SDWC Man: ??? My H only had one A, one OW. I call it an EA, since they never had sex, but they did do other things of a physical/intimate nature, so there was some PA elements as well. I never know quite what to call it.

Writer,

I stand corrected about your H having more than 1 affair--I misread your post, my apologies.

Now that I have re-read it, I realize that you had (your words here) �one fairly short-term affair�. As I suspected, it is therefore likely that you did not have a high level of emotional-addiction to your OM as originally assumed. I commend you for voluntarily leaving the affair, but my point thus remains valid.

You dealt with a WH who had a largely unreciprocated EA with his ex-girlfriend and you yourself apparently had a short fling with an OM that thankfully did not progress to the point of full-blown fog-addiction.

No offense, but you don�t personally know what it is like to deal with a romantically-addicted, cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs, WW. Be very glad you haven�t had that experience.

If stats are correct and only 15% survive infidelity, that would indicate that 85% do not.

A few more corrections. My A was "short" compared to my H's. My A lasted 6 months, which may not be particularly short compared to many on this board. I was deeply fogged during that 6 months. I was absolutely convinced that there was no hope for my M, that I was "in love" with the OM, that we were going to get married and live happily-ever-after. I thought we were soul-mates, meant to be, blah, blah, blah... In other words, I was very cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs. I can see all of that now. I couldn't see my hand in front of my own face back then.

Luckily, my H did a fairly perfect rendition of a Plan A without even knowing what one was, and it worked. I came to the realization that he really did care about our M and this (very slowly) broke up the fog before I left and made what surely would have been the worst mistake of my life.

Very, very few WWs reconcile the way you did, as Dr. Harley freely admits.

I'm a long time lurker, but this one drew me out of lurkdom. In June 2006 I discovered my wife's 1 1/2 year long affair. Like many here my world was absolutely shattered. I never thought that something like that could happen to us. Today nearly 4 years later, I am very secure in who I am, I have no problems with my self-esteem or sense of self worth. I also have a marriage that is recovered and in many ways is far better than the relationship we had prior to the affair.

Granted, when I confronted my wife on d-day, she confessed, immediately ended the affair and went no contact. She did display remorse and spent her energies trying to recover our marriage. She also did not put me through the indignity of a withdrawal from her affair partner. Shortly after I discovered MB and with the help of JL and some others who are no longer posting I feel we have recovered our marriage. Is the affair a distant memory that is buried in some remote region of my mind? No. We still discuss certain aspects of it, but this I feel is due to the role we have played in the lives of some family and friends who have also undergone the trauma that an affair afflicts. Yes I do bear scars, but those scars would remain whether we recovered the marriage or not and would then play a part in any future relationships.

Today I am very happy, I love my my wife, I am part of a family unit that is intact. I have a wife that loves me and reminds me of it regularily. She contributes daily to my well-being. In many ways it's hard to associate who she is today with the person she was 6 or so years ago. I would not trade anything for what I have today other than the ability to go back in time and erase the affair from our experience.

I would also like to say that the the price she has paid for her actions is far greater than the price I have paid for recovery. I can go through life with the knowledge that I have kept my vows. She to this day mourns what she perceives as the loss of her integrity. The hit to her own self esteem is far greater than the hit to mine and today I do have a concern about her self image. I need to be there to comfort and help her when she does get overwhelmed with the memory of the choices she has made.

Please don't question my sense of my own self worth or self esteem. What I have today I value more than anything else on earth. It's my choice and she was/is worth it.

Regards

And where is that? Sure, the WAYWARD is guilty for the affair. But if the wayward works on recovery, then BOTH parties have to accept responsibility for the DIVORCE. Just looking at it through a kid's eyes...

Where does Dr Harley freely admit this? Can you give a source, please?

Men's perceived failure to satisfy their wives is punctuated by the fact that women file for divorce twice as often as men. In other words, their unhappiness with marriage often results in divorce.

....

When all forms of spousal neglect are grouped together, we find that it is far ahead of all the other reasons combined that women leave men. Surprisingly few women divorce because of physical abuse, infidelity, alcoholism, criminal behavior, fraud, or other serious grounds. In fact, I find myself bewildered by women in serious physical danger refusing to leave men that threaten their safety.

Simply stated, women leave men when they are neglected. Neglect accounts for almost all of the reasons women leave and divorce men.

When I talk to their husbands, they usually have a very different explanation as to why their wives feel the way they do. They often feel that the expectations of women in general, and their wives in particular, have grown completely out of reach. These men, who feel that they've made a gigantic effort to be caring and sensitive to their wives, get no credit whatsoever for their sizeable contribution to the family. They feel under enormous pressure to improve their financial support, improve the way they raise their children, and improve the way they treat their wives. Many men I see are emotionally exhausted and feel that for all their effort, they get nothing but criticism.

Echoing Krazy71, a BS should imho strongly consider immediate divorce rather than wasting years of their life under the following circumstances:

1. The affair happened within the first 5 years of the marriage.
Don�t waste your time with a WS like this�he/she never took the marriage seriously from the get-go. A no-brainer.

2. This isn�t your WS�s first inappropriate extra-marital relationship.
See #1. Someone repeatedly distracted by anything shiny on the side of the road is not marriage-material. Another no-brainer.

3. The exposure potential is not very �target rich�.
If OP�s career/job can�t be jeopardized, if OP is unmarried or already divorcing, if family members �go along� or are detached, you don�t have much pressure to bring to bear on breaking the affair.

4. Your WS is clearly emotionally-addicted to the OP.
The more irrational, fantasy-driven, scapegoating-towards-you, and defending-the-OP your WS is, the more deeply he/she is addicted. They are illogically and powerfully attached to the OP. You are, at the very least, looking at a looooong road.

5. (get ready, this may be controversial) Your WS is � a WW!
Unless you catch the relationship in its infancy (rare), she will be heavily-addicted. She won�t give her OM up voluntarily (much more rare for a WW than a WH). The only realistic hope is to get him to dump her via exposure pressure that threatens something more important to him than her (career, finances, his marriage/kids). If #3 is present, you are hosed. I have seen many, many emotionally-addicted, active WW affairs both here on MB and in real life and I can tell you it is vanishingly rare to break the affair and save the marriage unless the OM dumps the WW in fairly short order. The usual result, like with Krazy, MissMyFamily, PSUBIKER, and myself, is that the WW is a �not-worth-it-lost-cause� who stays tightly glued to her lover, no matter what the sacrifice and how big a slimeball-loser the guy is. Think hard about it, BHs, cuz divorce is basically just Plan B without the added pain of (a likely futile) prolonged disappointment-limbo.

When I went back and read more of Krazy's posts, it dawned on me: a lot of his problems came from inside.

She has done nearly everything right since, and we are working on R.

So how does she feel about adultery now?

She really hates it. She despises what she did. She went out and bought "Not Just Friends" on her own, and read it. She cringes when infidelity is mentioned on TV or in movies, just like I do.

She can't believe what type of person she had become.

After re-reading my own post, I can't help but wonder if at least some of my anger is unresolved anger from my childhood. My mom started the cheating...my father knocked her up WHILE SHE WAS STILL MARRIED TO HER 1ST HUSBAND. She then divorced him and married my dad. Charming, isn't it?

I sometimes wonder if people are posting while they're drunk or high, or just in an ecstasy of bitterness.

To any newbies who might have felt discouraged by Krazy's post, consider the following instead.

Infidelity is an appalling trauma. Few of us are prepared for this to happen to us; we're not equipped to deal with it. We start off much too small for this overwhelming disaster.

Straight away, we have to make a choice - stay small, or grow big. Growing big - which means developing self-honesty, defending boundaries, fighting down panic, enduring injustice - is painful and difficult. Staying small - which usually means amputating the problem marriage - requires only the effort to get through the divorce.

Stick around here for a few years, and you'll notice that those who choose to grow don't lose out in the long run. The marriage may not recover; they may decide they don't WANT to recover the marriage, but they come out of the whole deal a much more enlightened, wise and self-aware person than they would ever have been otherwise. They have a much better chance of success in a subsequent marriage, IF they've done the hard work on themselves.

Stick around, and you'll notice another pattern. A lot of people who ran away from infidelity in a previous marriage end up with yet another unfaithful spouse. If you haven't worked out how you ended up at d-day the first time round, chances are good that you'll repeat the same patterns, and end up with the same result.

MB is not a magic formula for fixing marriages. It's a tool you can use to build a healthy marriage - IF you're both prepared to do the work, and IF there's enough emotional health available to build on. That's not the case for every broken marriage, and not every marriage can or should be saved.

Don't be put off making the effort just because there's a possibility you won't end up with a 'fixed' marriage. You won't lose out, whatever happens.

The tragedy is to fudge the work, end up with a divorce anyway, then complain the whole program didn't work. Shame on you, Krazy.

TA

I am at the point of seriously considering cutting my losses.