UPDATE:
Well, so far, so good...
I've been checking but he doesn't seem to have gotten any emails from her (nor sent) and the phone is still vacant. FaceBook is long gone.
Of course, she waited nearly two weeks before sending the guilt-inducing, "my daughter deserves recognition, don't punish HER" email, so we'll see... At the same time, she might have emailed 20 times since that last one, but the filter is doing its job.
On the bright side, DH now seems to think it was a
good thing that I BCC my response to OW's H.
It's truly weird.
He'll start reciting stuff straight out of the Cheater's Script, I (usually!) gently ask him to question his logic in that statement and either immediately, or after an hour or three of think-time, he'll tell me that he KNOWS it's BS.
He doesn't know why he would say such a thing... It's weird. I can see him IN the fog. I can see him OUT of the fog.
We've done the Emotional Needs inventory and, not surprisingly, we both seem to be meeting each other's emotional needs pretty well.
At the same time, though, it means we need to dig further into
why this happened. I have
my theories, but am patiently waiting for him to want to discuss it again and see what
he thinks.
Yesterday he sent me a text "I'm sorry. I love you and wish I could ease your mind." I responded "Don't wish--work. Learn. I love you too."
He replied that that wasn't really the response he was hoping for... a little more terse than he'd expected.
I told him that he seems to want "easy," and that he doesn't want to change his definition of what is and isn't appropriate contact with other women. He just wants to be able to say "sorry" and have the tough stuff done.
He knows I've been reading this site extensively, and have ordered "Surviving an Affair" (I hope it shows up soon!!), so I was
thrilled when he asked me to send him some links so that he can read, too.
We also discussed the familiarity of the Emotional Needs questionnaire when we filled it out. Not to mention the concept of the Love Bank.
Both of us are nearly positive that we did His Needs/Her Needs, and the accompanying workbook, as our pre-marriage counseling curriculum (in early '97).
This is a good thing because that means we're both coming from the direction that this is the right counsel for us. (Not sure if anyone has looked lately, but there's a LOT of surviving-affair/building marriage information out there and some of it seems positively
disastrous.)