Since you're "needing advice," I'm going to offer you mine. I'm afraid some people here may not like it, possibly including yourself. I don't say I'm right. It's only my opinion, based on everything you've told us. And there's a big IF attached to it, which I'll explain. But I will start by saying that although this site is for Marriage "Builders," we do have to ask at times whether a particular marriage is indeed worth saving--or whether a particular person is worth staying married to.<p>You've been beating yourself over the head and groveling in apology because you were unfaithful to your wife--
once. All right, so maybe you were planning to continue, and you had some other sex chat on the Internet and the rest of it, but never mind that. You're beating yourself into the ground with remorse. I think you should stop doing that altogether. I think you should stop, for five important reasons.<p>First, because if you committed a sin, that's between yourself and God. You've already stopped doing whatever you were doing, and expressed repentance for it--a great deal of repentance. God has forgiven you already. And I'm sorry that so many people here were continuing to bash you for it at the time, because back then they hadn't heard your whole story.<p>Second, because this incident of infidelity
is not the problem in your marriage. It's a mere detail. I don't mean to condone affairs or trivialize the damage they can cause, but this is different. The real problem in your marriage lies somewhere else. Where it lies exactly is another question, but if you were to put your marriage back together again, that's the area that would need focusing on--irrespective of whether you'd had an affair or not. You did not destroy your marriage for a few minutes of pleasure. It was being destroyed long before that.<p>The other three reasons I'll get to later. But let's suppose for a moment that all your bended-knee apologies and making amends and promising never to stray again could win your wife back. Or suppose even that you could turn the clock back to last September when you started exploring the Internet in search of some fulfillment and condolence that you were missing. Suppose you'd never done that. Would you then be happy? Would you then have a rewarding marriage that met your reasonable needs?<p>No, you wouldn't. You'd still have a wife who not only failed to meet your reasonable needs, but has behaved very badly toward you and vented an enormous amount of anger and spite at you--which she's now doing worse than ever. You'd still have that big problem to solve, somehow. That's why you sought an affair, and that's what needs the real focus. How are you going to get her, not only to come back to you, but to start treating you with the respect and love you deserve? More to the point, could you get her to do it at all?<p>Whether you could depends on why she has been treating you this way; why she has been dumping so much anger on you. That's where the big IF comes in. It's an "IF... THEN... ELSE..." statement.<p>On the one hand, it's possible that you've been failing to meet
her needs in some respect, or treating her badly in some way that isn't obvious to us from what you've said--perhaps some way you weren't even aware of yourself, or thought was justified--and that's why she's been so angry and contemptuous of you all along. IF that's the case, THEN that's what you'd need to understand and change. You'd have to explore that with her (if she's willing to do that at all) and work to remedy it, so that you can have a marriage where you both satisfy one another's needs and where she grows to feel more loving toward you because of that. Your affair was only the last straw that broke the camel's back, and you're very willing to avoid making that mistake ever again. The real work on your part would be needed in quite another direction. <p>Or ELSE what you've been doing yourself isn't the main problem. It may be on the other hand that you've done your reasonable best to please her all along, and she's been treating you like dog crap in spite of it. If that's true,
you don't deserve this treatment. And you have been to counseling with her in an attempt to fix things. You've been trying.
Has she?<p>Let's make a catalogue of what she's done. Some of it may be explained by anger at something you've done to her, but I don't see how all of it can be.<p>She failed at two marriages before, and the way she's going--the way she wants to go--she's soon going to fail at her third. Without casting aspersions on anyone here who's had failures before but is genuinely trying to succeed--which you are, but she certainly is not--the evidence suggests that your wife
is a failure at maintaining a marriage, and shows no willingness to change--only to blame others for her own faults. Her last husband even got a restraining order against her to protect himself from something she was doing.<p>She is a serial adulteress. She committed adultery in her previous marriage, and she did the same to you, long before you considered having an affair yourself. What's more, the very instant she had an excuse to be free of you, before divorce action is even under way, she's going around dating another guy, or says she is, and is presumably screwing him too.<p>While you were together she hung around in bars and karaoke joints, taking off the wedding ring you gave her (an insult that showed how little she thought of it and of you) and associating indiscriminately--and who knows what else?--with various men. She also organized conspiracies with others to lie to you about what she was doing and with whom, so she was probably cheating on you then too. In spite of that she must have known it would be obvious enough when you found out.<p>Then she went off to live with another man, a former boyfriend, for two weeks. Separation is one thing; open adultery is another. She claimed--though heaven knows what "logic" she was using--that this was "not being unfaithful to you." What on earth does that mean? Was she was trying to suggest that "nothing happened" between them? If you believe that, then I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you! If that's what she was saying, then far from mitigating what she did, that compounds it. She flagrantly cuckolded you, then lied to you about what she'd done, and insulted your intelligence into the bargain. And if by some million-to-one chance "nothing did happen," that made no difference, because the appearance she presented by behaving that way hurt you every bit as much as if it had happened.<p>Or was she trying to claim that her adultery was "justified" because "you made her do it," as she said? If that's the case, however "justified" she may have felt, she was still being unfaithful to you. Trying to pretend otherwise is still an insult to your intelligence. Why should you buy that from her? And if it's true that you somehow "made her do" what she did, then why aren't you just as entitled to use the same excuse on her for your
one single instance of infidelity, compared with her two weeks of leaving you alone while she rolled in the hay with another man? She'd better pull the beam out of her own eye before she picks on you for the mote in yours. You have every right to be mad about all this.<p>I want to make important distinctions between your wife and some people on this board who have had affairs themselves. I'm not casting stones at them. Many, including yourself, feel very guilty about it. I wonder, did your wife grovel in remorse and beg your forgiveness for hurting you, the way you're doing for her now? If not, why not? Could you expect to heal from this wound alone if she didn't?<p>More to the point, most of these people, including you, had an affair because they "just fell in love" with another person, or they wanted to satisfy some need
of their own that was not met in their marriage. What they did not do was behave promiscuously, as your wife has been doing with several men. They had more respect for themselves, as well as for their partners. You did not cause her promiscuity; that's her problem alone, and you can't fix that. What these people especially did not do was flaunt their behavior in their partner's face
with the deliberate intention of hurting him or her. Most of them did their very best to hide it, and so did you. Yet that's what your wife has been doing: intentionally trying to make you jealous, hurt you, and grind you contemptuously into the dirt at every opportunity. There is no excuse for this. It is
abusive behavior, pure and simple.<p>And if she's trying to "justify" her behavior by some twisted argument, that doesn't make it any less abusive. On the contrary, it proves that she takes no responsibility for her actions. She claims she is "forgiven"--and you're not? She's been playing head games with you to get away with what she's done. This mindbending behavior of hers is just a subtler form of abuse.<p>I hear that the man she claims to be dating now is someone she promised not to see any more. So she's been holding him over your head all this time, and perhaps lying to you about what's been going on between them.<p>She denies your feelings, claiming that you "never loved her in any way." Yet you obviously do. This is her own messed-up thinking at work. She treats your love with rage and contempt, from putting aside your wedding ring as if it meant nothing, to tossing away flowers that you gave her.<p>You might have forgiven her for having an affair, but her most unforgivable fault is the way she has constantly torn you down, ripping apart your self esteem. She keeps telling you "I could have this man and that man, and any of them is better than you." She compares you sexually to her second husband (and was he all that great if she cuckolded him too?) She made you feel worthless to her. She has been
castrating you. That's one of the worst things a woman can do to a man she's supposed to love. No wonder you felt the need for affirmation outside your marriage. Why would you want to live with a woman who tears you down this way instead of building you up? Would you want to see this happen to you in front of your 11-year-old son? For that matter, would you want him to start believing that this is what women are like? Why would you put up with this when
you deserve better?<p>So to your Internet activities. All right, so last September you got naturally sick and tired of this soul-destroying treatment and began to seek compensation elsewhere. I'm not saying that was a good thing to do. But for three months you were looking at sex-oriented material, exploring chat and the like. Then at the end of December you got into bed with another woman for the first time since you were married. Just one week later, your wife "discovers" this and blows up. Isn't that a bit of a coincidence, that you were going in that direction for over three months and your wife just happened to cotton onto it only a few days after you did something terminally wrong? And if she was monitoring what you were doing all along, how come she didn't tax you with it earlier?<p>I'd guess she's been snooping and spying on you all the time. But she didn't say anything before, because you hadn't done anything really "wrong" yet. She wasn't trying to "solve a problem" by early intervention. She was waiting for you to do something "badly" wrong," so that when you finally did, she could swoop on you and blast you to hell for it--then extort penalties from you for it.<p>You've tried to apologize for your affair, but has she apologized for her chronic emotional abuse of you and the slow destruction of your self worth? She doesn't even sound close to it. You may be responsible for your infidelity, but from her viewpoint
she brought it all on herself! After driving you in that direction with her cruel treatment of you, I'd say what she did was very close to
entrapment.<p>And that's the third reason why I think you should quit feeling guilty about this affair. Far from really "hurting" her, I think
you did her a favor. She's not really acting like a "hurt" person. Oh, perhaps you ticked her off a bit because in her hypocritical mind she's the only one who's allowed to get away with adultery, not you. That's how abusers think. They're very good at playing the victim, because they truly believe they are the victim! But she would only be truly hurt if she loved you and valued you and then found you'd let her down unexpectedly. She hasn't been treating you as if she loves you, has she? And if she loved you she'd be making some effort to hang on to you even after the affair, just as you hung on to her after her affair. Instead, the first thing she did was to turn around and throw you out of your own house!<p>She's not acting like a hurt person. She's acting like an angry person. But that doesn't mean you're the cause of all her anger. Her anger is her own problem; it's chronic; and most of it has nothing to do with you. She just uses you to vent it on. She might
say she's "hurt," but that's because it suits her purposes to manipulate you with guilt, giving herself an excuse to do what she wants at your expense while continuing to extort money and other concessions from you. She's told you outright that she was glad of your affair because she wanted a divorce anyway and now you gave her an excuse for it. At least she was honest on that occasion.<p>You're interpreting some of her recent behavior--sleeping with another man to make you jealous, changing to a hairstyle that you like--as "hopeful," as if she's doing it to attract you back. I'm afraid that's wishful thinking on your part. She doesn't need to do that to attract you when she's already got you on her hook. Besides simply doing what she wants to do, she's doing it to hurt you and gloat over your pain, because that's what she gets off on.<p>She's done everything she possibly can to hurt you, to exploit you as a mere target for her own inner rage. She has thrown you out of your own house and threatened you with jail for no cause whatsoever. Among her minor manipulations, she blamed you for "not reaching out to her" when you've been trying hard to do that all along and it was entirely her fault for needlessly cutting off all contact. That's what abusers do: they put you in the wrong all the time and then lambaste you for it. If you had tried to contact her instead, there's a good chance she would have had you thrown in jail out of spite. She lied through her teeth and defamed your character by claiming you had threatened her and your stepdaughter when you hadn't. She's lied to you about other things before and can't be trusted. The reason she "won't believe a thing you say" is probably that she's projecting her own habit of lying onto you. In your time of trouble she maneuvered to cut you off from your church and deprive you of social and spiritual consolation you needed. She has stolen your property and won't give it back to you, so she's a thief as well, besides trying to blame you for her theft. She cut off your cellphone just to harass you, and broke your keyboard out of spite. She gets off on all this; she is greedy, vicious and vindictive. She says "If you loved me you'd give me money." That's nothing more than barefaced blackmail. Money is all she wants from you; all she's giving back to you is pain.<p>The biggest mistake you made was not to "destroy your marriage"--she was already doing that in spades--but to give her an excuse to wield this power over you. Why are you putting up with this cruelty and acting as if you deserve it when you don't?<p>That's the fourth reason why you should stop beating yourself up over the affair. This woman is continuing to abuse you because you act as if you deserve it. That's like wearing a big sign saying KICK ME. Being the way she is, she does just that, so you're better off not inviting her to do it. Also, if there were any chance of recovering this marriage--which I doubt--you're not going to get anywhere by pursuing her with apologies. She'll only run from you while continuing to abuse you. If she's ever going to pursue you at all, the only way to get her to do that is to ignore her as far as is practical and get on with your life. But even if she did change her mind, you'd still have the problem of getting her to treat you decently.<p>It was a mistake to have an affair, and I'd like to tell myself I wouldn't have done the same in the circumstances. But my only justification for saying so is that if I'd been putting up with the behavior your wife has been practicing all along, especially the tearing down of your self-worth, and if I couldn't do anything to change that, then I'd get her out of my life first.<p>You credited her in your letter with having a "passion for the Lord," but the truth is that she doesn't. She hasn't been doing what Jesus would do; no way! And people at the church have advised you to move on with your life. I think that's excellent advice. But you seem to think they're telling you this because you've messed up so badly that you have no right to expect your marriage to continue. I wonder how many are really saying that for the opposite reason: because they know what she's like and they're advising you to
save yourself from her. If I were you I wouldn't be asking myself if you were "worthy" of her. I'd be asking whether
she was worthy of
you.<p>I know you're "in love" with her, and she may seem beautiful to you, and that's very understandable--as well as very painful. But she's not beautiful inside, where it counts. I think you're in love with an image that doesn't truly exist. And yes, it is necessary to grieve the loss of something that perhaps never was. But I think one of your main jobs, as hard as it is, is to
get over her.<p>I think you need to start
protecting yourself from her abuse of you. To detach from her emotionally, to realize that her insults and contempt are
her problem and not yours, is hard but necessary. I'd be very careful not to violate that restraining order she hit you with, because she might use that as an excuse to victimize you further. But I would take legal steps to get your rightful property back, get a lawyer and scrutinize any divorce settlement carefully because this is the kind of woman who will try to screw you. Thankfully you have no children from this marriage, so you can split from her cleanly without entanglements of that kind. You don't need to give her a penny more than you legally have to, and certainly not out of guilt. You don't owe her anything after the way she's been treating you, affair or no affair. But by all means forgive her if you want to. If she goes on acting the way she has been with no change or repentance, God won't forgive her, so yours is the only forgiveness she's going to get.<p>The fifth and final reason to stop agonizing over this affair is simply that as you said, your self esteem has been shot for a long time. You wouldn't have been putting up with this treatment if it hadn't been--possibly even before you met her. So your other main job is to rebuild your self esteem, to repair what this woman has damaged. Beating yourself up over a mistake is only going to make it worse. You've put that behind you, so start holding your head up with pride instead. And if you can, I'd advise getting some therapy for yourself alone--not for the marriage--to help you get over all this before you think of moving on to anyone else. I wish you good luck in recovering.
