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going up.

Bumping a must read for betrayed spouses.

bumping for everyone because it's just so good.

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thanks Hiker. Very nice post. I have a long way to go. But posts like these gives me the confidence that i am not alone and tells me my situation is not that unique as i thought it first was!

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How can we permanently engrave this somewhere?

Hi Imagine,

I find the two Romantic Affairs threads invaluable, but I'm not sure of the wisdom of pinning them at the top of a forum ("permanently engraving"). The romantic affair seems to be the most embedded and thus the most difficult kind of affair to overcome. If newbies were to read of its dynamic, they would probably collapse in despair of ever recovering their marriages.

It is hard to know during the early period after D day whether an affair is "romantic" or not. My first D Day was after about 2 months of an affair that was conducted abroad (I live in England and OW lives in Europe). My WH's explanation showed that I had caught it early, that there had only been 3 or 4 sexual encounters, and that there were no feelings of love on either side. We decided to recommit to our marriage. When I had a second D Day exactly 2 years after the first, I discovered by reading their text messages that this was by then a deep love affair. The first text message I read was from OW, asking if she should "continue to wait" for my H or make her own marriage work. The reply from WH was that he felt the same as she; "lacking commitment here and wanting to be with you". They clearly had plans to leave their marriages at some time in the near future. As you can imagine, I nearly died reading these.

Despite my telling him to leave if he wanted to be with OW, my WH stayed with me and continued the PA for another 14 months, under my nose and through more D days for me. I was convinced that this was a romantic affair because I could not see why else my H would risk losing his marriage and children. I was certain that he was only staying with me because he did not want to leave his 9 year-old son yet, as he continually told OW.

Theirs was a very difficult affair to break (especially before I discovered MB and while I did everything the wrong way), and the words written between them spoke of deep love. However, when I finally contacted OWH (post MB!) and between us we pieced together the history, we discovered that what my WH had always told me had been true. He was strongly addicted to the sexual element of the affair and would pursue this as long as he thought I could not know about it, but his "love" if such it ever was, had always been shallow. Digital technology, which makes secret communication so easy for affairees, is wonderful where it provides hard evidence long after the events. The emails and text messages that OW saved showed that while she was a woman deeply in love, who moved first out of her husband's bedroom and then out of her marital home leaving her teenage son behind, for my WH, he was a despicable cake-eater.

Discovering that I was not married to a man in the grip of a romantic affair but instead to an unprincipled freeloader brought different recovery problems for me, but the point I am really trying to make is that it can be difficult to know what kind of affair one is really dealing with at first, and sometimes for a long time.

Affairs stink in all cases, of course.

Thanks sugarcane,

I need to keep this as useful list to refer people to. I think that I have read through this account maybe three times before.

Excellent thread.

I think my WH is in the grip of a romantic A. It is incredible to me that he is prepared to give up everything, his 4 daughters, all his family and friends, their respect etc all for her. It's illogical in the extreme but I don't have the stamina to hold out waiting for years for the A to fizzle out.
Thanks, Sugar, for bumping for my attention.

Any time, my dear friend, although I wish I hadn't had to.

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