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Ok so for the past few weeks I have been attempting plan A. But because WH chooses to keep his OW a secret I have moved to plan B. Please give me feedback on what you think about this letter. I used a lot of parts from sample letters I read on MB site and chose the parts that would apply to our situation. I have got to quit dwelling on all of this it is consuming all of my waking hours and energy and I hope this step will help to alleviate some of my anxiety. I am taking Welbutrin so the depression is under control. As for WH we have the complication that our counselor (Christian counselor) found him to be a little manic so he is bipolar. He has been on Zoloft for years to which I have found can make the manic phases even worse. I am fearful he will use this as an excuse for his behavior and not be accountable for the pain he has caused his family.
I am believe our counselor will be pleased with this letter. She had recommended I read Dobson's Love Must be Tough. I can sure use the encouragement from all of you to stick to this plan. This site has been so helpful to me. Also I had to email it to him because he has not given me his mailing address even after I have made several requests.

Dear WH,

This is a very difficult letter for me to write, one that has been weighing on my heart and mind for some time. The direction that I must go now is not one of choice but of necessity. Let me explain.

The past two months have been a difficult passage of time for me, the most emotionally traumatic in my life. The pain and emptiness that I experience on a daily basis is almost too much to bear. My only saving grace is the thought of us being together and happy again some day. Unfortunately, I find now that is slowly being shattered as well. My anger and bitterness are too great for me to handle. I cannot continue to live a “healthy” life with you and pretend to be happy. I am so sad and so miserable right now and I truly need to get a grip. We seemed to start recovery in the past few weeks, only to slip and fail. I am still feeling the hurt and pain when I don't know where you are, or what you are doing and who with. We have somehow misplaced our foundation of trust and respect. In the past I endured the hurt and pain, I now see that it is soon to drain my love for you. Until you can truthfully and honestly return home and work with me on rebuilding our marriage, I will be having no communication with you, except regarding S and D, and I will avoid seeing you except during our joint counseling sessions with MC. This is not to punish you, it is to protect my feelings for you and our chances at reconciliation. If we continue as we are now, there would be nothing left.

I know that you've been unhappy for a long time. I am going to take this time apart to try and understand my part in all this as well as try to get rid of my negativity and constant dwelling on the past. I need to let go, release myself of the burden and forgive - forgive myself and you - for my sake! I would like to acknowledge and apologize for my part in the demise of our marriage. I neglected your needs, and failed to give you what you needed many times. I know this helped create a voice in our marriage that allowed your affair (or even affairs) to happen. I have said this before, and I want to say it again: I want to do whatever I can to put our marriage back together in a mutually satisfying way. WH, as you know I am still willing to do whatever it takes to correct the mistakes that we have made in the past and make our marriage together stronger and closer than we ever thought possible. I simply cannot continue to do that until you demonstrate in a credible way, and are willing to follow measures to ensure total and permanent separation ending your relationships and emotional commitments which require you to maintain a secret second life that takes away from our relationship once and for all. Then we can talk about our future together. We cannot make the mistake we made in the past, thinking that by just ending the external relationship things would work themselves out. I believe we can jointly arrive at a positive plan that will ensure we're both happy with our lives together. I love you and I want our marriage to work but in order to preserve my love for you I am no longer able to maintain contact with you until you can commit to a marriage based on honesty, openness and mutual respect and care for both of our well-being. I can commit to marriage with you on those terms - I cannot commit to a marriage on terms other than those. You must know and realize the pain and suffering that I have endured because of your relationships with other women. I simply cannot endure this pain anymore.

The scars the attempt to reconcile left with us are probably one of the major reasons why we are where we are today. We must commit to our marriage and to each other as our number one priority in every way. And we must both agree to marriage recovery that lets us avoid being the cause of each other's unhappiness; helps us meet each other's emotional needs; shows us how to give each other our undivided attention; and is Honest - where we are totally open and honest with each other. Only our willingness to talk openly and use counseling can help us do this.

I want us to be a team, and restore our marriage together. I want you to know that no matter how bad the past was, no matter how ugly, we can get past it. With God's help, our true healing can begin. Look inside yourself and find the strength we will need to do this. I want to be your wife, in every sense of the word. I want to hold you, talk with you, laugh and cry with you, comfort you, share the joy of raising a family with you. I want to grow old with you. I love you WH. You will always be very special to me. You are the only person I have allowed myself to love so deeply. I loved you more than life itself while we were together, and I continue to do so as I write this. I look back through our life and I choose now to only remember the good times and learn from the bad. I forgive whatever pain you have caused and hope that in time you will forgive me too. I just cannot be with you or see you while you continue to keep secrets and hide things from me and feel the need to have a separate life without me.

WH, I do not know what the future holds for us, That is in Gods hands. When I said “I DO,” I made a promise in front of God, you, our family and friends for life. Through better or worse, sickness and in health. I want us to rebuild our marriage. I want us to be able to meet each others needs and avoid hurting each other. I want everything that we do to make us both happy so that there will be no need for us to separate again. I want to be your wife, your friend, and your lover.

My hopes are to bring our family back together. The process of getting us to that point is up to you. If your hopes are the same as mine it will show in your actions and commitment to your own personal recovery and healing. I understand how difficult this is for you as well, and I will make every effort to help you and support you as we work through this together. When you find yourself ready and willing to truly and fully commit to our family, willing to work on a plan for our recovery, I will be ready and willing to discuss our future. I still love you, and as I said before, I believe in our marriage and I am willing to do whatever is necessary, but until that time, please respect my wishes. People can change if they're willing to take a long, hard look in the mirror and hold themselves accountable for who they are.

All my love forever,
Annie
P.S. Text me when our appointment with MC is. If you prefer to see her seperately I understand, just let me know and I will make my own appointment.

So that is my letter. How did I do?

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BW (me) 50
WH 54
M - 19 yrs.
1st D-day April 1993
2nd D-day April 28, 2004
approx. 2 yr. A
S 18
D 16
Plan A failed June 21, 2004
Plan B letter June 27, 2004

Annie,

I think it's a good letter but I haven't done Plan B so hopefully others will comment.

I think it was a little bit long - he may not bother to read it all. It was a love letter, which is good, and it showed that there is still a path home. I think you could have been clearer on defining the path home, though. What you have is vague.

I'm curious - if your H keeps OW a secret, how do you know there *is* an OW?
Have you exposed the A?
How good do you think your Plan A was?
Why did you not choose to have an intermediary?

You already sent this letter?

It’s too long and not very clear. I’m not really sure what you are expecting/wanting based on what you have written.

Until you can truthfully and honestly return home and work with me on rebuilding our marriage, I will be having no communication with you, except regarding S and D,
This needs to be down later in the letter. Also, it should be a separate paragraph so it does not get lost in the letter.
Also, it should be that when he ends the affair, you will discuss your relationship. Don’t expect him to “truthfully and honestly return home and work with me on rebuilding our marriage” right away. Get the affair over first and then you can settle the other things.

and I will avoid seeing you except during our joint counseling sessions with MC
Why you are going to joint counseling and Plan B at the same time?

This letter immediately puts him on the defensive.

Much of what is written is pretty good stuff.
However, it’s jumpy. You write no contact, then I love you and then no contact, then I love you then no contact again.
Keep the paragraphs and what you are saying in that paragraph straight.

I recommend you use the Plan B letter in “Surviving An Affair” as a template and then personalize it.

This is a simple guide to what you should include.

1 – I love you.
2 – I want to stay married to you. (state why you got married to begin with)
3 – I am sorry for my part in bringing the marriage to the state it is. Also, I am learning (a’la MB) how to make a relationship better and take into account the other persons feelings with all my actions and words.
4 – I must end all contact because your continued affair hurts me too much.
5 - I will end all contact with you until you end your affair, Then we can discuss where our relationship is and where it can go.
6 – I love you.

Turtlehead - yes I exposed the A after finding OW cell phone number on his bill at the wee hours of morning when he was out of town. I called the number to inquire and then confronted him with it to which he reluctantly admitted to the A. As for the path home, I still don't even know for sure how to be more specific. That is where I hope the counselor will be able to give some guidence.
Chris,
Thank you for the points. We started joint counseling soon after D-day. His company pays for it. I didn't discover this site until after we were working at what can be described as Plan A. He has told me the A is over and it was "just sex" but still refuses to tell me who she is and with his job as a pharm. sales rep he has a lot of contact with a lot of different women and a lot of time spent on the road.

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> I just cannot be with you or see you while you continue to keep secrets and hide things from me and feel the need to have a separate life without me.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Because he does not feel it is important for me to know and we have been seeing a MC, it just seemed to me that I needed to quit seeing him every day since we were avoiding talking about the issues we need to discuss unless the MC was there. The last evening we spent eating ice cream together he brought up how our sex life was boring so I told him if we are going to discuss this now, I need to know who the OW is. He said I would never get it out of him so, I still do not really know if it is over, if he still has any contact...except he did mention she has left her husband, which someone else told him.
Rather than just stop contact I saw the need for the letter. I don't know if we will still be seeing the MC jointly for awhile now but we have that option.
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> until you demonstrate in a credible way, and are willing to follow measures to ensure total and permanent separation ending your relationships and emotional commitments which require you to maintain a secret second life that takes away from our relationship once and for all. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">WH has had a secret life for many years now to which I suspected a personality disorder and finally have been validated by our counselor that my suspicions were correct. He is Bipolar and needs medication. I am not sure how he can credibly demonstrate seperation so my hope is our counselor will be able to guide us through.


Also he had an A 11 yrs ago and we did very little MC so the problems were never really resolved, just swept under the carpet so he didn't have to deal with its affects on the family.
Thanks for all the input, I truely felt some relief after sending the letter. It's really hard not to ramble when the emotions are in full gear <img border="0" title="" alt="[Razz]" src="images/icons/tongue.gif" />

If the affair is over and you are going to counseling, then you should not be in Plan B.
Plan B is no contact until the affair is over (and it seems to be over at this point).

I simply cannot continue to do that until you demonstrate in a credible way, and are willing to follow measures to ensure total and permanent separation ending your relationships and emotional commitments which require you to maintain a secret second life that takes away from our relationship once and for all.
This is not magically gonna happen. Counseling is supposed to help resolve these issues.

I didn't discover this site until after we were working at what can be described as Plan A.
"We" don't work at Plan A. This is something soley the betrayed.

Have you told your counselor about Marriage Builders and see if they do/can use these principles?
Read the links below.

Chris,
No I haven't talked with MC yet, she has been on vacation and I found this site in her absence. I realize things aren't going to magically happen there is a lot of work to be done to salvage this M. I've asked for truth and honesty for years and hope that we can finally work towards that. As for the we on Plan A,I meant I was doing the plan basically but again at his refusal to devulge the OW's identity, I backed off because then I again became bitter, angry and argumentative. I didn't want to create more damage and need the time to work on Me! I will talk with MC this week. Thanks again, it's just so hard to know what to do when you so desperately want to do the right thing.

Annieblue......how goes Plan B? i find it most difficult.

PEACE OUT

sprezz,
how goes Plan B? i find it most difficult.
You are not in Plan B. How can it be difficult?