My Plan A seems to be throwing WH in a tiffy. He is really angry about exposure and STILL coming up with all kinds of rationalizations for his A. Claims that the A is over and also claims to be "working on" NC. This claim is a year old now. Even if it takes a while for the working relationship to be ended, he could cut off all other C, but claims he doesn't want to make a big scene out of this! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> ... more foggy babble than ever is coming out his mouth, he seems to be grasping at straws... this could be a good or bad sign.

Anyway, SIL goes on vacation for two weeks as of this weekend and WH will be moving in with MIL to help me take care of her in the meantime. We'll have more contact again and I'll be plan A-ing my butt off.

Then, after consultation with SH I'll be moving toward Plan B. I wrote this letter in an angry state today and it has come out more of a love must be tough than a MB Plan B. So hack away at it PLEASE!!!


Dear WH,

It is a curious thing how a person loses all perspective when she’s so close to a problem. It becomes difficult to see the issues clearly, and that has definitely what has happened to me. In the past weeks I’ve been able to pull back from our difficulties and I now see everything in an entirely new light. It is incredible how foolish I have been. Despite all the signs being there and warnings from your customers and our friends, I chose to believe that you were not having an affair. When I look back it makes me sick to my stomach to see how I lived in denial and reacted with anger and disrespect towards you for the way I was being treated. If I had believed my gut feeling and what others were saying I would have drawn the line much sooner and saved myself and our children a long drawn-out period of suffering. I guess I just loved you so much that I was willing to put up with anything just to keep you from leaving me and tearing our family apart.

I believed in you too much to think it possible for you to violate three holy sacraments in our family. Not only have you broken the vow of marriage that we took before God, because OW is also Sophie’s Godmother, our daugter's sacraments of baptism and first communion have also been soiled by your adultery. It saddens me that these things that we once celebrated with such joy have become so dirty and distorted. We will both have to answer to God one day for this, each in our own way. I will know that I had no part in this.

Now you have moved out and this is good so. It has given me and the girls a chance to begin the healing process from the damage done. For over a year now you have been promising off and on to end contact and your working relationship with OW. You have violated my trust and put my life at risk, not just once but repeatedly over a very long period of time. Our children have been robbed of a secure and stabile home. I am no longer special to you and you have no respect for me --- I’m just one of a crowd. I can’t live with that. I’d rather face life alone than as a member of your harem.

You say that you are working on establishing no contact with OW. Well, WH, after a year of you working on this, I am not real inspired to believe you. It is time that I completely cut off contact with you to protect myself from getting hurt further because of your relationship with OW. I don’t want to see, talk, or have written correspondence with you. I have asked our lawyer and your sister to function as intermediaries should you want to communicate with me about something. Our daughters can spend every second weekend with you from Friday 6 pm until Sunday 6 pm. I will also let your sister know when I have other plans on weeknight evenings or my weekends with the kids, just in case you want to babysit during that time. I forbid the children to be exposed to contact with OW or to have to witness you together with another woman as long as we are married. It is not good for our children to be exposed to their father’s adultery; they should not be led to think that this is acceptable behavior in a marriage.

Should you end all contact with OW completely and forever and want to live together as my husband again, we can then talk about it. I make no promises though, because in the meantime I will be working on doing everything possible to remove you from my heart to spare myself any more pain. It is not going to be easy. I loved you enough to give up my home, my country, my language, my friends, and my family. I loved no other than you for the last 19 years and I never regretted giving myself to you so completely. I thought that we would always be together and I still can not imagine growing old without you.

I have come to accept that I am living on false hopes. Promises that you will permanently separate from OW have been broken. It is time that I accept that you do not share my hopes that we can work together on making our marriage better and happier than ever before.

Well chere....if English is your second language...you've certainly got COMMAND of it!! This is a heck of letter and I truly love it!...but not a Plan B letter. Too long. Too much guilt. Too much blame. Too emotional. Too angry. The tone is not in keeping with what a Plan B is meant to accomplish. There is not enough discussion of "why" you need no contact with him....to protect your feelings for him, to remove yourself from his chaos and pain. I wish it wasn't so damn good because I don't want to touch it. Whittle it down....distill your thoughts and try to remove the disrespectful judgements and self righteousness...they will undermine the powerful messages you are trying to impart. but WOW. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

boy you WERE angry when you wrote this....

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

this should be love letter full of hope...

ARK

star*fish, ark^^^,

thanks for your replies and the 2x4s! But damn, did it feel to get that out!!!! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> That was all the stuff I felt like saying to WH babble yesterday, but didn't ... thank goodness.

The only thing I did reply to his anger about exposure and accusation that it was counterproductive was, "Yes, that is correct that it is counterproductive to the affair. The whole idea is get support for me, the kids, you, and our marriage. The best way for you to get people to stop talking about your affair is to cease contact with OW."

I just read the B-letter from travelling man.---thanks for the bump! Now that is moving. Back to the drawing board on a more peacful day...

Hey star*fish, my English is pretty good for an American, eh? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> I've been living in Europe for years, but grew up in the US.

Dear WH,

I write to you today with sorrow, but also with a sense of peace and hope for my own future.

I love you to no end, and my commitment to you and our marriage was unending. You are a source of joy and inspiration to me. I admire the goals you have set for yourself and that you have been able to accomplish. You are a conscientious provider for our family. You have a love for life that you spread to all you meet.

I regret that we find ourselves in a place that is so anguishing and lonely for both of us. It is a curious thing how a person loses all perspective when she’s so close to a problem. It becomes difficult to see the issues clearly, and that has definitely what happened to me. In the past weeks I’ve been able to pull back from our difficulties and I now see everything in an entirely new light. It is incredible how foolish I have been. Despite all the signs being there and warnings from your customers and our friends, I chose to believe that you were not having an affair. When I look back it makes me sick to my stomach to see how I lived in denial and reacted with anger and disrespect towards you. I did not realize how my depression, unhappiness, and resentment were only driving you closer to WHFBFGF. I did not know how to properly display the love that ran so deep, to the very core of my being, to you. I didn’t understand what your needs truly were and how I could meet those needs in order to allow our marriage to flourish.

I have done much introspection since you have moved out and believe I have found the tools we need to make a marriage in which we are joyful, loving, and supportive. I have made many changes in my life over the last months. Some of these you have noticed, some you have not. Some you may never know. I must continue with my changes and have demonstrated to myself that it’s possible and they are permanent. I still have much work to do, but with every success I have, my hope for MY future brightens and my confidence in my ability to make positive changes is bolstered. My hope is that I will be able to share this bright new future with you.

As my hope for my future increases, so does my sorrow over how easily I have been cast away by you. You must know how much pain and despair your decision to continue contact with WHFBFGF causes me. I find my love for you dying. In order to preserve the love I still have for you and to stop this continued pain from overwhelming me, I must remove myself from this triangle. I can have no contact with you in anyway: no visits with you, telephone conversations, email, mail, or even seeing you. This is not a punishment. This is to protect the love that I still have for you should there come a time when we can both commit to working on rebuilding our marriage.

If you must contact me for any reason, I ask that you do this through your sister, our lawyer, or our mutual friend -----. I expect our current financial arrangements to remain the same.

WH, I have the greatest of confidence that we could build a wonderful marriage if we both committed to making it happen. I have learned so much these last few months and would like nothing better than to share it with you. Should there come a time when you feel you could commit wholly to trying to build a new foundation with me, this is something that I would like to discuss with you. For me a commitment toward reconciliation would entail an agreement for you to break all contact, even professionally, with WHFBFGF, and the permanent integration of policy of joint agreement in our relationship with which we could agree on a realistic plan of how we can rebuild our marriage based on love, trust, and mutual respect. I hope that you will think hard on this and choose this commitment. If you do I would welcome a discussion with you about it. Until then, I ask that you respect my wish for no contact with you.

We were best friends once. I cannot imagine who I would rather spend my life with than my best friend.

I have always loved you,
LT

That my friend is a very loving plan B letter..

well done..

how much contact do you think he is going to try to have you with you..

what do you think his reaction will be....

ARK

That is truly beautiful.

When (if) the time comes for me, I'd be happy if I could write something half as lovely.

Alph.

Thank you Ark,

the first paragraph was a tough one. my WH's greatest EN is admiration and all the things I once so admired him for --- his honesty, integrity, loyalty, affection --- are presently gone, so I had to dig around a bit. He still has his good traits.

Plan B is still off in the future --- approximately a month, depending on what SH says.

If I make it real clear that I mean NC, I think WH will respect this. He stops by to check on his mother once a day and he also picks up D17 to take her to the train station on school days and pops in to say good morning to me and D10. I'll have to make sure that D10 still has daily contact with WH, he's been rather negligent himself and it makes her sad that she sees him so little. It's not because of me, beleive me, I've tried to encourage him to call her at the end of his lunch break, but he is just so wrapped up in himslef right now. I think I'll just encourage her to call him herself as soon as she gets home from school.

His reaction to this will be that I am over-dramatizing. He thinks I should just get over the whole damn thing and be buddies with the OW again. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" /> This A has evidently been going on for 4 years! An EA continues, even if a PA no longer exists.

Do you have any suggestions?

How about suggestions for a reply to his anger about exposure? At a party a colleague of his asked if it was true that WH hadmoved out of the house because he was having an A. I said "yes, and if there is anything you can do to support our marriage and our family, I would be grateful. I love WH and I don't want to lose him, but I will not share him with OW." The two of them went to that seminar together the end of last month and WH's colleague tried to have a heart to heart with him.

Boy, is WH angry about that. But something is going on at the bank. WH was in our garden with one of the bosses when I got home from giving a lecture on Tuesday. As I brought them a glass of wine and bruschetti I thought I caught something about transferring a couple people around between the bank branches. I think they met in our garden, because WH wanted to give his boss the impression that things are fine between us.

WH will take the path of least resistance. It would be GREAT if he would get pressure from the work side to separate from OW. Maybe I'm just getting my hopes up, but WH is getting fidgety and is not his cool-headed self.

There is movement in the bushes. If a visible change happens by the end of the month, like OW getting transferred I'd still sit on this Plan A while negotiating a recovery plan.

We shall see.

WH was in our garden with one of the bosses when I got home from giving a lecture on Tuesday. As I brought them a glass of wine and bruschetti I thought I caught something about transferring a couple people around between the bank branches. I think they met in our garden, because WH wanted to give his boss the impression that things are fine between us.

OHH the inhumanity of plan A...

If you weren't in Plan a you could have stepped in to the Garden with a glas of wine for you and your husbands bosses handed boss the glass of wine and said...

Darling I wasn't expecting you today...and certainly didn't expect to find you in my garden...infact when I heard voices I thought it was that adorable lawn man I had to hire to take care of the yardwork...
such a bad year for grubs...but you probably haven' noticed since it's so rare to see you here...

batt eyes...
big smile...
and toast to the boss....

then walked away...humming a little tune....

ohhh but we can dream....

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

LOL! <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/laugh.gif" alt="" />

Now that my confidence is coming back, so is my sarcastic humor. I am learning to bite my sharp tongue, though. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> No sarcastic humor allowed in Plan A.
my mantra:
calm
cheerful
confident
bite your tongue

I really find this WS babble anger provoking. I'm making myself breathe deep and count to 10 and repeat my mantra before I respond and if I feel that I can't say something that will not end in an argument or angry outburst, I'm keeping my mouth shut and politely excusing myself to go repaint my toenails. Believe, me that is a 180° that confuses WH to no end. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/cool.gif" alt="" />

The reverse babble won't work for me, it comes out too bloody nasty. My last shot at it was when I discovered that WH went biking with another female employee of his that is known to be the mistress of a married man. I said that I didn't like him sozializing with his female employees, especially the ones that do not respect the institution of marriage. He said that that was his leadership style. Me: "So your leadership style is to sleep with your female employees?" Ouch. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" /> WH: Are you trying to provoke me? Me: Are you trying to provoke me?

I bet he ran straight to OW with that one.