It's kind of weird posting here again after so many years. I'm pretty sure all of my affair battle buddies who were in the trenches with me are no longer here. If you are please say hello.

Anyway, just wanted to tell all of you were are presently going through your personal he!!, there really is life after these ridiculous affairs. Whether you recover with your WS, or just recover on your own, you will get through it.

I happened to recover personally and with my former WH. His affair was the "in-love" variety. Luckily for me I knew it was all a bunch of bullshi$$, but still completely devastating all the same. It just so happens that 2 days ago my H had to have contact with the OW. Without getting into details there was no avoiding it. We talked about it before and after contact. He ignored her. He has no feelings of anything towards her. Complete indifference.

So hang in there! you will get through this one way or another. CV

CV55,

Your husband should have NO CONTACT with his former affair partner.
I don't know how you recovered from his affair but if he's in contact with her you aren't following Dr. Harley's methods.

Hi CV55! Sorry to hear your husband had contact with the OW. I have seen so many affairs start back up that way because the feelings that were once there are triggered again. Now your husband is thinking about the OW and that is not a safe place to be. Here you are years later and you and your husband are STILL talking about the affair! That would not give me hope.

yikes!

And NOW she is top of mind........

What on earth could be so important!?

The only scenerio I can imagine is:

1. He is a police officer and he responded to a crime she was somehow involved in ;
OR
2. He is an ER doctor and the OW came into the hospital needing emergency medical care

In which case, they should move so neither option is possible.

Doubtful. Reading her archived posts his affair was with the office manager of his small business.

Also, he knew contact was about to happen because the couple POJA'D conact!!

Like PoJAing the taking of poison...

It was likely some legal or business thing he could easily have used an intermediary for. It just shows a very casual attitude to NC to have contact in person.

The mind boggles as to how this could possibly have been seen as a good idea.

Of course now the recovery clock has been reset to day one which is perfectly awful...

WOW! Wasn't expecting those responses. To clarify, there was no contact via talking to one another. Just happened to have occupied the same space, in a very large area. And no, there was no getting around it. And no, we really have no intention of moving to a different state now because there was an OW sighting.

Anyhoo, my intention really was to offer hope and not stir up controversy. I saw several posts from people asking for hope and wanted to say there is hope that you can get through this.

I will say a few things and then will gracefully bow out of here. Early on in our recovery I was very clear that I would rather be single than live my life looking over my shoulder constantly. I played Sherlock Holmes for the 1st 6 months or so and that was enough for me. Either my H & I were going to have a trusting relationship one day or I really would prefer not being married.

Second, I knew I would not want to be married if my H was having any secret longings or fantasies of OW. That is why he and I worked very hard to recover from this. I did my individual work to recover from the trauma, he had to recover from the shame of his actions, and we both had to recover our relationship. He was my best friend pre-A and he now is my best friend again.

In the past 10 years there has been maybe 3 times he has seen her face. Each time he tells me, we talk about it, and we move on. Of course we talk about the A at times. It was the most traumatic thing that could have happened in our marriage. He could probably not talk about it because he doesn't think about her, but I usually need to do a little processing. The excellent marriage therapist we saw said to us that sometimes you have to move towards the uncomfortable feelings in order to knock them out of the way. So that's what we do.

I love Dr. Harley. I wouldn't have gotten through the breaking up the A stage without this site and the fantastic people who supported me back then. Melody, you being one of them. Steve Harley helped us some also and was great. I just remember recovery is a difficult journey.

Again, I genuinely wish everyone here peace and healing.

CV,

Dr. Harley would encourage you to have NO CONTACT with the OW.
It sounds like you never implemented extraordinary precautions after his affair which would have included no contact.

Would you like to follow Dr. Harley's plan? It is detailed in Surviving an Affair.

The problem is that your idea of "recovery" does no such thing. By keeping the OW hanging around the fringes, you keep the affair top of mind for you both, which is unhealthy and dangerous for your marriage. Your husband is much more likely to have "secret longings" for the OW because you purposely don't do anything to avoid her. Doing nothing to avoid her just keeps the affair as the topic of conversation. I bet my H and I have not discussed the affair in 10 years. You and your husband continue to discuss it!

Your approach seems to be oblivious to the addictive quality of an affair so let me frame this in a way that might help you understand. Do you think it would be healthy for me [an alcoholic with 29 years sobriety] for go into bars occasionally and have a few drinks just to PROVE I could resist the temptation? Because that is the principle you are promoting here. What if my husband insisted I hang around bars by saying "I knew I would not want to be married if my wife was having any secret longings or fantasies for alcohol?" Does that seem rational to you? Because that is what you are doing.

I would think you would be more careful with your marriage. Your husbands affair was a devastating, tragic event. You were devastated. Why wouldn't you want to take extraordinary precautions to ensure it doesn't happen again?

Excuse my overuse of analogies, but you got hit by a car playing chicken and instead of getting out of the road like most rational people, you are trying to become a better chicken player. I am sorry, but that is just insane. The steps of taking extraordinary precautions is hardly an inconvenience in the face of the alternative, which is a repeat affair. Why take the risk?

CV55, ten years ago, things were a lot different here on the forum. Early on, I read many old threads in the quest to figure things out, and a lot sure has changed.

The thing of it is, many newly BS's come here to the Recovery thread in order to glean some hope, rather than reading the SAA thread where they are triggered. I did that myself for months, and if I had come on here and read your post, I may have gotten the impression that it was okay to have "some" contact with the affair partner.

It's totally NOT okay. There are threads right here of people years later resuming the A just over a chance and totally innocent meeting.

Dr. H says that ESPECIALLY with "love" affairs, that LoveBank balance never goes away, and so the simple spark of seeing that old lover can reignite all of the feelings of the affair.

A relative of ours told me the very same thing when I called her during exposure. Nine years previously, she had caught her H having an A and she was trying to give me some pointers. Well, after I got to know my way around MB here, and after I took the time to chat with this aunt more and more, I shared some snooping tools with her�lo and behold! Her H had still been in the same A with the same OW for nine years!

Again, I do realize that this forum was way different back when you were here last.

I'm not trying to be mean and I'm really happy that you and your H are making it. Also, GLAD that you came back here to post! But really, Dr. H believes in total transparency. Here is what he has to say about snooping ---> Is it right to snoop?

CV55, I like you so much and it pains me to see you taking such risks with your life and your marriage. Why? Is it to prove something? Will you have proved something when the inevitable happens and your H has another affair? I have seen this happen so many times over the years. Yet you imagine you are immune. Why take that risk?

^^^^

Please let this sink in.

CV55,

Do you truly understand the addiction of affairs? Have you read Dr. Harley's information about how affairs are addictions?

This is what disturbs me the most about her posts. Its like she is here to wish disaster on others. I smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day until 1998. I quit and have had no adverse effects since then. But what kind of person would I be if I told others it was good to smoke? That would be a very uncaring thing to do.

Sorry, but I don't see much hope in your story. You still talk about the affair this far out? You should be so far into recovery by now that you NEVER need to talk about the affair. My affair was only 4 years ago, and my husband and I never talk about it. There's no need to. But you still do? Where is the hope in that?

One of the hardest parts of recovery, for me, was the "don't talk about the affair" rule. There are details I don't know and never will. I am pretty sure that is why I still have the splinter of the affair lingering.

Had we been able to discuss and allowed me to process and accept, recovery would have been easier.

Thank you cv55, for your update.

Dr. Harley's decades of experience with thousands of couples says otherwise. You would have kept bringing the past pain of the affair into the present, all the while destroying whatever love you and your spouse had. Talking about the affair does not advance recovery.

It's already in the daily present in the form of unanswered questions and random thoughts. But, it doesn't matter. Too late now.

You are confusing the rules. You are supposed to get the details FIRST and then drop the subject. So apparently you didn't follow that rule.