So, about a month ago I found out my wife of 10 years has been having an EA with an old boyfriend on FB for about 2 months. No physical contact.

I found out about it, confronted her, and we have started the process of ending the affair. She has de-friended him and I was told that they had stopped all contact. However, I recently discovered that there has been some ongoing contact via FB messages and phone. Though it has been greatly reduced. I confronted her again and we are working on completely stopping all contact. I will have her block him as well. I do know it can be removed.

I will also likely be asking for phone records to be sure there is no ongoing contact.

I spoke with the OM and the OM's wife, so that end has been covered. I have also told my father in law, and after reading the forum will likely begin telling other family members as well. I'm considering sparing telling my mother in law as she is going through some issues as well and the added stress wouldn't likely help.

My wife is currently in the withdrawal stage and is very miserable. Crying daily, very torn up about which way to go, likely depressed, etc, etc. Neither of us are doing very well, I am doing my best to control my temper, knots in stomachs, etc.

We are communicating very honestly, still are in love. She also believes she is in love with the OM, so this is tearing her up pretty good. He is very far away.

We both realize the tremendous amount we have built: 2 kids, beautiful home, and a pretty good marriage. Obviously there was something missing, but we are committed to try and make it work.

We had one session with Jennifer, prior to me finding out about the ongoing contact. As of right now, my wife would like to put the process off a little until her head clears somewhat.

I still plan on going forward with the No Contact Letter, and not tolerating any further contact. I have made it clear that further contact will not be tolerated and will end this process. I know demands aren't the best, but I can't go forward alone in this process.

Question:

1) Should we wait until my wife is out of her withdrawal period before continuing with the MB plan?

2) How long does this withdrawal period last?

3) Anything that can be done to minimize some of the agony?

4) Other suggestions?

Any help?

Sorry you are here but welcome to MB.

If you click this link for notable posts, scroll down and there is a section on withdrawal. http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=403915#Post403915

Try to spend as much time as your WW as possible. Definitely keep up your Plan A. Do you need some Plan A linsks/infor? As long as she can stay in NC, she should hopefully start to feel better. As soon as she has any contact or is even triggered by FB, etc, it will make everything harder.

It would be best if she deactivated the FB account. Is she willing to do that?

Hang in there.

thedude, I am not the best person for giving advice, but the first thing that jumps out at me (perhaps because I did much the same thing) is that you seem to be jumping straight into Plan B without ever have done Plan A.

You admit that your wife loves you and you her. Plan A is all about meeting her emotional needs while at the same time exposing and doing what you can to kill the affair.

If you go straight to Plan B, I think you risk pushing her away, rather than cause her to realize what a good relationship she has with you. Plan B without Plan A seems like Plan F (failure) to me.

The veterans here will weigh in and will either confirm what I'm saying or will advise you otherwise. But I had much the same reaction -- I went right into "you betrayed me, we're done" mode and WW had moved almost moved out when I came to realize I wanted to save the marriage. I now have a much harder road to hoe as a result.

Hi thedude,

Welcome to MB. It is very good that you are coaching with Jennifer. you will receive the best possible advice from the professionals. You will also get a lot of support here.

I suspect that you are not posting from north America, where most posters live. The board tends to come slowly to life in about 2 hours from now, and then there is much more activity from about 5 hours onwards. I am in the UK, and it is deathly quiet from my perspective!

I'm not too good with withdrawal advice, but I read this on a thread in the Recovery forum:


The Dr Harley infidelity video can be downloaded from this site.

Infidelity video

You would probably find Barnboy's thread (in Recovery) helpful for you to read. His wife's affair involved FB contact.

Barnboy's current thread.

Fred,

He hasn't mentioned Plan B at all. He seems to be asking whether to actively Plan A while his wife is in withdrawal, or whether to leave her alone until withdrawal is over. His efforts to meet her needs seem to be going unnoticed and he is wondering whether to suspend these efforts for now.

thedude - you're in the right place. You will get plenty of help and support here.
I have a very familiar situation - welcome to the world of FB haters - and am in plan A. It's helping. We are also seeing a counselor, but I have gained a ton of understanding about what's going on here. My thread is 'Dealing with an emotional affair' (sorry, not sure how to link), and there are a few others that are the same. EAs are awful - just as painful as PAs as far as I'm concerned. I know about the knots in stomach, etc. I've lost 15 lbs since this started (not a bad thing actually, I need to lose a few) and keeping my cool is a daily challenge.
I've read just about everything on this site, and lots of threads where other men and women are dealing with the same thing. It helps to know we're not alone. Keep the faith - you have friends here.

Ok, thanks everyone. Just to be clear, I haven't jumped to any conclusions at this point. I'm just trying to get things rolling. I've made a few mistakes as I found out about this situation before I found this site. Nothing too serious. Now, I would like to try and do things correctly, it may not work, but all i can do is try.

I'll definitely read the links on withdrawal. And try to get the info to my wife. As for deactivating FB, that may be the next option.

Oh, and I'm in the US (west), and not sleeping the best, hence the late hours.

We did the no contact letter this morning. That wasn't a popular start to the day, but it had to be done.

chris

Yes, welcome to the club of people who hate Facebook

I joined Facebook after learning of the A, since my WW had an account there and it was a way to find out the identity of the POSOM. I made contact with a high school friend through it, but truth be told, now that I've blocked WW, Facebook has very little attraction to me now.

@thedude Hey, at least she went along with the no-contact letter. My FWW and I are in recovery, but the NC letter she sent him read much more like a love-letter "goodbye letter" than anything else to me.

But it got the job done. Between exposure putting pressure on OM to end the affair via OMW, my diligent Plan A, and her own conscience, she eventually ended it and despite occasional foggy, wayward thinking, we're making improvements.

My wayward's depression was constant and unending for around 6 weeks after no-contact. It starting getting better over time, and now clears out for longer and longer periods of time, but comes back with a vengeance once or twice a week.

We are nowhere near "recovered" yet. In recovery, sure, but learning to control our Love Busters and meet one another's Emotional Needs is a difficult job that we fail at regularly. But we keep picking ourselves up and trying harder.


DO: read it yourself and become familiar with the symptoms. Help her through it, be loving & supportive yet vigilant against further contact.

DON'T: try to educate her on withdrawal. Doing so is a disrespectful judgment: it presumes she doesn't recognize what she's going through. Any attempt to 'straighten her out' is a DJ. If you feel you must introduce concepts in order to talk about something with her, be sure to do so by ASKING her how she feels, rather than TELLING her how she feels.


In lieu of getting rid of Facebook, we've done the following:

1. Set up a Facebook chat client to which only I have access that logs into her Facebook account and logs EVERYTHING that is said. A beautiful "feature" of Facebook is that if you're logged into Facebook chat from multiple locations, all of the chat clients get CC'd on all the sends and all the replies. So just install "Pidgin", install the Facebook plugin for Pidgin, log in as her FB account, turn logging "on" in Pidgin, and you have full chat transparency.

2. I have her Facebook account password.

3. OM is "blocked" in FB privacy settings.

4. All new Facebook Inbox messages are set in the Facebook preferences to send email notifications. We use Google Mail, so it's easy to set up a server-side rule that says, in effect "If an inbound message is going to wayward_wife@mydomain.com containing "Facebook" anywhere in the Sender line, send a carbon-copy to betrayed_spouse@mydomain.com".
I'd be glad to help you set up that kind of transparency on your accounts if you like.

5. I have all her other passwords, too.

6. We closed down every other social media account except for FB and email. My FWW's affair was via Twitter and then telephone, not FB. Not that the venue matters much


The key is to be the hero and not the bad guy here. Be her lover, not her jailer. She's going to be a royal pain to deal with for weeks or months. Be ready for that long-haul of not having her reciprocate your needs-meeting behaviors for at least several weeks to several months. Instead of Love-Busting, write down your concerns and plan to talk with her about them on a semi-regular basis so that most of your interactions with her are positive and marriage-affirming.

Please do not offer the above "transparencies" on FB to your WW in lieu of deactivating the account. If you do so, she will definitely not negotiate closing the account with you.

Given that your WW conducted her A on FB, it would be imprudent and unwise for her to keep the account open. Not only is it going to trigger her, but unblocking somebody takes just a couple of clicks. I googled the pidgin plugin mentioned above and w/n 2 seconds I found threads/posts online of people complaining of the unreliability of it.

Below is a thread on facebook wherein former waywards discuss the reasons why keeping their accounts open triggered them.
http://forum.marriagebuilders.com/ubbt/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=2276588&page=1

Hang in there.

Thanks again everyone, this is very helpful. Any other advice is welcome. My wife knows about this site and may look here, I've shown her this thread. She would like to hear from other wives that have had an affair and how they have made it through. I think she is mainly looking for some hope that the hurt will start to fade.

Facebook - She has actually offered to deactivate the account. I am hesitant to ask for that because she does enjoy talking with girlfriends that are far away. I don't want to be the bad guy. But it looks like this might be the best course of action.

It would be nice if FB offered a way to merge accounts into a couple's profile. Then I wouldn't mind so much.

There's been some damage in the last few days with me re-discovering their contact. So things are pretty tense and uncomfortable around here. I was pretty unhappy when I found out and didn't act all that well. Gonna try and make up for that.

Gonna be a tough holiday

Chris

Generally, it isn't recommended that you share this site with your WW until the A has completely ended, but since she already knows about it, I would be more than happy to talk to her if she comes on here. She should start her own thread if she wants help. I am a FWW. There are quite a few of us on here.

thedude, I'm sorry you're in this situation.

I went through an emotional & physical affair a year ago, but I was the one who cheated. So, I can't speak to everything you're going through, obviously, but here's my two cents.

First, re: some questions you asked:


No. Recognize that she may not be on-board with MB ideas in full or right away, but you need to follow the steps to first make sure you kill the affair, and then do your best to meet her emotional needs without resorting to "lovebusters". If possible, get "Surviving an Affair" and both of you take the Emotional Needs questionnaire.


Dr. Harley suggests that the worst part of withdrawal is the first 3 weeks from the date of last contact. However, withdrawal can & often does last longer; it can be months, and any new contact "resets" the clock. Seem like she's had contact within the past few days, so her clock is basically at zero.


Hers or yours?


Yes: Get the heck rid of her Facebook account. Look: I managed to have a fullblown EA & PA a year ago without ever joining Facebook, but in the 4 months I and (for the last month) my wife have been reading the MarriageBuilders forums, we are pretty darned amazed at the number of affairs that get ignited by Facebook encounters. Not that FB itself is to blame for the underlying lack of boundaries or lack of fulfillment of emotional needs, but the more we read, we're more & more of the view that leaving a FB account in the hands of someone who's trying to get out of an affair & eliminate the accompanying adulterous mindset is like telling a cocaine addict who's in rehab "Here, you can hang onto your crack pipe." CANCEL the account, and do NOT let her negotiate away from this! If there are friends/relatives of hers who matter, then -- prepare to be shocked -- she can keep in touch with them (and they with her) in other ways, just like humans managed to do for decades before Facebook existed!

Also: I'm worried that you might not appreciate how important is that contact be cut off right away & avoided thereafter. You've already seen for yourself that there's a big temptation for her to relapse. The language you use sounds equivocal and wishy-washy -- listen to yourself:




Do those quotes sound like someone who's resolved to defend his marriage, or like someone who's afraid that if he's too firm in not letting her end this affair on her own timetable, he might drive her away?

I can't know your wife's mind, but I can tell you from my own experience that exposure & the imminent threat thereof was key to ending my affair, and cutting off contact was key to giving my wife some reassurance. Be firm on these points.

Even if she sincerely recognizes that she's been wrong & that she needs to get out of the affair and save her marriage, she may be harboring the idea that she can just make everything the way it used to be (minus FB emotional-affair buddy). That isn't a sufficient goal. Your & her goal needs to be to make your marriage NOT as good as it was, but BETTER than it was before. Because "before" led you to where you are now. "Like before" won't be good enough. Aim higher.

That is really encouraging to hear that your WW wants to post here! There are some wonderful FWWs that post here that can definitely help her

That is wonderful that she has offered to deactivate the account. I would STRONGLY encourage you to deactivate it immediately, today even. If you are going to keep your account open, I would encourage you not to have it open around her as it will likely trigger her...

I'm actually not being wishy washy, I have been very firm in my demand for no contact. I'm just trying not to be overly confrontational. I have already told her that I will need phone records for this month both from home, business, and mobile. I was very clear and firm.

The no contact letter was sent out this morning and I wrote it. Because contact had been broken previously the letter might have been overkill. But with the relapse, it became mandatory. As for FB, I stated my reasons for allowing her to continue, but I am beginning to see good reasons to stop the access.

We do realize that if we can get past this, then we need to make some major improvements. We have talked at length about the things we were both missing. Much of it was mutual, but both sides failed to speak their mind.

As for "minimizing the agony", I was actually referring to her. For myself, all I can do is keep busy and try not to dwell on it too much.

I will tell her to post a thread. That would really help her mood if she can talk with others that have gotten through this withdrawal stage, and then learn what is to come.

Well, if FB goes, it will go for all of us. I will block it at the router/firewall.

I totally hear you on that. As my wife & I spent time going over everything & hashing things out through many long, deep conversations in the months after my affair ended, one of the maddening things we discovered together was that before my affair -- and even during it as it was taking root -- we'd each been of a mind to speak up at various times (whether to complain about things that had been bothering one or the other of us, or to give some affirmation that might've meant something to the other); but we were too complacent about our relationship to weigh in when we should've, and too conflict-averse to speak up & express certain needs that we needed filled, or to voice concerns that we ought to have raised.

We wish we could go back & get a "do-over", but we know we can't; so we focus on what we can do now & for our future. It can be done, although it ain't always easy. Hang in there.

For those interested, here is my WW's thread

WW