How long does one fight for one's marriage? I fought for mine for two years before I was served with divorce papers. Did I do the right thing? No. Here's the story in brief.

I met my now ex-wife when she was a graduate student. We dated for eight months before we decided to move in together. We lived together for a year before we decided to marry. Ours was a second marriage for each of us, so we pretty much thought we understood all the pitfalls and how to avoid them. While she was in graduate school, all was well and we experienced no real problems beyond those one expects to encounter in a new marriage. These were easily handled.

When she graduated, it became apparent that she would not be able to use her training in the city we lived in, so I gave up a job that I loved, a job that I'd been at for 15 years, and moved to another city. I took a management job that paid nearly twice what my prvious job paid, bought us a house, and settled in. The new job was a pressure cooker and initially I had to work 60-70 hours per week. For the year, my wife didn't work and then found a part time job. This was fine with me, since I made more than enough money for us to live well. I told her she could work or not as she desired. She wanted for noothing and the worst thing she had to endure was that I would occasionally come home late in the evening exhausted and grumpy from a hard 14 hour day at the office. She resented my working such long hours, but I assured her that it would not be this way for long, since I was in the process of building a staff to whom I would delegate much of the work I was doing.

Not long after we arrived in our new home, we were having lunch and ran into an old friend of hers and his wife. They joined us and we had a pleasant lunch together. The two of them had not seen one another in several years and had some catching up to do. His job required him to travel extensively and he and my wife struck up an email correspondance. Not being the jealous type, I thought nothing of this, not even when she revealed to me that they had once been lovers.

Not too long after this, a change came over my wife. Suddenly everything I did was an annoyance to her. I could do nothing right. She became distant, withdrawn, argumentative and completely unaffectionate. We still had sex, but her interest in it was lukewarm at best. This was distubing to me, since we'd now been married for nearly four years and had lived together for a year before that and had always had a model relationship. We had mutual interests and hobbies and, unlike most married couples, spent our evenings talking, reading together, or cuddled up watching a movie. So I didn't understand this sudden change. I feared that she may have been becoming depressed and suggested that she may want to see someone. I was told that their was nothing wrong with her, but that she "felt smothered" by our relationship. I then suggested that perhaps she should go back to work full time, that maybe she needed more intellectual stimuation than she was getting from just working part time. She agreed. But things just got worse.

I began to suspect that she was having an affair, though my mind couldn't accept that my wife would ever do such a thing. One day after having had a senseless argument, I confronted her and asked her straight out if she was having an affair. for a moment she was shocked, but then admitted that she was -- with her old lover. I remained calm and tried not to show how crushed I was that she had betrayed me in this way. I told her that we couldn't deal with this issue alone, but would need to get a councelor to help us through the crisis. I had no intention of throwing away a good marriage over an affair. She agreed.

A few weeks later, her lover's wife learned that he was having an affair not with my wife, but with another woman. Unlike me, she threw him out of the house immediately. My thought was that she'd see what a immoral two-timing [censored] she had hooked up with and also show him the road. To my horror, she went to him to comfort him when she learned that his wife had thrown him out.

I deliberately chose a woman therapist and one with a veruy good track record of success. She was terribly expensive, but my marriage was worth it. We started therapy and had a few private session with the therapist before starting couples therapy. the first thing out of the therapist's mouth on the first session was that my wife must do as his recommended on this site. She must end the affair immediately by sendning her lover a letter telling him their affair was over and that she would never see or communicate with him ever again. I nodded in agreement. My wife baulked and said that she would end the sexual relationship, but that I had no right to demand she give up her friendship with this man. The therapist told her that he was not her friend, but her lover and that should have thought about this before she slept with him. She reluctantly agreed.

But therapy wasn't going well. My wife refused to do any of the homework the therapist assigned. Much of it was similare to the things one would find here. She quit having sex with me and moved into the guest beadroom because she needed "space." The therapist had told her explicitly that she must not do these things, that we must continue to share our marital bed and that she must continue to have sex with me even if she didn't desire it. This situation went on for several months. Sometimes we'd talk and laugh together just as we once had, but most of the time she would find a way to turn even the most innocent statement into an argument. I began to loose patience with the whole situation and have to admit that there were times with I said some rather regretful things to my wife. In retrospect, I still can't believe I could say such things to a woman I loved. She now added a new weapon to the arsenal: I was verbally abusing her. I was shocked when she leveled this accusation against me. But not as shocked as the therapist, who told her that this simply wasn't true. She admitted that she'd joined an on-line woman's support group for women who where having marital problems. The therapist asked which one and then told her she was familiar with the group and that it was very toxic and dangerous. She was advised to drop out of it. She refused.

The stress was beginning to take it's toll on me. In the previous year I had lost 35 pounds and looked drawn and emaciated. I began to become physically ill. I didn't know how much more I could take. One day my wife announced that our therapist was a quack and that all she wanted to do is gang up on her with me. She would not be going anymore. I offered to allow her to choose a new therapist, but she said that marital therapy was just a bunch of psychobabble. I went to see the therapist alone. She told me that my wife's behavior was consistent with a woman who was still having an affair. She also told me that I must begin to come to terms with the possibility that my marriage may not be savageable. I confronted my wife about whether or not she was still seeing her lover. She said that she wasn't, though they had taleked on the phone a few times over the last several months, but just to see how each was doing.

A few weeks later, after giving it considerable thought, I sat my wife down and told her that I couldn't go on this way any longer. I told her that she either had to move back into our bedroom, reingage with me as my wife and return to therapy or that I would file for divorce. Divorce was the last thing I wanted and I still loved her, but it had become a matter of self-preservation. I told her she had one week to make up her mind. I was told that he'd hired a divorce lawyer two months earlier and that I would be served with divorce papers within the next few days. She'd been looking at houses for a couple of months and had already signed a contract on one. She didn't have the money for a down payment, but she'd get that in the divorce settlement. I almost fainted on the spot. I felt so betrayed.

I hired an expensive divorce lawyer, who told me that in my state there was nothing I could do to stop the divorce, but could only do damage control. He wanted to do some digging around to see if he could find out what my wife had been up to. I didn't like the idea of spying on her, but he said that I needed ammunition just in case. He requested detailed records of my wife's cell phone use. He could do this, because, while the pohone was listed in my wife's name, it was on my account. What he found was that she and her lover had been talking on the phone almost daily the entire time! She had not ended the affair. I confronted her with this and she became angry. yet she suddenly dropped many of the demands she was making in connection with the divorce settlement.

My lawyer suggested that I give her some of the household furnishings and send her on her way. The nature of our marital relationship was that she would not get much in the division of marital property, since we lived in an equitable distribution state and she had never contrbuted much to the household. Thankfully we didn't have children to consider either. Quite simply, she wasn't entitled to much and certainly not to the $75,000 in equity in the house she was demanding. Also to be consdered was that I had paid more than half the cost of her graduate degree. I couldn't bring myself to just send her on her way with nothing. She was earning less than a thrid of what I earned and I wanted to make sure she was set up and could support herself. So I gave her $25,000 for the down payment of her hew house and an additional $10,000 in cash to get her started on setting up household. My lawyer said I was being far too generous. But how can you be too generous to your wife?

The day finally came when she moved out. She moved into her new house on Saturday and ... hold on, wait for it, here it comes ... her lover moved in the following Wednesday. As it turns out, the two of them had been planning this for months. They'd gone looking at houses together and he'd even pick up the tab for her divorce lawyer. Seems that when some people go for betrayal, they go all the way.

That was two years ago. Since then, I've healed a lot. I had assumed that at 45 years of age, starting over again might prove too difficult a task. But it hasn't. It was hard at first and the first few months alone are rather foggy. But I survived and now have found and odd sort of peace. My life goes on and I'm generally happy, though I could not have imagined this possible two years ago. Things have changed for me. I have no desire to date. I tried dating for a short while about a years ago, but found that the women my age had hidden agendas. They didn't seem to want me, but a wallet to pay the bills or a new daddy for their children. There may be someone else out there for me, but to be honest I don't much care. I have to honestly ask myself if I will ever fully trust a woman again. Until I can answer that question in the positive, I have no business even trying to have a relationship with another woman. I understand now that my wife never really loved me but only used me.

So how did things turn out for her? Ah, well, you'd have never known that there was a problem in her life. She just picked up her new life and carried on as if I never even existed. She's still with her lover. Well kind of. What she never knew and I will never tell her is that her lover and I have some mutual friends. I know that he has three girlfriends in other cities to which he frequently travels. He can't seem to get home but one or two weekends each months and he will not always be found in the city he claims to have to be in to work through the weekend. She's being played for a chump and doesn't even know it. But she's not my wife anymore and it isn't my place to wise her up. She'll find out for herself one day. It will hurt her. But she deserves it. She's a cheater herself and that will always eventually come home to roost.

So what's the take-way message from this long post? if your spouse is having an affair, demand that it end immediately and that you have proof of it. If that doesn't happen, you have no choice but to end the marriage. Waiting around for the affair to end on it's own and trying to be the dutiful, loving spouse in waiting is just too damaging. It's better to end things early than to fight a hopeless war. Never accept betrayal without contrition. Understand that if both partners aren't fully committed to the process, marital therapy is a complete waste of time, effort and money. Accept that some people don't marry for any of the right reasons and you may not know what their reasons really are until it is too late. You must live for yourself and never allow yourself to chase rainbows. Accept that most people like the idea of marriage, but they don't want to put in the effort and sacrifice required to actually have a good marriage. If you find yourself in such a marriage, you don't have anything worth fighting for. Give it up and move on. Yet if you are married to someone committed to it, fight like hell to save it when it hits the wall (and it will).

Interesting first post.

Why do you think your ex-wife never loved you? Couldn't it be that her feelings changed? What about the 60 hour work weeks you were putting in, could that have led to the conditions that made the affair possible?

a conclusion from a sample of 1 . . . i prefer to use the Harley method which has a more statistically valid track record. . .

and btw, what part did you possibly have in the demise of the marriage?

wiftty

As I said, I told her the 60 hour weeks would not go on forever and just as soon as I had my staff in place, I cut my hours back to a normal 40 hour week. I kept my promise. But remember, when we first got together, she was a graduate student. She'd leave in the early morning, attend her lectures, teach in the afternoons, then do another lecture in the evening and get home at 8PM. She'd then spend the evening reading, writing, or doing research. Weekends were pretty much devoted to catching up on school work. This was her job, what she needed to focus on, and she never once during the three years she was in school heard a word of complaint from me. I supported her in her endeavor - just as a loving spouse is supposed to do. Just because your spouse is working long hours, doesn't give you an excuse to take a lover. Besides, I may have had to work some long hours, but she certainly didn't complain about spending all the money I was earning. She liked that part of it just fine.

To address your question, wiftty, I will say that this is the point of marital therapy. I naturally assumed that if my wife took a lover it was because she was looking to have needs met that I was falling short of the mark on. I downloaded the emotional needs questionaire from this site and asked her to complete it. The therapist thought this was a good ideal. She refused. I found that it is an absolute truth that when someone is involved in an affair, they will not work on their marriage. Actually, wiftty, I asked her to tell me what I had done to warrant divorce. She told me that my demand that she give up her OM forever was unacceptable. She said I was trying to control her life and dictate who she could have as friends and that she considered this abusive. She said she couldn't remain married to a dictator. Yeah, I know; how completely unreasonable of me to demand that while I'm breaking my butt at work, my wife not to slip out in the afternoons and screw another man!

I continued in therapy for a while after the divorce. I felt I needed a post hoc examination of my marriage in order to address the very question you pose, wiftty. My therapist finally asked me why I was even attempting to find fault in myself for the failure of the marriage. Sometimes, she said, the partner left behind didn't do anything worthy of divorce. Some months after she was gone, I was going through a file cabinet in the basement. Buried under some old documents, I found her divorce papers from her first marriage. She had told me that she divorced her first husband because he was cheating on her. What the divorce papers showed was that it was he who divorced her for adultry. And guess who was named in the suit as the OM? The same man with whom she cheated on me. Understand now, Greengables, why I say I don't believe she ever loved me?

Check, thank you for fleshing out the story. Now, your point of view makes a lot more sense.

I would agree some wayward spouses cheat just because they can, and that they'd do it no matter what the Betrayed Spouse did.

I'd also agree long hours isn't an excuse for an affair.

However, for those Betrayed Spouses who are working to save their marriage, being away from their spouse for long periods of time isn't good. For BS who "contributed to creating an environment which made an affair possible," there's a lot they can do to help restore the marriage.

Ultimately, each BS needs to discover for him or herself when it's time to DV.

--Waiting around for the affair to end on it's own and trying to be the dutiful, loving spouse in waiting is just too damaging. It's better to end things early than to fight a hopeless war. Never accept betrayal without contrition. --

I think this is where I disagree. This may have been true for YOU, but it does not necessarily true for everyone.

Great post. Well thought out and extremely well written.

I would be hard pressed to add or subtract anything to your final paragraph.

Best of luck and thanks for your retrospection!

Edited for spelling

BTW would you mind posting this over in GQII. I think it would get the exposure it deserves

I understand what you are saying, wiffty. But I wasn't trying to work on a troubled marriage at the time I was working long hours. At that point, I thought everything was going fine. My wife complained that I was working too many hours, but really didn't give me a lot of grief about it. To my knowledge, her affair started well after I had cut back my hours. Her affair was not about my working too much and I WAS a very attentive and loving husband. Her affair was about her, not me.

You are probably right that no one tactic is right for all and I can only speak from my own experience. Yet I have read in this forum where BSs have fought and waited and suffered, sometimes for years, while their WS did exactly what they damned well pleased. This will always exact a high psychological price from the BS. Sure, fight for your marriage, especially if it has been a good one. Troubled marriages DO get better. But one must also be realistic and not bindly pick up the emotional tab for a cheating spouse.