Hi,

My WH and I have been separated now for 2 months after he left home. He now says that he will never come back because he is happy. He says he feels so good now that he can't imagine coming back. He tells everybody that we should never get back together because we are both happier apart.

He told me that he wold never come back and that he is not ready to talk to anybody about it. He says that there is just too much water under the bridge. On the other hand he has told his mother and aunt that he wants an alternative financial and visitation arrangement because he misses his children and he is always broke and does not want to continue living that way. He also says that I was too possessive in the relationship. I don't believe that I was, in fact a lot of people tell me that I gave him too much leeway and actually made it easy for him to have affairs. He had lots of female friends and I never stopped him from going out with them even when I was not there. The only time I put my foot down was with the ow. He said that I seemed to get angry when he went out with friends. To some extent I did resent his going out with friends because he almost never went out with me.

He also seems to accuse me of being unsupportive because I exposed his affair (with a co-worker) at his work place. He has since left that work place but I think he is still seeing the co-worker.

I truly love this man and I believe that if he were to end his affair and focus exclusively on the marriage we could make it work because there were things that made both of us unhappy, but he has refused to even consider a reconciliation. Owing to the circumstances under which he left I did not have an opportunity to initiate a propoer plan B, is it too late? Is there any possibility that my marraige can be saved or am I just flogging a dead horse.

Lakeri

Me (BS) - 32yrs
WH - 36yrs
Together - 13yrs
Married - 6yrs
3 children 5,3 and 1
OW - 34 (WH's former assistant)
Affair started: jan-05
exposed - August 05
reconciled - Oct 05
separated - Jan - 06

I read through a few of your old posts. Are you in Plan A still? Have you read a copy of Surviving An Affair yet? Which other books have you read?

There's no reason to assume that your WH should be any different than others. They ALL go ballistic when they're exposed, and they ALL say they're never coming back. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

Have you established a legal custody/visitation agreement, or are you and your WH just working it out as you go along?

I was still in Plan A when he left. I didn't get a chance to initiate plan B. I have read Surviving an Affair and I have also read His needs, Her needs as well as His Needs, Her needs for parents.

we had an informal custody/visitation arrangement but I am working on a more formal arrangement so that everything is more stable and the financial or custody issues don't become issues for arguement.

lakeri ~ my husband and I were seperated for 18 months. The first 9 months he maintained that I was psycho, he was happy and never coming home.

It took him another 9 months to pull his head out of his posterior.

We will be 5 years recovered in August of this year.

You can still do Plan B!! Let the good people here help you with your plan A and when you are ready, do Plan B.

Don't give up yet. We can't promise that your marriage can or will be saved. We CAN promise that if you follow the MB plan, that you will be able to walk away from your marriage peacefully, and look your children in the eyes with a clear conscience that YOU did everything you could to save it.

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

Ws says he is happy but the fact is that he is broke, misses his children, can't talk to anybody about what...his happiness and doesn't want to continue living that way?

Does that sound like a happy man to you? Hm....

Now let's check you out. How far are you with your plan A? Done with your personal improvements? Ready to move to plan B? Yep, you are separated and prime time t/d a plan B ..... while he is soooo happy.

Ok, now do you see this babble? Does any of this make sense to you? If not, do NOT make plans based on his status or state of mind.

Instead you work on strengthening you and protecting your family financially and emotionally. When you present yourselves do it as 1 pkg. It's the family against the WS. He says he misses the children, tell him the family misses their H and father but NOT the WS.

He claims he is broke, let him knwo he is still obligated to his family responsibilities. If he says he can't then ask him if his so called happiness is worth throwing his family away. If he says he is too broke, tell him to go and get the $$ from the OW.

I did that. The OW was willing to pay blood $$ to the WS. WS was smart enough to know that was tainted $$ and refused, so I told him to go and get us the $$ we deserved because we certainly didn't want a WS back. However, I told him we'd be willing to suffer a bit only if our H and dad came back. So the broken H and dad came back....we've been in repair. See we didn't stoop to his level, he came back and asked our forgiveness. It took a while though.

L.

lakeri, the answer to your title question is "yes," frequently around here.

Your husband is still living in his fantasy world, though your comments about his "always being broke" are indicative that the REALITY is begining to break through the fantasy fog he is enveloped in.

For now, though, the fog is still thick and it will take more time for REALITY to burn through the fog. So you must continue to be patient.

DO pursue a formal, legal, arrangement based upon his abandonment of the family. You CANNOT control what he chooses to do, but you CAN expect the courts to uphold his obligations to you and the children.

It is time that the realities of his choices get consequences attached to them.

IF you are ready for plan B, do so in conjunction with formal support arrangements. If meeting his obligations to you and the children leaves him "always broke," that's HIS problem, not yours. Right now he still thinks he can act as a single person and have his cake and eat it too. YOU, have to do the work of two people, even though it's not fair, and keep the reality "alive and well."

There is a threat to the physical and mental health of your children out there...and that threat is the OW. It is time for you, in loving protection of your children, to FIGHT. Nature has proven time and time again that it's not a good idea to corner a mother and threaten her cubs. Momma will turn at some point when she thinks "retreating" won't work and will fight tooth and claw to protect her cubs. YOU need to adopt that same sort of "call of the wild" as God has given the gift of your children into your care and keeping as well as your husband's. If he is refusing to perform his God-given role, then you do the work for both of you until he leaves or comes back...but no "both ways."

God bless and comfort you through these difficult times.

Thanks to all of you for the support and advice. I have talked to the lawyers and we are working out a formal settlement for maintenance and custody.

I realise that I may have been cutting him a lot of slack which was helping him stay in the fog. I will take your advice and make sure that he keeps up his side of the arrangement.

I knew the OW before he did and I know she is not really the type to support him especially if there is not much coming her way. She likes the good life and that is what she got while he was at home and I was subsidising most of his other activities.

THanks for all the support. It is of great help.

I think it's good to be in Plan A while you're doing that. It gives you an opportunity to 'rattle his pea' a little bit with Reverse Babble. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />
(See Orchid's link at the bottom of her post and bone up on it.)

While you're using this last few days/weeks of Plan A, doing the things you need to do in preparation for Plan B....you're poking holes in his fantasy bubble and letting a little daylight in. He'll huff and puff, but you get an opportunity right now to turn his choices back on him.

So, when he comes to complain about how you're making his life tough financially and why can't you wait for awhile to formalize things, you can say to him, "But WH, you said you're NEVER coming back. "Never" is a pretty long to wait, isn't it?". And then you get the pleasure of batting your lashes and giving him a wide-eyed look like you can't possibly understand why he's upset, right?

This last little bit of Plan A is a time when you can put a bit of cest la vie in your attitude. You're just a woman doing what she needs to do in order to take care of her family afterall.

That leaves WH standing goggle-eyed on the platform, shaking his fist and muttering to himself....while the train slowly starts pulling away. <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Its been a while since I last posted here.

My WH and I have been separated now for 9 months. he is living in our old apartment after evicting the tenants. In the course of the last months we had agreed on maintenance and I have custody of the children (3). My WH vists every other weekedn. he usually takes them out.

Last weekend i was going out of town so i decided to inform him, in case of emergency. He told me he was going away for the weekend although he didn't say where. I did have my suspicions that he was going away with the OW but I didn't raise them. After I had left he called me on my cell phone to tell me that he had taken the kids with him. When they came back my two older children told me that they had been with a woman, a friend of their dad's and that they had even shared a bed with her. The OW used to be friend of mine and so when I should them a picture of her, they confirmed that that was the woman they had been with. When I contacted my husband about it he apologised profusely and said that he had no choice as he had already planned the weekend trip and he couldn't leave the children on their own. i reminded him that i had not asked him to take the kids as there were other people with them, but he just apologised and said he would not do it again.

I have since discovered that the OW, who lives in another town spends most of her weekends at his place, so the affair is still going on. Its still very secretive because he makes sure that they are never seen in public together. On his birthday, his kids insisted on giving him a gift so we got hin a ticket for a charity concert. He has a senior job in a large corporation and it turns out his company had corporate tickets for the event, although he didn't say so. It turns out that he attended the event with his colleagues from work although the OW was also there secretly and it appears on the ticket from his children. i am deeply offended by his behaviour particularly as it seems he is being two faced. he continues to see this other woman but tries to involve himself in our lives. he recently called and asked if we could have a birthday party at home for our youngest son. In the light of all the things that he has done in the last few weeks I am more tempted to restrict his vistation rights rather than hold a birthday party. i don't understand what this man wants. He asked for his space and I gave it to him, despite all the pain that this caused me.

I would have still wanted to make our marriage work especially for the kids who are now beginning to ask a lot of questions. (They asked why I didn't go along with them last weekend and apparenlty they were told that it was because I didn't want to) and also because I think that whatever issues we had they could have been resolved, but I really don't know what to do. The OW seems to be pretty determined to stay around and is now trying to suck up to my kids. It seems they delibarately didn't want me to know that she was there or who she was because she refused to tell my kids her name and my daughter had to just give her a nickname.

What is going on here and what would you advise me to do.

Lakeri

Me (BS) - 32yrs
WH - 37yrs
Together - 13 yrs
Married - 7 yrs
3 children 6,4 and 2
OW - 35 (WH's former assistant)
Affair started: jan-05
exposed - August 05
reconciled - Oct 05
separated - Jan - 06

EXPOSE!!!! At his work, his relatives, neighbors and most of all to the children. Let them know he prefers to be around OTHER PEOPLE instead of his family. Let them know that certain former family friends are no longer family friends because these PEOPLE want to hurt the family in sly ways. Your children will understand and what they don't tell them to ask. Keep on asking until they understand. Let them even ask the WS. Do a complete background check on the OW and find a way to legally keep the OW out of your children's lives.

Your WS is a jerk. Big time. Protect yourselves.

L.