Mrs. Tomfool, welcome to MB. I am well acquainted with what it's like to live with a P/A spouse and so are many of us here. In fact, there is a very long and ongoing thread devoted to it over on the "In Recovery" board. You might want to take a look at it; the link is below in my signature line.

Yes, we can sympathize with having a conflict-avoiding, passive/aggressive spouse.

What we cannot sympathize with is your decision to do the *one thing that is guaranteed to make the situation worse*: Go out and find another man while you're still married. That is never ever justified for any reason. If your spouse is terrible and you hate living with them, then you are justified in leaving and divorcing them - but you are NOT justified in complaining about them and cheating on them while conveniently still living with them.

That's guaranteed to ruin the very best of marriages, never mind one that is severely troubled already.

If you want to go on punishing your husband, destroying your own family, making a cheap fool out of yourself and putting your kids through h*ll and public humilation, then feel free to go right on dating your boyfriend while your husband stays home with the kids.

But if you want a chance at recovering your marriage and solving the problems it had the first time around, then I'd suggest the following:

1) Start your own thread. You do not post to Tom's thread and he does not post to yours. We have seen this before where couples just come here to argue with each other in public. That doesn't help anything. Each of you start your own thread and do NOT post to each other's thread.

2) Call the Harleys - there is info on this site - and schedule a telephone counseling session with them.

3) Get a copy of *Surviving an Affair* and *His Needs, Her Needs*. Read them cover to cover and then come back here to ask any questions you have.

What will NOT work is for you to think you can somehow have both your marriage and your boyfriend and that you're entitled to this because your husband doesn't give you what you want. That has never, ever worked for anyone. You may as well save everyone a lot of grief and money and just get your divorce today.

But if you'd rather try to save your family, heal the damage and make it a better marriage than it was before so that BOTH of you can get what you need from it, you will get much support for that here.

Just please start your own thread.

And welcome to MB.
Mulan

Mrs. Tom Fool, Welcome. Like Mulan said, you need to start your own thread.

I hope you do that and continue posting. MB is a really useful site for saving families.

ONLY if both are committed to R-E-C-O-V-E-R-Y.

Mrs. TomFool is active in an affair. And has not committed to end the affair and work on recoverying their marriage.

[color:"blue"]SaturnRising,
Active in an affair does not equal committed to recovery.[/color]

Mrs. TomFool,

Your best chance at happiness is with the father of your children, not with a man who was willing to help you lie and cheat. What if your lover tires of you and moves on to another person? He doesn't believe in marriage vows or he wouldn't be helping you to cheat on your husband.

Your husband may have thought that commitment to marriage means you have to put up with whatever he decides he wants to do. Any woman who has two young children and is willing to cheat on her husband needs to look in the mirror and ask herself how good of a wife she has been. No matter what he has done, he doesn't deserve infidelity -- divorce, maybe, but not infidelity. People have to paint their spouses as uncaring in order to justify their own lack of care.

Look ahead five years. Look ahead to the man of your dreams dropping you for another, and -- in the meantime -- those two young children growing up with bobbing back and forth between homes. Just last week, I was at school, and a child of divorce was supposed to be picked up but wasn't -- some mixup. How does that child feel? My heart goes out to him because he seems so like my own son.

Not that your stories of your husband aren't true, but his past actions don't dictate how he'll be in the future, especially after the trauma of his finding out that his wife is involved in an affair. He still wants you.

That little boy left at school -- well, his Mom had an affair and divorced the Dad. It was an amicable divorce. The Mom and Dad would attend school events together. The Dad did remarry, to a divorced woman with a child of her own. So, they send their son back and forth every three days, and the stepdaughter goes back and forth to her dad every other day. Now the second wife is pregnant with a child due in January. That child's Dad is busy! He's got a wife, a stepdaughter, and -- oh, yeah -- his son.

Meanwhile, that child's Mom told me that her boyfriend and she are getting married. When, I asked? We don't have a date. Boyfriend wants us to buy a house together and move in before we marry, but I don't want that because I think we may never marry. Well, she's probably right about that.

Is it possible she's wishing her son's Dad hadn't remarried? Would she be open now to returning to her first husband since her boyfriend is delaying marriage indefinitely? I don't know. What I do know is that that option doesn't seem open to her at this point, since her ex-husband has a new wife and new baby on the way.

Is that where you'll be in five years? My husband, in reflecting on his affair, once said, "You cannot separate the person from the situation." He realizes now that the way he treated his lover was insulting. He used her. Are you being used?

Take some time to consider. People can change. The situation you are choosing to create for your children is not the best. The man who is most likely to care for those children is the biological father, not a new lover. You know that, so you need to be vehement in saying you will never love him again and what he has done is so horrible that there is no possibility of his changing.

Lies.

People can change. Your husband seems open to change. Give him that chance to be the husband you need. He has failed you in the past. You may have made matters worse by having an affair, but from what you describe he has indeed failed you in the past. He's willing to create a marriage that works for both of you and those two children.

Respectful