same lies. The rewriting the history of the marriage to falsely justify the affair. The same addiction to their OM.

As already said: I have never seen a person sorry that they exposed their WW. Only regret that they did not expose right away.

Your reluctance to follow great advice from the best people on MB is mind blowing. All you do is keep making excuses to take action.

Instead you action is just to spin excuse after excuse as the OM keeps banging your WW.

I can not believe you are allowing the affair to live. I will not post anymore until you man up and take action.

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Ok I exposed them. She immediately is running scared and broke off. He is very mad at me and I am the cause of interfering. He says it is over of which I dont believe right now. I did leave the house and stayed away. My guess is he will only last a day or two and then try to contact her. What is the next step because he is going to be very depressed and want to call or see her.

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Before you move on to the next step can you tell us who you exposed to and what was said?

It is crucial that you do this exposure to everyone and everyone at the same time. A trickle exposure doesn't work.


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Who all did you expose to wifeinstrife? Please detail all of the people here for us (not names, just for example her husband, parents, his parents, etc).

Why did you leave the house?

We will help you to make a plan for the next step after we know these answers. smile


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Although I commend you for taking a step in the right direction, I fear that you did not heed our many posts about doing a full exposure and doing it all at once.

I am going to say this one last time. This is a very entrenched affair. You have to do this right, it is your only hope. You cannot just do things willy nilly, expose to one person for instance, because you are too scared to do it the right way. You cannot let fear drive you or you will wind up divorced. You need to follow a plan and do it right.

So please tell us what you mean when you say you exposed it, so we can help you go from here with a plan.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
What is the next step because he is going to be very depressed and want to call or see her.

The next step after doing a FULL EXPOSURE is to demand he end his affair and provide him with a list of EP's to follow. These are YOUR requirements for staying in the marriage. The very first and most crucial step is to send a no contact letter to OW and commit to never having contact with her ever again. And if this means you have to move away to avoid her, then prepare to move.

If he is unwilling to do any of these things, you need to start preparing for a dark separation.

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From Surviving an Affair, pg 66-67

The extraordinary precautions do more than end marriage-threatening affairs; they help a couple form the kind of relationship they always wanted.

These recommendations may seem rigid, unnecessarily confining, and even paranoid to those who have not been the victim of infidelity. But people like Sue and Jon, who have suffered unimaginable pain as a result of an affair that spun out of control, can easily see their value. For the inconvenience of following my advice, Sue would have spared herself and Jon the very worst experience of their lives.


Checklist for How Affairs Should End

_____The unfaithful spouse should reveal information about the affair to the betrayed spouse.

_____The unfaithful spouse should make a commitment to the betrayed spouse to never see or talk to the lover OP again.

_____The unfaithful spouse should write a letter to the lover OP ending the relationship and send it with the approval of the betrayed spouse.

_____The unfaithful spouse should take extraordinary precautions to guarantee total separation from the lover OP:

_____Block potential communication with the lover OP (change e-mail address and home and cell phone numbers, and close all social networking accounts; have voice messages and mail monitored by the betrayed spouse).

_____Account for time (betrayed spouse and wayward spouse give each other a twenty-four-hour daily schedule with locations and telephone numbers).

_____Account for money (betrayed spouse and wayward spouse give each other a complete account of all money spent).

_____Spend leisure time together.

_____Change jobs and relocate if necessary.

_____Avoid overnight separation.

_____Allow technical accountability.

_____ Expose affair to family members, clergy, and/or friends.

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Originally Posted by wifeinstrife
Ok I exposed them. She immediately is running scared and broke off. He is very mad at me and I am the cause of interfering. He says it is over of which I dont believe right now. I did leave the house and stayed away. My guess is he will only last a day or two and then try to contact her. What is the next step because he is going to be very depressed and want to call or see her.

To WHOM did you expose the affair? If this was just a little trickle exposure, I assure you the affair is not over. To whom and what did you say? Did you identify yourself?


"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.." Theodore Roosevelt

Exposure 101


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