"A co-worked confided to me that her sister (divorced) was having an affair with a MM. This co-worker wanted the BW to know, but wouldn't expose because she didn't want her sister to be mad at her.

That is a shame, I think."

I agree, it is a shame... and not just because fialure to expose further harms the BW (and BC) but also because it harms the adulterers to the longer it takes them to end their addiction.

I've noticed that a LOT of people I know are ONLY opposed to adultery IF the BS is themselves or somebody they are close to... BUT if they are the WS or OP, or a friend or relative is, or EVEN if just a coworker or mere acqaintances is (they do't even have to know the adulterers very well - just have met them apparently vs have not met the BS), then they somehow convince themselves that giving support to the adulterers is OK.

Amazing IMHO. Basically they are not really opposed to adultery at all just are 'siding' with their friend/relative/acquaintance, 'supporting' whatever it is they're up to totally ignoring the question of morality.

"I wasn't going to intrude on your thread, but when I read this ... sheesh! He actually thought he'd be able to tell you to teach your kids that adultery is ok?
Kudos to you for having instilled morals so they didn't depart from them... too bad the youngest was young enough to be influenced. Maybe it's only temporary."

Oh yea, and that was not even the most ludicrous thing he tried to convince me of LOL! A few others:

He was going to have to stay in contact with the OW and her kid because her kid had become 'attached' to him... (Thankfully he turned out to not be the bio father of her kid and the real father did NOT want my WH around his daughter - whew!)

He had to go back to OW and go through with divorcing me because he had "made a committment to her and her family" (um we were still married and he had also just made a promise to me and our daughters days before that he had broken up with OW for good)...

I HAD TO move in with him (after OW dumped him for another man) because I was being evicted from our home BUT we could never remarry because he "couldn't stand to live with me"... (Oh and I was supposed to keep it a secret form his family too if I moved in with him. Because I said NO to this 'reconciliation offer' it's my fault "it didn't work out and we can't ever get back together"...

It was "white trash" of me to call the police when he head-butted me and threatened to kill me, "the police don't want to be bothered by that", and I wasn't REALLY afraid enough to need to get a resraining order, I was just doing that to be vindictive and/or to try to prevent him from having visitation with our daughters (who BTW were refusing to have anything to do with him anyway)... BUT just because I called the OW and told her some truths she didn't want to hear she was supposedly so afraid she had to send the police to my home and threaten to get a restraining order against me if I didn't leave her alone...

When OW took him back (um resumed the adultery) with him after he had begged his way back into my life, he said he had to go back to her because he had to give her a lot of credit for being willing to take him back... never mind that I had taken him back after learning he was cheating with her and apparently wasn't being given any credit for that...

Oh and one of my favorites: The reason he was cheating on/divorcing me was because he knew I would act angry if he did, and that made him so angry he had to cheat on/divorce me...

Some other 'reasons' he was divorcing me: He was reminding himself "to keep hating" me whenever he started to feel ambivalence or maybe wanting to save the marriage... He "had to go through with the divorce" because he was going to be "strong"... We could get back together again after his job here ended and he took a job in another state BUT he and to go through with the divorce and couldn't reconcile with me yet because he wouldn't know how to explain it to his coworkers (BTW, he's supposedly depressed and lonely now, and the one who tried to reconcile but I wouldn't because I "cared too much about what others thought")...

When I found out he was still lying to his mother and the OW about why he came home for one reconciliation attempt, telling them I wouldn't allow our daughters to even talk to him otherwise, he said it was none of my business what they were told, I wasn't allowed to talk to them, that I "cared too much what others thought", and that his mother was "a stupid old woman who's going to die soon anyway"!!! (I still suspect that after she does die he will make another reconciliation effort)...

Oh and about our youngest daughter cutting herself and saying she felt like Daddy was preteding she was dead when he was with the OW and her little girl, and talking about killing herself, he said: "that's what suicide hotlines are for, don't bother US" and later he tried to tell me that cutting wasn't dangerous or a problem, just a popular new teenage trend...

And he actually thought he was making sense and neither he or the OW has expressed the teensiest bit of remorse for what they did.

I feel very bad for you MM. I have so much anger for the OW in my story but at least my FWH has shown remorse.

The OW has not "bashed me" per se (at least not that i am aware of except to my face) but she certainly was a real fatal attraction.

She stalked my H for quite some time before the A began (I know my FWH choice what he done with her pursuit) with him telling her all along that he was married and that he loved his wife (verified by others at his company). She broke into my house and took our TV (to give to my FWH when he came back to her), she called me non-stop during my H illness, she said horrible things when she spoke to me, she even called and told my 15 year old DS that she had slept with his dad.

To this day i think i feel more anger towards her than i do my FWH. I am not sure if it should be that way but it is the way i feel.

Mere, what reserves of strength you must have had, to be able pull you and your children through this and to continue having to keep doing so!

He is a real piece of work. Has he always been like this, or have the affairs made his attitude toward his own children even worse?

I do hope that you and your children are progressing forward into a stronger, healthier place for your sakes. Are your daughters growing stronger? I remember reading with sadness how one daughter gave up her skating and how another tried to express her pain via cutting.

I understand that spouses can grow to hate each other, but
I cannot understand how a parent can ever look so callously on the pain of their children.

Well, I love my family members and don't want them to be mad at me for anything, but I love them enough to try and stop them from hurting themselves by wrongdoing, whether they get mad at me or not. For instance, my DD was in an inappropriate "friendship" with a guy who kept coming by our business to hang around and talk to her. He's a player, and I knew that there was nothing good about the relationship. I called his wife.

I also talked to him and told him that if he didn't end all contact with my DD, I would keep calling his wife, because I did not raise my daughter to be some MM's ho.

Yes, WWIII broke out, but I stood my ground. My DD got over it.

She did? That's wonderful! I must have missed reading that, but belated congratulations!

Thank you, Neak! Yeah, she was plenty mad. Tried to claim that I could have gotten her killed if his wife had wanted to come shoot her or something. I said, "No, your trying to mess with her husband would have gotten you killed. Other people were already talking about how he was always hanging around where you were. If you'd kept on, you would have really gotten in deep, so you should thank me for saving your life by getting this thing ended NOW."

Anyway, we had it out, and since then, we've had hardly any problems at all with getting along. Her father tried to tell me, in front of her, that what she does is none of my business, but I told him that he needed to butt out of the relationship between her and me...which has long been a major problem for me.

Since then, we had one slight disagreement where he tried to butt in, and I told him, "Your interference is neither wanted nor appreciated."

He no longer butts in between DD and me.

Not very MB-like of me, but both father and daughter have a lot more respect for me now. I was majorly PO'd at him, and he knew it.

I think it is somewhat easier if it can be done on a one by one basis as opposed to being in the midst of a group. I wonder if the concerned sister could contact the BW anonymously and tell her about the affair? Most affairees do encounter other people (unless sis and MM are only meeting in the dark in out of the way places) in their carrying on. Would the wayward sis know for sure that her sister had exposed? It might not be the bravest way to go about it, but it might help her do something that she feels is the right thing without destroying her relationship with her sister.

Jumping back to the SIL around the family table who didn't speak up, sometimes mixed in the fear of going against the flow, is the fear that an argument is going to break out.

Some folks find it too difficult to be near disagreement, much less near strong disagreement. The SIL who speaks up might find that she is the brunt of everybody's anger for just stirring things up and causing a family feud.

People are complicated.

My co-worker felt sure that her sister would assume that she was the one who had "ratted her out".

As it turns out, she told someone else (a friend of the BW) and this person did indeed inform the BW of the affair. The BW apparently gave her H the boot.



Yeah, I suppose they are. I feel a total lack of respect for this co-worker because it just seems so spineless to me to place higher value on keeping the peace in favor of doing the right thing, but then I wonder if I'm just being judgmental. Just because *I* don't mind stirring things up doesn't necessarily mean that she is wrong for not wanting to, does it? Nah...there I tried to have an open mind for a minute. It didn't work. I still feel a lack of respect.

"I cannot understand how a parent can ever look so callously on the pain of their children."

Oh I totally understand how that happens:

It starts with caring more about impressing the OP than about their own family. It starts with the realization that it's much eaiser, and perhaps even more rewarding (in the beginning anyway), to get your EN for admiration met by somebody who has not yet learned too much about you. It starts with a valid need - for admiration, exploited to serve an evil purpose - the destruction of a marriage and family. It starts with the temptation to get admiration, not by BEING a person your wife and children could admire, not by being the one who protects and defends his marriage and family, but by simply being a con artist with an OW who is either Sooooooooo simple-minded that she doesn't suspect in the slightest (not likely) that he is lying to her OR (mouch more likely) is a con artist herself rewarding him with admiration and pretended belief in his lies to suit her own evil admiration-achieving agenda.

IMHO adulterers often share a realization that in order to get their valid need for admiration met inside the marrige they will have to actually start behaving in a manner that their spouse and kids could admire and respect. They then realize they don't really want their spouse and kids to REALLY admire and respect them so much as to fear and worship them... and they don't want to solve their problems which prevent them from getting more admiration and respect at home. So it's just a lot easier for them, instantly rewarding without all the work of fixing their problems, to just go play make-believe with an OP who is equally lacking in true character.

Then once started, it continues because they are addicted.

And even long after the adultery has ended they sometimes stubbornly refuse to face the truth, continue to bash the betrayed, and continue to pose as supposeldy decent folks because they STILL would rather get away with merely pretending to be a good person than to actually become a better person.

And why not? There's not exactly a shortage of people so gullible, OR just as guilty as they are of being posers, willing to play along and give them all the 'support' they crave, is there?

I once asked our family counselor why my WH didn't realize that the continued love and concern my daughters and I expressed towards him, in spite of what we knew about him, was genuine love compared to the shallow admiratrion he got from OW BECAUSE they only 'knew' him based on the act he put on for them. HE KNEW he wasn't showing them his real self, so therefore he also knew they didn't really love or accept him, right? Our family counselor said he didn't want ANYONE to really know him, that is part of the reason he resented us and treated us so cruelly. He didn't appreciate us loving him or even forgiving him. I guess you could say his ONLY goal was to be percieved/treated as something he knew he was not and didn't want to bother to become.

The irony is the family counselor also confirmed the OW was most likely doing the exact same thing BUT that my WH was the more naive of the two because he didn't realize it. So while he was getting high off of thinking he had conned a sweet innocent girl into 'loving' him he didn't even know he was just experiencing the placebo affect. She didn't really 'love' him OR believe his con job. AND she wasn't any more sweet and innocent that he was. She had her own recipe that he his fat paycheck was the main ingredient for.

BTW, the OW was well aware of the damage the adultery was doing to my daughters. And she didn't care either. Oh she 'cared' that other people knowing about it made it more difficult for her to pose as sweet and innocent while she CONTINUED the adultery...

The whole skating community was aware of and shocked by my oldest daughter quitting skating. Even after she had been off the ice for a couple of years she still got a written invitation from a synchronized skating team to please join without even having to audition. And then a year after that another skating team was telling her they would allow her to compete with them even though they had already had mandatory practices the entire summer without her. This OW was a coworker of my WH and there was another coworker who had a sakter daughter. The OW knew knew.

Also, my oldest daughter co-taught the Irish dance lessons with me. She was very popular and exhibited real leadership qualities. She and her sister helped me organize and host the first area homeshcool prom. Even if I had not called the OW to update her on what was going on with my daughters, there is no doubt whatsoever that she was well aware of what effect it was having on my daughters.

IMHO her failure to correct the bashing and false rumors she spread about me is not mere oversight on her part (or even embarrassment or genuine shame). She WANTS the negative perception of me that was created by her bashing of me to continue, so that combined with her efforts to portray herself as a community do-gooder, she can hopefully prevent the public knowledge of her attempt to steal my husband from damaging her ability to pull off pretending to be sweet and innocent... so she can catch the next man...

She is more like my WH than she wants anyone to realize. Her social-climbing agenda trumped any feigned concern over the fate of my daughters. She REWARDED my WH for turning his back on his daughters and putting her and her kid first.
And while it is one thing to forgive, even if I am forgiving the unrepentent, I will never forget that fact about her unless/until she apologizes and stops pretending she was innocent.

I think you've got it HERE..this was THE SCENARIO for my H's affair...



I think you've got the EASY part and there also is a lack of COURAGE to deal with the problem, taking the EASY way out as you say...

But please know that it is possible for the wayward like this TO CHANGE..my H works daily on winning the genuine ADMIRATION and RESPECT of our sons..and THEY ALL ARE SO HAPPY..because that was what he was wanting...and took the EASY and EVIL way out...

I made the mistake of thinking that my H wanted FEAR and WORSHIP..he wanted the ADMIRATION and RESPECT that a man normally craves and which he did DESERVE..PRIOR to his affair...

frozen... please don't think I'm stalking you, but I'm bumbling around talking about Plan A and Plan B and repentant spouses over on wonderin's thread, and since you were kind enough to post on there a couple days ago, I was hoping you'd take another look (or anyone else, too).

If what I posted was wrong or out of line please correct me. But I so want one of y'all experts on wayward spouses, fog, etc to give input. The whole emphasis seems to be on her learning to meet his ENs. It doesn't sound like any case of a repentant spouse that I've ever read about over here on GQII.

If you feel at all like I'm doing what ** did to smb, let me know and I'll stop asking. I'm just frustrated... and I think this is a case that would be greatly helped by input from more of the folks who frequent this board. Y'all are so good at this, I would think you'd see through any WS horsehockey.

ETA - Please excuse the t/j.