I recently found out my wife was having an affair. After the worst week in my life my wife and I came to the conclusion that we want to be together and we want to fix the marriage. The primary problem is the lover. She is adamant that she wants to maintain a "normal" friendship with him. She tells me she is not in love with him and never has been. She says the sex was just sexual experimentation and she has no emotional attachment to the man. Last night I told her that I was not comfortable with her having a friendship with this man. I think I was able to get the point across that she was going to have to hurt someone no matter what decision she made. If she maintains the friendship she will cause me pain. If she drops the friend then she will cause hime to loose yet another friend. Today she is really down. We normally Instant message chat during the day. She has not said much to me today. She did tell me that she would be going to dinner with the guy tonight and she would tell him that their friendship would have to change. She also promised me that no outings with this guy would be planned that would exclude me. I am not sure what to do at this point. She is really depressed. She has realized the scope of her transgression and she says she wants to work things out. She also says she is numb and is not sure she is "in love" with me but she wants to spend her life with me. I dont know if I should push any harder or just take a wait and see approach.

Here's my advice:

Contact your wife and tell her you plan to go with her to meet this man tonight .... her reaction to this announcement will be very telling of her commitment to end the affair.

Let us know how she responds to you deciding to go with her to dinner to meet him.

Pep <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

You cannot force your WW to do anything she doesn't want to do, but you can inform her that her continued contact with the OM comes at the expense of the marriage and your love for her. Ask her if the roles were reversed, would she be ok if you continued your 'friendship' with another woman you sexually experimented with? Let her know that you will not force her to do anything she doesn't want to do but if she continues having contact with the OM, that eventually your love for her will die and you will no longer want to be married to her. This is not a threat or ultimatum, but a statement of fact.

TMCM