Many thanks for the many replies.

To unwritten:

(1) RE: Every situation is different.
What I meant is that when affairs happen, there are many different factors at play: newlyweds vs married 20+ years; kids vs no kids; other prior affairs vs none; alcohol in the picture vs no alcohol; abusive situation vs no abuse. FWIW, my wife & I have been married 20+ years, 3 kids that are late teens; no prior affairs. But another major factor is that I'm in Christian ministry as a vocation. There are some in my situation who might demand I be fired even if I have biblical grounds for divorcing my wife due to the affair. That makes this all the more complicated.

(2) RE: Which Dr Hartley materials.
I've read some of the things and it was addressing situations that are not like my situation. Maybe if you could tell me which of his materials apply to my situation, then I could start there.


To armymama:

(3) Yes, I need a plan to execute. Not a wish or fleeting hopes. Which materials of Dr Hartley's do you recommend that I read and consider first for my situation?


To MelodyLane:

(4) Yes, her lovebank is currently closed to me. Completely. No, I have no reason to think she is still communicating with the other man. It was a fling. A lot of sexting. Only met him 2x. She never thought it would hurt me if I didn't know (although I noticed that the affair changed her, even before I knew about the affair). This was not the kind of man she would ever marry or have a serious relationship with.

I have no reason to think she is now continuing to contact him.
Part of the reason is because I ended it for them. When I first discovered the affair, I was afraid to expose it because we had a big family trip (a week for all 5 of us in Australia) coming up in 5 weeks. I didn't want to ruin everything for this trip for the kids, but I also didn't want the affair to continue. So without her knowing that I knew, I kept asking her not to do anything "destructive" towards our marriage. She didn't take the hints to think about what she was doing. She tried to meet up with the OM several times but their schedules didn't allow.

They were about to meet up before the big family trip and I did something quite risky to prevent it. I texted him from her phone without her knowing. I stated:

"This is xxx's husband. We've been married 20+ years and have 3 kids together. She probably didn't tell you she was married, or maybe she did. I know who you are. I know all about you from social media. I've read your texts. I know you're fooling around with my wife. I advise you to never contact her again. Ever. It's over."

And I sent it. And I deleted the text on my wife's phone so she didn't know. Then I added his number to her spam list so any return message was blocked as spam. Then I changed his contact number in her phone to a different # so any text she sent went to a slightly different number. So yeah, I temporarily interrupted contact between them as a stop-gap measure to avoid the affair going further before our big family trip. And my plan was to expose it all to her the day after we all got home.

It worked, until we were overseas and the OM realized what had happened and he texted her from his work phone and sent a pic of my text. And I saw this contact from the same city on our phone records and knew this had probably happened. Day after we got home, I drove us to a local park (away from the kids) and we sat in the car for 2 hours and talked about it all.

I have no reason to think she has contacted that man any since that trip. It sounds like he was pretty ticked at her for not being honest with him. So it does sound like it's over.


To markos:

(5) I'm in Christian ministry. Exposing this could have disastrous effects beyond my marriage. So I'm very hesitant to make a wrong decision about exposing this. (See #1 above) I'm not a hypocrite and don't act like I'm perfect or my marriage is perfect, but I also know that my wife & I are held to a higher standard than others. So yes, in many ways, my situation is different. And this is much the reason I feel trapped with no one I can share this with.