Almost 5 years ago now I began I flirtatious relationship with someone I work with indirectly. At the time my wife was in a high risk pregancy and we had two small children. Two months after the birth I slept with this woman twice. I continued a friendship with her for 6 months through email and phone calls but did not see her.

Six months later I saw her again and we slept together 3 nights that month. I told her then that I felt horrible and guilty and I loved my wife and broke it off. A few months later her boyfriend contacted me (she was also married). I felt very dirty and duped because she had told me that I was her first affair as she was mine. She made me feel special at a time when my wife and I had grown apart because of our busy hectic life.

I lived with the guilt of this affair for years and even contacted her every so often mostly because I wanted her to know that she had not damaged me in any way. In the winter she contacted my wife and I confessed to everything.

I take full responsibility for this affair. I was weak and self serving. This guilt has caused me to be a different person and when I admitted to my wife what I had done I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. I was so relieved that she would give me another chance and that I would not lose my family.

It has been 5 months now and we still talk about the affair all the time. She cries about it all the time. I am so sick of it and I told her so the other day. I had no feelings for this woman other than friendship. She was just a distraction from the craziness of our life.

My wife and I have always had a great relationship and I really missed that when all this started. I dont think this makes it ok. I know I was horribly wrong but I want to get past this.

I love my wife and I want to live our life and be happy. Life is too short to wallow in this misery.

Please help me get her to realize that there are worse things in this life. We could be so happy together if she would just get past this. I dont know how to help her and I am getting frustrated and making it worse.

Thanks

Welcome to MarriageBuilders! If you are willing to work, this forum and Dr. Harley's books and articles can help you both.

First of all, other than talking about it what have you all done...read any books, read the information on this site or gone to counseling????????

First off, re-read your first line of your post 5 years ago . . .

Now, when did your wife found out? 5 months ago?

You had 5 YEARS to deal with this. Your Betrayed Spouse has had 5 MONTHS to deal with it.

YOU made a CHOICE to deal with it- you wife has been FORCED to deal with your CHOICE.

There in lies the difference.

Has your wife been here to this site? Your story sounds vaguely familar, though they all do. If she hasn't, why don't you show her the site, maybe we could help her.

Have you been in counseling?

Why not call Steve Harley and make an appointment for some marriage counseling.

Have you read all of the articles on the site?

Have you read the book Surving an Affair?

There is another book you might read called After the Affair- it is downloadable on the internet at a site by that name.

I'm sure you do want to move on- but that is not so easy for a betrayed spouse.

Hang in here, read, post and read some more.

sosorry.....welcome to the forum. I'm going to say a few difficult things....but please know, they have been learned through a great deal of experience and training dealing with infidelity and recovery. So they might be hard to hear....but I hope you'll hear the truth of them.

I'm not really sure you are sorry....because your attitude right now, is still very selfish. 5 months is a drop in the hat of recovery....it's my experience that it takes a minimum of a year, and that's just until most of the tears dry up....the hard work starts after that. What you seem to be forgetting....is that YOU got all the benefit of the affair....the sex, the highs, the cure from boredom and the escape from your responsibilities. What did your wife get except pain and humiliation? Your contact with this woman went on for YEARS, but after a mere five months you expect your wife to just forget it? When you confessed, and had that big burden lifted off of you.....guess where it went???? Right on your wife's heart. So now you feel better....gee that's terrific....but wake up and realize that if you TRULY deserve your wife....than she deserves a man who's BIG enough and strong enough to let her GRIEVE. I'll tell you a little secret too....those tears....that you hate to look at because they remind of your unethical and selfish actions....are physical proof that wife still loves you and how lucky you are. Consider them gifts. Your wife was carrying and taking care of your baby while you were having sex with another woman. Maybe you're not finding too easy to forget the sex.....but how easy do YOU think it would be for you to forget if the tables were turned your wife was the one having sex with Joe Blow while you were taking care of the baby? You've anihilated the trust in your marriage. Trust takes YEARS to build and seconds to destroy. Are you telling me that you can't give your wife as much time to recovery from the affair.....as you spent dallying behind her back??? Please re-calibrate your attitude....or she may rethink her desire to renconcile. Many marriages survive D-day....only to fall apart in recovery because of issues just like these.

Now....if you want to help her get over her grief....get a copy of "Surviving an Affair" and read about what real compensation and accountability after an affair look like. What extra-ordinary precautions have to you taken to prevent this from happening again? What kind of recovery plan do you have to rebuild your marriage? Are you two in counseling....if not, why not? Just because you're "over it"....doesn't mean she SHOULD be. She gets to decide when.....and if you aren't patient enough....you don't deserve her.

Holy crap, you bludgeon the woman and then have the nerve to complain that her bleeding and moaning is getting on your nerves? <img src="/ubbt/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" /> WOW.

How about doing what it takes to help her recover from your very cruel betrayal? This is about as traumatic as the death of a child and she won't "get over it" too soon. You are looking at about 18-24 months for her to recover.

Since you inflicted the damage, you should be willing to do WHATEVER IT TAKES to help her recover if she is willing to keep you. And many betrayed spouses choose NOT to keep an adulterous spouse, so consider yourself damn lucky you weren't kicked to the curb.

Why not send her here and allow us to help her?

Welcome to marriagebuilders. It is a good place to be under the circumstances.

Actually, it doesn't sound like you "admitted" the affair to your wife, it sounds like the other woman told her. If I were your wife, that would worry me.

See if your wife will read here. I think we could really help her.

SSNH,

Welcome to Marriage Builders. You've found the right place if you are serious about wanting to build a new marriage.

I'm going to sound stern in my reply, but I think its warranted.

Obviously you are clueless as to the gravity of what you've done to your marriage or the severe damage and hurt you've caused your wife. Else you'd be more sympathetic, remorseful and patient with her.

Your marriage WILL NEVER BE THE SAME, NEVER. It has the potential to be a different and perhaps a better marriage, but it will NEVER be the same. And neither will you or your wife. You have eliminated the innocence in your relationship with her by your selfish act.

And now you are again being selfish by placing your demands on her to JUST GET OVER IT ALREADY. Like I said, where is your remorse? Where is your selflessness, your patience and compassion.

If you are not willing to try and grasp the gravity of the destruction your betrayal has caused, then its unlikely you and your wife will ever recover from this. It will always be looming in your marriage. ALWAYS.

I know because I lived it.

God Bless,
Jo

Sosorry:

I want to preface my comments here to say that although many of us tend to use a proverbial 2x4 when needed that I really believe that this is the absolute best site to learn the tools to rebuild a marriage after an affair. Although you will occasionally get a vent from a BS that doesn't say much positive most of the responses that you will get here are a product of each of our own struggles in trying to rebuild our lives.

I for one believe that an important part of the recovery process is for all of us to hear what we need to hear instead of what we want to hear. Unfortunately, I happen to agree with the other posters here that you are still focusing on the "you" in the relationship instead of trying to meet your wifes emotional needs and rebuild your marriage so that the focus in on her and us.

Adultery is a heartless, cruel and selfish act. It happens and can be worked through in a marriage. Many of us are here as a testimony to that. BUT....I seriously question why that you came clean with your wife to begin with. Was it only because the OW contacting your wife gave you the heeby jeebys and you wanted to cut your losses and do damage control or did the guilt really get you to a point that you finally decided that you had made your choices and now it was time to allow your wife to make hers?

A marriage cannot survive the cancer of dishonesty. An affair is all about dishonesty and deciet. You if think the burden of you carrying the guilt for your choice is difficult, have you stopped to think about the burden that you wife now has to carry because of your choice? You say that you feel terrible about your choices that were made over five years, but you want your wife to make the choice to forgive and forget in five months....sorry, you are still in the fantasy land of the affair world.

If you truly want to save your marriage and build from this you should immediately assure your wife of your committment by doing the following:

1) Acknowledge again that you not only take responsibility for your poor choices but that you cannot even imagine the pain that you have caused her by your poor choices. You can only empathize with her pain, you cannot feel it yourself but you will try your best to make her comfortable as she works through it. There is no pain medication for this one. Early after D-Day, I described the pain as someone reaching into my guts and pulling my stomach out without an incision. You have to recognize that it is not just her heart that is hurting, she is probably hurting physically too.

2) You need to assure her that although you cannot change what happened that you will be with her, comfort her, and do whatever you can to make it less painful for her NO MATTER HOW LONG IT TAKES, even a million, billion years.

3) You need to immediately get into IC and determine not only what in your makeup is so defective that allowed you to rationalize that an ongoing relationship with someone else other than your wife, especially while she was carrying your children was allright but also what changes you can make to become a better person and prevent this in the future. I have a few places that you can start. You are selfish, concerned only about your needs, void of concern for consequences and had been temporarily abducted by aliens. Hopefully the aliens have now been excommunicated from your body and mind but it is apparent from the title of your post Help.....ME, that you are still of the school of thought that the world revolves around you. It has been proven that the world revolves around it's own axis and if not for the miracle of gravity you would be centrifuged into space with hardly anyone noticing.

4) Take the emotional needs questionaire with your wife. Forget about your needs, focus only on how you can better meet her needs. For once, let the world revolve around her axis, even if that takes a million billion tears.

5) Learn and practice the policy of radical honesty. Bear your soul to your wife without regard to consequences to you. Radical honesty starts with being honest with yourself (see above). When practiced as the only alternative by both parties in a marriage, true intimacy can be reached even after one has participated in an affair.

6) Let her now make her choices about where to take this relationship. If she wants to no longer stay married to you, that is her choice and her's alone. That is the only choice that she gets to make in this whole deal and it really pales in comparison to getting to make the choice to potentially destroy many lives so you can get laid while she is pregnant. Respect her choices no matter what they are. If she wants to work on the marriage, you need to work even harder. The problem that most BS's have here is that they tend to have to shoulder the lion's share of the rebuilding process at least early on in the recovery. This is in addition to rebuilding their entire self worth, image of the sanctity of marriage and many other issues for personal recovery.

7) Spend a whole day with your wife without saying me or I even once. Make a practice of this exercise and you will finally learn just how much you have taken from this relationship and how little you have given.

8) Allow your wife to determine her own timetable for working through the recovery process and understand that this will be a battle with many relapses and setbacks along the way.

The new Dixie Chicks song is spot on on how a betrayed spouse feels even long after the AE and D-Day. Here are just some excerpts:

Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.....
You turned my whole world upside down....

I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,

They say time heals everything...I'm still waiting.

I read a post earlier where an old MB's sig line said "Time doesn't heal everything, it's what you do with that time"

In the time continuim of recovery, five months is a speck of fly doo-doo in the evolution process. Your wife has to grieve, then accept, then forgive and only then can true recovery really start. You are not even through the grieving process and if you expectations are that she should be ready to forget the whole matter, maybe enough time has passed for you to be radically honest with her and tell her that since she deserves so much more than you are willing to be, she should seriously think about moving forward while leaving you behind.

Probably not the advice that you were wanting to hear, but certainly the advice that you need to hear.

NT

ssnh, I'm not sure what it is you think your BW should be getting over so easily. Maybe what you don't realize is your BW's grief is about more than just the sex. It's about the loss of her belief that you were a loyal and trustworthy husband who would never do what you did... over and over again over several years, I might add. You have destroyed her faith and trust in you and the safety and security of your marriage.

As star* asked, how would you feel if the shoe was on the other foot and you found out your loving, loyal, faithful wife wasn't that at all, that she was actually having an on again off again affair for the past 5 years with a co-worker? Do you think it makes your BW feel better to know you destroyed the sanctity of your M for a "distraction"? Would it be okay for your wife to have a sex partner on the side for "distraction"? Can you try to imagine how this would make you feel and how long it would take you to "get over it" and trust her again, especially if she seemed indifferent to, or at least impatient about, the pain she had caused you?

You sound hurt that OW, in a sense, cheated on you, too. What if this hadn't been the case? Would the A still be going on? How much does your W know about the details? Don't you think this might make her feel like second choice?

[color:"blue"]Joseph's Letter[/color]

To Whomever,

I know you are feeling the pain of guilt and confusion. I understand that you wish all this never happened and that you wish it would just go away. I can even believe that you truly love me and that your indiscretion hurts you emotionally much the same way it hurts me. I understand your apprehension to me discovering little by little, everything that led up to your indiscretion, everything that happened that night, and everything that happened afterwards. I understand. No one wants to have a mistake or misjudgment thrown in his or her face repeatedly. No one wants to be forced to "look" at the thing that caused all their pain over and over again. I can actually see, that through your eyes, you are viewing this whole thing as something that just needs to go away, something that is over, that he/she doesn't mean anything to you, so why is it such a big issue? I can understand you wondering why I torture myself with this continuously, and thinking, doesn't he/she know by now that I love him/her? I can see how you can feel this way and how frustrating it must be. But for the remainder of this letter I'm going to ask you to view my reality through my eyes.

You were there. There is no detail left out from your point of view. Like a puzzle, you have all the pieces and you are able to reconstruct them and be able to understand the whole picture, the whole message, or the whole meaning. You know exactly what that picture is and what it means to you and if it can effect your life and whether or not it continues to stir your feelings. You have the pieces, the tools, and the knowledge. You can move through your life with 100% of the picture you compiled. If you have any doubts, then at least you're carrying all the information in your mind and you can use it to derive conclusions or answers to your doubts or question. You carry all the "STUFF" to figure out OUR reality. There isn't really any information, or pieces to the puzzle that you don't have.

Now let's enter my reality. Let's both agree that this affects our lives equally. The outcome no matter what it is well affect us both. Our future and our present circumstances are every bit as important to me as it is to you. So, why then is it okay for me to be left in the dark? Do I not deserve to know as much about the night that nearly destroyed our relationship as you do? Just like you, I am also able to discern the meaning of certain particulars and innuendoes of that night and just like you, I deserve to be given the opportunity to understand what nearly brought our relationship down. To assume that I can move forward and accept everything at face value is unrealistic and unless we stop thinking unrealistically I doubt our lives well ever "feel" complete. You have given me a puzzle. It is a 1000 piece puzzle and 400 random pieces are missing. You expect me to assemble the puzzle without the benefit of looking at the picture on the box. You expect me to be able to discern what I am looking at and to appreciate it in the same context as you. You want me to be as comfortable with what I see in the picture as you are. When I ask if there was a tree in such and such area of the picture you tell me don't worry about it, it's not important. When I ask whether there were any animals in my puzzle you say don't worry about it, it's not important. When I ask if there was a lake in that big empty spot in my puzzle you say, what's the difference, it's not important. Then later when I'm expected to "understand" the picture in my puzzle you fail to understand my disorientation and confusion. You expect me to feel the same way about the picture as you do but deny me the same view as you. When I express this problem you feel compelled to admonish me for not understanding it, for not seeing it the way you see it. You wonder why I can't just accept whatever you chose to describe to me about the picture and then be able to feel the same way you feel about it.

So, you want me to be okay with everything. You think you deserve to know and I deserve to wonder. You may honestly feel that the whole picture, everything that happened is insignificant because in your heart you know it was a mistake and wish it never happened. But how can I know that? Faith? Because you told me so? Would you have faith if the tables were turned? Don't you understand that I want to believe you completely? But how can I? I can never know what is truly in your mind and heart. I can only observe you actions, and what information I have acquired and slowly, over time rebuild my faith in your feelings. I truly wish it were easier.

So, there it is, as best as I can put it. That is why I ask questions. That is where my need to know is derived from. And that is why it is unfair for you to think that we can effectively move forward and unfair for you to accuse me of dwelling on the past. My need to know stems from my desire to hold our world together. It doesn't come from jealousy, it doesn't come from spitefulness, and it doesn't come from a desire to make you suffer. It comes from the fact that I love you. Why else would I put myself through this? Wouldn't it be easier for me to walk away? Wouldn't it be easier to consider our relationship a bad mistake in my life and to move on to better horizons? Of course it would, but I can't and the reason I can't is because I love you and that reason in itself makes all the difference in the world.

(end of Joseph's Letter)

This is so sad. So much destruction for a meaningless "distraction".

The title of your thread is all wrong.

It should read: "Help, I am killing her"

My H thinks very much the way you do. All he will say about the woman he finally had to confess to is, "She was nothing."

Well, apparently, she was enough of something for him to risk losing me.

So, if she was "nothing"; then, the logical conclusion for me is that, for the period of time that he was with her, I must have been LESS than nothing.

And, I am supposed to be the most important person on earth to him, other than God.

And, his attitude, like yours, is one reason why we are not in REAL recovery.

That you would hurt your wife for a "distraction" that you apparently aren't really sorry for is the real problem.

You screwed up. YOU need to make things right.

Adjust your attitude, buster, or you will LOSE your wife!

Hi
I am sosorrys wife. I have been here since about a month after dday. I have asked him to post several times and last night after a rough weekend I tok the reigns and pretty much held a gun to his head.

He does not understand the magnitude of what he caused. He is really a good person but has been very very weak during his guilty stage and after.

I honestly feel like he was more sensitive to me in Dec when I found out than he is now and I am much weaker.

The truth is the betrayal is killing ME. I am almost past the actual physical contact images that ran through my mind non stop for months now I cant believe he would lie to me for so long. He withdrew from me and the family because he thought I would leave him if I found out. His attitude towards my parents was cruel because he knew they would back me financially and otherwise if the truth came out. He thought my family would keep him from the kids.

There are so many questions I have that I need reassurance on like Letstry said...what if she didnt turn out to be such a nasty person...how would this have changed what he did? I cant ask him ANYTHING anymore because he is defensive.

To answer a few questions since I dont knowif he willbe back yes we started councelling right after dday. His idea. That day he came home from work after being there an hour and cried, called a MC and told me everything. There were also some other things I didnt know about. Internet porn, flirting with another girl from work etc. Everythign was out on the table.

Now when I ask him to clarify something like what was going on between you and the other girl he says it was nothing that day he admitted it was inappropriate since he is her boss.

We have read the Harley principle and I pretty much had to break his arm to do it. He feels good now and feels he doesnt need help recovering from the A. He jsut wants me to be "normal" and it makes me feel invisible.

Believer the letter from the OW was very vague and mailed from a different state than the one she lives in. She sent it to scare him so honestly if he had said I have no idea what that is I would have believed him. I had that mch trust then..my how things have changed. Nottoday I do believe he felt very very guilty I have talked with my friends about it over the years how he changed and was just so self destructive. It made so much sense whenhe told me what happened. It was the missing puzzle piece to why he couldnt STAY happy. It was a relief in a weird wasy because I had resigned myself to believing he was not as IN love with me as we had been when we were first married and that was just what I was going to get. The possibility of having him back the old H I used to have was so wonderful that even through the pain I could see a light.

Anyway thanks to all of you for taking the time to respond to him he has read the posts that were here this morning and my hope is that he will come back. I do love him more than words.

I am sorry for what you are going through but lets face it you are not the only one in that boat. We are all sitting here right next to you. Sometimes it feels like they gave all of the oars to the people on one side of the boat and we are just paddling in circles.

Sometimes I wonder what the heck goes through my FWW mind when she speaks. We had a conversation on Friday and when it came to her feelings she was completely logical. I could not even argue with her points. When we talked about my feeling all logic went out of the window.

I think we have all heard "OP meant nothing to me" that is really just a minimalization on their part.

Makes us feel like crap though. We all learned if then statements in school. If Johnny is taller then Suzy and Bobby is taller than Johnny who is the tallest. If OP meant nothing and you were with them instead of me that means I am less than nothing. Then comes "thats not what I am saying."

I think deep down we all want the same thing. We want our FWS to put the same energy into saving our marriage as they did destroying it during the A.

If that happened how much would we respect our FWS?

So Sorry Need Help,

So, you think your wife is still carrying on after 5 months. You felt guilty and had to confess after how many years??? It weighed heavy on your shoulders - you had to come clean. Because you took the weight of your shoulders and placed it on your wife's doesn't make it disappear.

Because you confess - it doesn't stop there - or in a week - or even in a couple of months. You can't imagine how hurt this makes your wife feel. Because you say you didn't love her - it doesn't make a difference. Imagine if your wife did this to you. Can you imagine how she feels when she visually sees the two of you being intimate together - something that was only meant for you and her?

People that go outside of the marriage think - well, it's over – I said I was sorry – what else can I do - what are they carrying on about? I went thru the same thing with my husband. He not only talked and thought this way - he stayed working with the OW for 10 months. Isn't that a slap in the face? But, it was over between them - so I was supposed to except the situation – what’s the big deal. Not only that he would make all the ultimatums - tell me to stop talking about it - stop being a drama queen.

You've got to understand - you took away all the trust, the faith, the intimacy that the two of you had - and given your wife the exact opposite. It takes a long time to regain that back. Your wife did nothing to deserve this. Why did you do this- because you were going thru a rough period in your marriage? That’s not an excuse - many people go thru rough times and they don't stray.

Do you think all these people are on MB are complaining for nothing – just so they can post to each other? When you are betrayed you are genuinely hurt – beyond words.

My husband, his family put me thru heck and back and I never strayed - because I knew the repercussions were worse – my family was worth more – than if I was selfish and satisfied my own ego. I hung in there - but when my husband thought life was passing him by - he decided to cheat and put me thru more heck. I treated him like he was "King Tut", but did that matter - of course not.

Cheating is a selfish and self-centered act - you think of no one but yourself. So, when your wife needs time - give it to her. If she can't be up to SF - think of how she sees you and the OW in each other's arms. I’m sure you’d love to see your wife kissing, caressing, having sex, touching him, saying intimate things to another man – just visualize it. Just, for one moment, put yourself in her place. 5 months is nothing. Be gentle and understanding – she is trying to deal with this the best she can.

Most of all be honest with her in every respect - and communicate.