My W had an affair that started (near as I can tell) last November and continues to present. I discovered it on Jan 17th, but waited in shock, anger and fear to do anything about it for almost a month. When I confronted her, she had a ready made excuse that was so much bull. I was in a very bad place then, and in a stupid snap decision, accepted it because I thought that it didn't mean the end of our marriage.
My second big mistake was telling her that I had taped her phone calls with the OM. Now she has turned this completely around putting it on me that I'm a spy and that she can't trust me anymore. She started searching my office and found some porn that I had; she then said that she thought that I was having an affair (I wasn't and never did or would). She claimed that she cooked the whole thing up to punish me!

I discovered this board too late for me to have had a better confrontation. I have done a lot of soul searching, looking for the root cause of her wandering. I think that it is mostly that after 11 years of marriage, we never had children, and she is (I think) starting menopause. This "mid life crisis" coupled with the really extream mood swings, freaked her out.

Truth be told, I was always luke warm to children. I fear the staggaring responsibility and have almost a phobia of having a less than perfect baby. Anyway, she has only mentioned having children a handfull of times over the last 10 years, and I thought that when she really heard the call, she would start pressuring me. She didn't. She now blames me as if I was supposed to be pressuring her all this time!

I feel that we are drifting apart. I think that she is stringing me along because she doesn't want to deal with a public breakup. We never fought before. Now we fight all the time. We are communicating our real feelings better, but I think that there is little hope.

So have you asked your W what her reasons for the A may be?? I know you have your theories but they maybe completely different from what your W thinks. You need to ask her why she did it. As a BS, I thought I knew the reasons for her A but her slant on things was different. You need to hear from her to see I indeed your take on things is correct.

Alex, she will say just about anything to excuse her actions. That is typical behavior. Why did you wait so long to confront? Did you really tape her conversations? If not, why did you tell her? In any event, she says that she does not trust you, but can you trust her? That is the issue, she is turning things around to make you feel guilty. You may want to talk to her and find out what caused her to become a wayward spouse. She needs to be honest.

Although the purpose of this board is to encourage solutions. You have options available.

Best of luck

Thanks for the responses.
Here's where things are sticky and bad. The explaination she gave was there there was no A! On a hastey decision, I accepted this hoping that it would put the fear of God into her and we would just forget it and move on. If I now state that I don't and never did accept her expalnaiton, game over.

What I hoped to do was to introspect, fix the underling problems with our relationship, and allow the OM to shoot himself in the foot.

Re the taping. I did tape her. She has threateded me with prosicution over this. I was not intending to cop to the taping at the confrontation, but when faced with her outragous lie, I blurted out that I had listened in! There are no copies of the tapes (we destroyed them together (another dumb move on my part, but a drowning man will grasp at anything!)).