My wife and I have been together for 15 years. We are in the aftermath of discovering an emotional affair.

Situation

My wife spent the last year and a half seeking emotional guidance with a college friend who she had a crush on for years.

She met this man in college (now 10 years ago) and always maintained a friendship relationship with him. During her time in college, I knew about this friendship and I always distrusted this person because he�s a womanizer. I never doubted my wife�s fidelity and she always treated me very well.

I always asked her to keep her guard up because �you know how some men are�, but she�s a very open person and a people pleaser so this doesn�t come natural to her.

After college �John' (alias) moved to Europe for business. This relieved my anxiety about their friendship, although they maintained contact through online apps and over the phone. They checked in regularly every few weeks or months. When I asked about their contact she minimized it. We had a lot of heated discussions about her friendship with John because I was afraid it had the potential to grow into an affair.

She always knew that I didn�t like it, but continued to maintain the friendship. I put up with this because, after all, John lives thousands of miles away I didn�t want to fight all the time. Note that my wife has always been extremely loving in our relationship so I didn�t have any reason to believe she would be up to something bad.

Recently I�ve found out that since a year and a half their contact become much more frequent and my wife started discussing very personal emotional issues with John.
I realize now that I was emotionally not available for her, which I�m very sad about. I always thought they talked every few weeks for a few minutes, but in reality she send thousands of messages, she dreamed about him and sought out for life guidance. Not something you like your wife discussing with her college crush�

She started talking more and more about him to me, to the point where she mentioned that she wanted to start up a business with John. (She told me this before I found out about the emotional affair). For me this was a red flag so I checked into her communication with John and that�s how I found what they�ve been talking about.

A few months ago my wife and John met a few times in person while he was visiting family in the States. I have enough trust in her that nothing physically happened and she also denied anything did.

After a lot of talks with my wife and self-reflection on her part she found out that she was looking for a father figure in John. Someone who could comfort her emotionally and make time for here when I was unavailable. She acknowledges that she has sexual emotions for John but she believes it�s a neglectable issue in all of this (something that I don't agree with). Since this came out she agreed to brake off all contact with John and cancel the business plans.

I�m still left with a plethora of emotions. I have so much love for my wife and want us to build up our relationship. I�m fighting with emotions of disgust, feeling betrayed and I find it very hard to trust her at the moment. Even though she sought out for emotional guidance, it feels like she was having a full blown affair to me. She let me read all the letters en emails, she comforted me that nothing sexual happened nor was discussed but I keep thinking that she�s holding back information.

To top it all off, this all happened while where actively trying to get pregnant. To her, this proves that nothing was going on. She agrees that she had a toxic relationship with John and she admits that she would not like to see me having the same kind of relationship with one of my female friends, but she doesn�t see it as putting our marriage in harms way. To me, it feels like she wasn�t into our marriage at all if she could build such a deep relationship with someone that she knew I don�t like.

If you made it this far I would like to thank you very much for your time.

I have two questions:
For the readers with experience, what do you make out of all of this? Sometimes I feel like I�m blowing this all out of proportion, but on the other hand I just know she was walking blindly into a physical affair.

Second question: What about trying to get pregnant at this time? I know it�s not the smartest thing to do, but we are getting older and I don�t want this to kill our potential last chance to have children over this. We both want to work on our relationship but I�m having serious trust issues.

Thank you,

Alex

Welcome to MB.

You should be having 'trust issues' because your wife cannot be trusted. You have mentioned numerous times in your post that you have faith or trust in your wife. Dr Harley does not advise anyone to have blind trust in their spouse. This is because we are all wired to have affairs and will all have one in the right circumstances. So you can see that blindly trusting someone is not a good approach, as you have now found out through your experience.

Trust issues are your natural instinct to a threat. This OM has been a threat to your marriage for many many years. Your WW gaslighted you into allowing her to continue destructive behavior.

Dr Harley has a great plan for recovering marriages from an affair, but it does not include blindly trusting someone. It includes 1) eliminating the opportunity to have an affair and 2) building a better marriage than you have ever had.

Please go read the Exposure 101 thread. This is the first step to killing an affair. Given the long history of your WW's relationship with this OM, you cannot afford to skip this or any steps.

Please understand that your wife is not on your side right now as she is fogged out on her affair. Do not discuss exposure with her.

In addition to unwritten's great posts, is the OM married?

My take on your two questions:

1. Your wife is having a garden-variety affair. It needs to end with exposure and terminating all contact with the OM for life.

2. Getting pregnant is a side issue. This affair is an existential threat to your marriage. You can kill this affair totally in just a couple of months, but if you don't act to end the affair quickly, it will never end. So, put the pregnancy on hold for those couple of months and secure your marriage first. You still have time to build a family, but the time to rescue your marriage is fast evaporating.

Thanks for your response.
I read the Exposure 101 post and we already took action.
This is what we did:

Done
The unfaithful spouse should reveal information about the affair to the betrayed spouse.

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

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

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

Done. Blocked all email/social media accounts, deleted phone number of the OM. I have all of her email and cellphone passwords so I can monitor everything she does online.
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).

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

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

As much as possible at the moment
Spend leisure time together.

Done
Change jobs and relocate if necessary.

Done
Avoid overnight separation.

Not sure what this means?
Allow technical accountability.

Done for the most part, her best friends know and I found out that they have warned her about maintaining this relationship in the past but she didn't listen to them because she thought it wasn't serious. She now understands that it was very toxic and agreed with all of the above. My parents, my brother and a few of our mutual friends know as well.
Expose affair to family members, clergy, and/or friends.

Yes. I know Exposure 101 tells us to expose this to his wife, but she's European and doesn't speak English. Also note that I've read all of their communication and he never tried to make it sexual (nor did my wife). He was playing the roll of an understanding father. The sad part is that my wife had a crush on him, so the problem lies in our relationship. She never talked to him about having a crush, she only admitted this to me and her close female friends.

On answer one, in your experience, how hard is it to recover from this? This all happened in the last few weeks. Sometimes we act very loving towards each other, an hour later I feel like smashing furniture...

Thanks for your guidance (2)

That is because you have just been through the worse experience you will ever have. The injury to your brain is real, and it will take time and effort to heal. How long? The book answer is two years, but you can feel a lot better in just a few months. You need to stop reinjuring yourself. Practically, this means stopping talking about the affair - immediately and for life. I know that sounds like a tall order, but that is what you have to do.

The other thing is to see your doctor and get on antidepressant medication for a short time. That will restore your brain chemistry to something more like normal. You will feel less traumatized, so it will be easier to get back on your feet. Your wife may need medication as well. The next step is rebuilding the romantic relationship with your wife. The more normal you feel, the easier that will be.

It's very hard for me to stop talking about the affair. I feel like I need to keep digging to gain more information. I still feel like she's going to drop the bomb...

We are going back and forth a lot. Being very romantic, arguing, crying, and back. I do feel like she is starting to feel guilty for what she has done, where a week ago it felt like she was sorry she got caught.

Can anyone help to provide steps to how she can forget/get over the OM?

Dear unwritten, in other topics you talked about how she should delete the OM phone number/email and she should change her mobile number and stay away from social media.

My wife has a high profile job. She deleted the OM from every medium and blocked him from her personal social media accounts.
However, the OM also has her mobile number/email from work. It is impossible for her to change those contact numbers. How should we/she go about this?

The other thing that bothers me is that his email is just his name. Therefore it's very easy for her to just add him on a secret account that I would never know about, if she really wanted to.

Out of protection for my mental health I don't want to start installing spy software. Any advice? Thank you.

AlexF
The answer to your last question is in your first statement.

Do you have all the information you need about the A? If so STOP talking about the affair.

Get SAA, read every thing on the MB site, follow the advice given from the these great people here and DON'T skip any steps.

What are the steps for her... you BOTH Build a great romantic marriage in the present using the MB steps

You can choose to do what is right for your marriage, or do what is right for her job.

It is not 'impossible' to change contact information. It is a choice whether to do it or not to do it. I can only tell you what Dr Harley would recommend in your situation and that would be for your wife to make it next to impossible for there to be ANY contact with her AP. Listen, this is a long standing affair. EA or PA, this is someone who she has had around for a long long time. I would assume she is in love with this man. This is not just a one night stand or two week fling with a meaningless individual you have no feelings for. For this reason, taking shortcuts is NOT going to work. She WILL contact him again, or he will contact her again, I would put money on it. You can choose to leave avenues open for that because of her job, or not. That is your choice.

You are right, she can actively seek out contact with him. This is why transparency in your marriage, and also spyware, is so important. The more difficult it is for her to contact him the less likely she will be to do it. And if she does, you need to know about it so you can address it. Again, nobody can make you use spyware, but your mental health will suffer just as much or more if you don't know what is going on, than if you are monitoring it.

This has NOT been done. You are still uncertain about the nature of their relationship, which is why you keep bringing it up. I would suggest you ask her to take a polygraph to confirm that there is not more to the story. Waiting for the 'bomb to drop' is no way to live.

These have NOT been done. The OM still has access to her through her work email and phone. Clearly this is a huge gaping hole of easy contact opportunity.

This has NOT been done, and it is the single greatest opportunity for you to hold her accountable and end this affair. You have not exposed to the OM's BW which is the greatest exposure target and will pack the most punch. We have had posters who found and exposed to people from other countries and who spoke other languages before, and this can be done.

I am trying to point out that there are some gaping holes in your EP's. This is called cutting corners and it won't work. It will especially not work for a 10 year long affair.

I would get these holes filled up today.

The 'plan' that you are asking for is Dr Harley's plan to 1) affair proof your marriage (through EP's) and 2) create a better marriage than you have ever had. Have you read through his basic concepts?

Again, I would ask her to take a polygraph. It is a win/win for both of you, if she has told you everything she can use that as an opportunity to gain back some trust by proving to you that she has been honest about the affair. And you can put it to bed.

Have you read about lovebusters? Are you committing lovebusters by trying to get her to feel guilty? Even if you have been betrayed, it is not OK to beat her affair over her head. It will do more damage to her love for you and to your marriage.

Once you have all of the information, you MUST stop talking about the affair. Dr Harley is very adamant about this and any one of us can attest to the fact that, although it is very hard to do at first, it DOES make a huge difference. It becomes easier as time goes on. The better your marriage becomes, the more the pain from the past will fade...unless you keep bringing the pain from the past into the present.

Again, talking about the affair is a choice. You can choose to do it or not to do it.

Getting the holes filled in your EP's so that there is NO contact with the OM for life, and creating a better marriage than you have ever had...that is the steps to take.

She should be able to get her number changed. She just needs to ask her job.

Here Polygraph Testing