Anytime I asked a question the reply was always inquiring about the UA time, so that is why the discussion was going in that direction until this last question I asked which has taken it in this direction.

Listen, you aren't unique.
Ive been around long enough to see the signs of when posters aren't serious.
The reason why you aren't posting about the MOST IMPORTANT parts of recovery is because you aren't following them!

So when I go back over the Checklist for How Affairs Should End:
- Full Exposure occurred and she has admitted to the pain she caused to me and family and had been remorseful
- She has totally revealed all the information about the affair I have asked for and then some. No I didn't do a poly with her, I feel she was fully honest her because I know the when, where and how�s and have been able to verify a number of things I was told and many confirmed evidence I already had that I didn�t reveal to her.
- She made the commitment to never talk to or see the OM again and the best I have been able to verify she has stuck to that
- She wrote the letter of no contact and I delivered it to the OM and for what it's worth got his word it is ending on his end also. But.... there is room for doubt
- I have full access to all her social media, emails, cell phone and so on. Blocks have been placed on him being able to contact her. There is nothing that she hasn't given me access to.
- There is never any unaccounted for time and I am fully aware of where she is at all times. She doesn't take her phone into other rooms or away from me to have private conversions or texting sessions.
- All the money is fully accounted for and there is no unusual spending
- We spend all our leisure time together, haven't done any separate leisure activities since we agreed to try and fix the marriage. We have lots of UA time, more than the minimum 16 hours and approach closer to 20 almost every week. She suggests about as many date ideas as I do
- There has been no overnight separations.
- technical accountability, I have searched and not sure I found a clear definition, but we hold each other accountable to make sure we talk throughout the day, never leave or come into the house without acknowledging each other with a hug/kiss. Never go bed without a good night kiss and every morning there is a good morning ritual I will call it that we have. None of this previously existed and it has all come with us working on the marriage

The only thing that hasn�t occurred is the change jobs and relocate if necessary. While we have plans to move in the future I am not sure in this day and age with all te available communication methods that far enough exists, considering the number of long distance threads I have seen posted here.

I'll be honest she has done everything I could have asked for and more, been very loving and attentive, it hasn�t been perfect there were days where one or both of us had break downs early on. But the more time we spent focused on each other the less and less we had bad days and the more and more we have good days.

I was literally the happiest I had been ever in this marriage, and she appeared to be also, but then all these current response have brought me back to the early stages of this, I have gotten paranoid and I find myself checking and double checking everything and even trying to read between the lines. I have gotten physically sick and feel like these responses have brought me back to day 1 of this.

Well, I spent the past few days snooping and digging deeper and have found no evidence of any wrong doing, if anything I am getting confirmation of everything she has said and is making a real effort at recovery.

Whenever we point out to you that you have not taken step one, which is to secure NC, you repeat what you have said from your earliest posts; that you are not prepared to move house now, and you are not prepared to leave that organisation.

You say this over and over, with more elaborate explanations, but essentially saying that you will not change those crucial factors in your life. Well, it is your life.

No regular poster on this site will support your decision to maintain either of those positions - I can guarantee that.

We are only reiterating our advice because we have seen (many of us at first hand, in our own marriages) that it is impossible to end an affair and recover a marriage while either or both spouses is in contact with OP, or while OP lives close enough for accidental sightings to take place. More importantly, Dr Harley has seen the resumption of affairs (or their continuance, hidden) so many times over his 40 year career that he is "adamant" that, regardless of the sacrifices necessary to careers and children's schooling, a move away from the area where OP lives is essential.

But, as I said, it is your life to live as you wish.

Sorry but this is all MEANINGLESS.

Experiencing a "honeymoon" after a d-day and decision to stay together is COMMON and says ZERO towards your ability to recover your marriage for the LONG HAUL.

Every couple goes thru this here. The ones who SKIP steps and cherry pick come back here with problems. It might take a few weeks or months, but they come back.

Have you seen where Dr Harley says you can skip extraordinary precautions (live in proximity to OP, BS can stay in contact with OP) if your WW is remorseful and willing to meet your needs and is acting very happy??

No! It doesn't matter!

No NC....no EPs = no recovery.
It's really that simple.

You can't SPIN a different recovery plan. It WILL NOT work.

We won't pat you on the back when you are making mistakes that are going to BACKFIRE. Sorry!

I am so sorry, but this is all meaningless until you have taken steps to end contact with the OM for life. That has not been done. So many people make the mistake of going through the checklist, thinking they can pencil whip it while completely skipping step one: NO CONTACT FOR LIFE.

I don't think Dr Harley predicted people would misuse his checklist in that way when he made it up. I should tell him that people are misusing it to justify glossing over STEP ONE.

An exercise in pencil whipping, I am afraid.

here

ThePhoenix,

Have you taken all the steps you can to drive OM off ***EDIT*** exposure to his children, parents, grandparents, girlfriends, exes etc. Does OM at least fear you?

Will your WW take a polygraph ***EDIT***

Gamma

Sir,
The posters aren't making you physically sick.
You are making yourself physically sick through psychological and physiological responses to what you are viewing, similar to someone that may vomit after being in a morgue.
The posters are explaining Dr. Harleys program for Surviving an Affair to you.

The fact is the No Contact letter is meaningless becAuse she will continue to see him and you are unwilling to quit a membership and move in order to prevent that from happening. Just call him up and tell him to disregard the letter and that you will enable it the best you can. I imagine if you want to be discreet and maintain your image in the community the best way would be to hire him as your gardener while you are at work.

If you decide to get serious then you will need to establish no contact and move.

It is an addiction. Do not underestimate its power. That is a rookie mistake.


You have discovered twice that your WW cannot resist OM.


Take control of your life. You will never get the affair or the OM out of your minds and your lives until you take action to get out of OM's sphere... and that does not mean trying to avoid OM because you live in his area.

Phoenix --

Sadly, you are vastly underestimating the POWER of her addiction.
And you are leaving in place the opportunity for the affair to rekindle....so easily.

I was a WW. 15 years ago. And even now....10+ years after my last contact with OM, it still CROSSES MY MIND that I could contact him to "see how he's doing". My OM lives across the country.

Imagine if I had to drive by his neighborhood... Or drive by a place where we had lunch... Or by somewhere special to "us".... How much more frequently I would be reminded of him.
And how much easier it would be for me to find him in a moment of weakness.

That is how easy it would be for her affair to start up all over again.

She might be behaving now. But what about 3 months from now?
What about a year from now, when you have both slipped back into old habits? Why won't you take her away from those triggers?

Why aren't you willing to take the extraordinary steps?
It seems like a lack of care on your part. Aren't you "all in"?

I wasn�t saying the posters who are trying to help me have made me physically sick, what they have done is forced me to reexamine everything that has occurred and all my decisions to this point. The result of that is they have knocked me out of my comfort zone and now I am worried that contact could have resumed. I have no clear or hard evidence and none of the affair behaviors have returned, but all that could mean is it has gone deeper underground if they are in contact.

So I am not sure how to play this out, the only red flag I have is increased Facebook usage over the past 2, 3 days mostly during the workday. Even though they are not FB friends they were using messenger to communicate previously. No other red flags exist, so it could be coincidence or it could mean something. I guess I need to gain a comfort there.

So do I ask her point blank if she is back to messaging with OM, approach him or handle it some other way? While she has no problem handing me the phone and letting me go through it while she is there, getting a hold of it without her knowing to install a monitoring program could raise suspicions and I would most likely get caught. Obviously I know things could be deleted or a stealth program I cannot locate could be running on the phone. I can�t find a way to track phone location without installing an app on her phone or sending her a notification text that its being tracked.

Then if there is no contact how do I approach the subject of selling the house and moving and having her switch jobs on an accelerated time table over what we have already agreed to.

I guess the power and risk of the addicition is hitting home and I need a status check as to where we are in regards to that before pushing to get out of the area

1. How do you know about the increased FB usage? What are you using to monitor this? What device is she using to go on FB during the working day?

2. How do you know they are not FB friends? It takes only a second to friend, and unfriend again.

You said earlier, she gave you full access to all devices and social media. Therefore, she should have no objections installing a Keylogger on all devices, a GPS app on her phone, a tracking app for all messages on her phone, etc.
If she balks the slightest, then RED FLAG!

This is what is meant by technical accountability, you put warning measures in place to ensure she does not break NO CONTACT.

She only uses her phone for FB. I can say that with confidence because her job doesn�t have internet access and she doesn�t have or need a computer at the job. At home she doesn�t use the kids laptop or my pc unless she needs to for very specific purposes.

I am manually monitoring it, when I open FB I can see which people in my friends list are currently active and for some of them it indicates when they were last active. Best I can tell from research, FB shows last active if you go on via a mobile device and just close it but don�t log off, i.e. its running in background. That�s always been normal for her and even myself, so thats not a red flag.

..and yes this method of monitoring is impacting my job performance severely as I am not fully focused on my tasks

What is bothering me is very often today they have both been on at around the same time fairly frequently (as well as about 30 to 50 other people at any given time from my friends list) and they both have the similar last active times, give or take a few minutes. But this has only been today, for the past few weeks and months it was very rare for them to be on around the same time. His wall posting shows him winning big at xxx game fairly frequently and getting tagged in a picture and posting a status, so for all I know it�s a slow day at work for him and he is playing the game and checking when he gets alerts about being tagged and not messaging her, but�the strength of addiction talk now has me filled with doubts.

Also, I can check data usage via our cell phone provider, that however has remained fairly consistent. No spikes like when the affair was active, which was probably due to file/picture sharing.


Because I can see both his and her FB profiles and in their activity logs it shows recent friends, neither one of them show up for the other and it�s rare for her to accept a friend request knowing I am looking at this without telling me about it first ever since she agreed to work on the marriage. I do look at the friends profiles to make sure they are legitimate people and not ghosts.

Beside I am not friends with OM�s girlfriend but during exposure I was easily able to message her. I don�t think you need to be friends to �chat/message� it just sends it to a different mail folder if you don�t have messenger installed and if you do have messenger installed it comes up like any other message from a friend.

OK that explains technical accountability, thanks. Considering we are 5 months into this process how do I approach her to say I now what to do this, when it probably should have been done much earlier on. I think even if I wasn't doing anything wrong and this request suddenly came up I would perceive as an accusation of doing something wrong.

Do I take out the surviving an affair list and say we should review this and then point to this as an uncompleted item. Or is there a better way to approach the topic.

After my DDAy, I wanted to believe my WW when she said she would never speak with POSOM again. I really did.

Unfortunately, it simply went further underground and it took me 9 months to find it. We ended up in a False Recovery which in the end was much worse than the original A itself.

Go into this with your eyes wide open friend...

Fully embracing and incorporating 100% of the MB program gives us the best chance at R.

If you can get her to fall back in love with you, her motivation will be much higher to join you in this.

R is a marathon not a race. Many highs and lows. Steps forward and steps back. It takes years to R your M....

I simply dont understand why a WS who had a Facebook/social media affair still HAS any social media?

Eliminate the conditions which led to the A. The site itself is a trigger for her!

I think it is very likely contact has resumed. You need to get a keylogger on there. As to getting caught - that is a very minor consideration given that she is the one who is hiding something not you. She can count on you to snoop in any way you can think to. Promise her.