You sure can't force her, but I agree that you should be concerned about leaving her there alone. She would feel much better if she just faced these people and it would give you some much needed together time.

This is a perfectly normal assumption on your part. Try to convince her to go along. If she objects too much, you may have a red flag up.

Do not trust blindly that the POS OM is finished with this.

By the way, you have done a great job given the circumstances.

You cannot overanalyze enough with an untrustworthy person. Your wife is the equivalent of a chronic alcoholic who has not had a drink in 6 days so you are WISE to scrutinize everything.

If she does end up staying home, I would suggest calling the OMW and alerting her and perhaps even putting a GPS on her car. [or better yet, hiring a PI]

RB! I just read your thread. Your instincts served you well on the exposure even if it was for the wrong reasons. You are getting some great advice here from people of who have shared your experience and seen hundreds of similar situations.

So far the only mistake you made was throwing the clothes out the window. -You should have taken them with you

You are doing great, your strength is apparent and will serve you well. The other side of that coin is probably the angry outbursts. But you are aware of the importance of controlling them now and are far better placed to succeed because of that knowledge. Keep educating yourself and be patient.

You should also try and maintain contact with OM’s wife for a while if you can. I keep on contact with my FWW’s OM’s GF and this is a vital resource for me. If I have any doubt about where my WW is I shoot the OM’s GF an email asking where OM was between hour X and Y. She does the same and its been a great system.

I also wanted to express my admiration for your brilliant reponse and handling of the "stick" of Plan A. You have done everything right so far. The vets here will give you great advise on how to proceed. There is hope and you have done NOTHING wrong!!! I also agree with bettororworse that you maintain contact with OMW for a while. Although it seems your WW's A is over, WS's are notorious for lying and sneaking around so it would be unwise to let slide any good sources of information too soon. Good luck and I'm very sorry this had to happen to you.

Thanks to everyone again for all of your support and encouragement. For the first time in my life, I'm in a situation where I just feel so out of control.

Well, she just called to let me know that she had the car packed and we are ready to go whenever I get home. So everyone wish me well this weekend. We’ll have 2 hours alone in the car and more time spent together alone over the weekend than in the entire 4 weeks since d-day.

My plan is to have a pleasant weekend and just try to engage her in small talk and avoid relationship talk as much as possible. I still have a lot of questions, but I don’t think this is the time to try to pull answers out of her. Besides, I usually get angry when we talk about her affair because I seem to only get partial truths. I have to ask the same question 3-4 times before I get the whole truth. I am about ready to resort to waterboarding! But, I’ll leave that for another time and just try to make some LB deposits this weekend.

I’m leaving my laptop at home, so I won’t be able to post over the weekend. But, one of her big issues with me is that I always put my work ahead of her so I’m leaving the work and laptop at home to give her my undivided attention.

This weekend.......avoid it totally. There is time for that.

Have a great weekend. NO LOVEBUSTERS!!!

Great idea, RB. You two need this time together. Good luck this weekend!

Great idea to not discuss the affair or recovery this weekend. Just enjoy each other.

I would of been so uncomfortable to leave WW home at this time if I was you. WW could be embarrassed or up to no good. No way to tell which way.

It was a good sign to of called you that she was ready to take the trip when you get home.

Based on that statement, you need to get some personal counseling and do some reading on the concept of self respect.

A person with healthy self respect should act exactly like you did....outraged by the despicable actions of your WW. However when in your later post you make that statement above, questions arise as to your capacity to show your spouse that you accept ABSOLUTELY NO culpability in her floor rutting actions and your subsequent ego-HEALTHY and ego-APPROPRIATE reaction.

The inability or unwillingness to demonstrate to WS's that a healthy love ALWAYS has boundaries, self respect and a healthy ego, dooms a lot of marriages that come to these MB forums.

Best of luck.

Please allow me to be the poster guy for Cymanca's statement. I waffled for a month before I got my legs under me, hoisted them up and created a ruckus. I should explain that it is not my nature to be passive. I had a couple of reasons for allowing her to partially eat cake while I was on the floor pretending to be a doormat.

Anyway, one night I had had enough and simply and calmly gave her an ultimatum. I thought she would bail. She didn't. Instead, she said she would terminate the affair, establish no contact for life and do her best to restore our relationship. It took her four days to really do it instead of saying she had and from that point in time, she never looked back.

Haven't had a problem since except the usual rocky road to recovery.

Please read Cy's post carefully and digest every word. Best advice you can get.

Larry

Update

Before we left for the weekend, I called OMW just to check up and see if maybe there had been something up between OM and WW for the weekend. Apparently, it was just me being paranoid since they were catching a flight Friday evening to go house hunting because OM has a job offer about 1000 miles from here. I definitely take this as good news.

The weekend started a little rough as WW was very quiet the for the entire 2 hour drive. Conversation was difficult since I was the only one attempting to engage. But, things got better after the 1st game on Friday evening and it actually turned out to be a pleasant weekend. I actually think I made a lot of deposits in the love bank by engaging her at every opportunity in small talk and I actually found a couple of opportunities to compliment her both when we were alone and during conversations with other parents over diner on Saturday. There were only a few times where she said or did something that ticked me off, but I was able to just bite my tongue and get past all of them without an angry outburst.

As we were leaving to come home DS16 asked if he could ride with one of his fiends and I readily agreed since it would give us a little more time alone before we arrived home and had to deal with all of the responsibilities of normal life. Soon after we left, I reached over and held her hand and told her that I had really enjoyed our weekend together and that we needed to find time to get away without the kids more often. She agreed and said that she really did have a good time this weekend.

About an hour into the ride, I noticed that she had gotten really quiet again. I thought she may be asleep, but when I glanced over at her, I noticed that she looked like she had tears in her eyes. I asked her if she was okay and she nodded yes. She sat there quietly for a few more minutes and she said “ I’m so sorry for screwing things up so bad. You do know that I never meant to hurt you like this.”

I thought I might be seeing a glimmer of light, but as she kept talking she somehow went from how sorry she was to blaming me for her affair. “If I had treated her like I did this weekend, she never would have cheated.” I could feel my blood pressure rising but somehow I bit my tongue again until I could get my emotions under control. I let her finish and then very calmly told her, “I’m sorry for putting work and the kids ahead of you and neglecting your needs for so many years, but I refuse to take responsibility for your affair. You are the one who chose to disrespect me and betray our marriage vows by starting a relationship and having sex with your boss. I take my share of the responsibility for the condition of our marriage, but you are the one that has to own the choices you made.” She just sat there and avoided me for the rest of the ride.

The weekend started rough, was good in the middle, and ended on a somewhat sour note. But, I’m not giving up hope. I think she is showing glimpses of her old self. I just have to make myself put my emotions aside and continue with Plan A even though I really don’t want to all the time. What I really want is for her to start putting in some effort and quit feeling sorry for herself. If anyone has a right to feel sorry for themselves, it’s me. I’ve got a counseling appointment with my Pastor tomorrow and we both have an appointment with him for Thursday. I’ve seen him a few times in the past few weeks and I think he is really helping me put everything into perspective and improve myself. His approach to healing marriages is also very much in line with the principles taught by Dr Harley.

Congrats on the decent weekend!

Although it wasn't perfect, there will likely be times when you wish things were that good.

As for waywards, they always try to at least partially blame their atrocious behavior on the BS. My FWW tried that, and I gave her the same response you did, almost word-for-word.

BOY they hate it when you shove flawless logic in their face. It really bothers them to have to own their own crappy behavior.

It sounds like you handled things well...FAR better than I would have that soon after d-day.

Good luck to you.

It may have seemed like a sour note at the time. I do not agree that it was because it was really a "Moment of truth." She was treated by her boss as a piece of meat. In terms of self worth, that is hard for her to swallow. In the real world, truth hurts and processing that truth takes someone who loves you enough to point out the truth no matter what.

Unless she is self delusional to the max, she MUST see the difference between you, the man who sees her worth as a person and her boss, who obviously saw her as a collection of holes. I don't see how you could have made that stark difference more obvious or more appealing.

Just for the record, I drew a similar contrast for my wife after her affair. It took about six months for her to see the light and she was NOT a happy camper. In your situation, it should have been painfully obvious within a few days.

Larry

I have friend who is a counselor and he pretty much said exactly that same thing. He thinks that she was jolted back to reality pretty quickly because of the way OM treated her post discovery. But, that she has been reluctant to really push ahead with recovery because of my anger. He thinks, that if I can make her feel safe talking to me that she will eventually committ to the marriage.

I have to admit that the first week, I was a mess and I called her a lot of names and would just go off on her at the least provocation. I'm trying to keep that under control, but I refuse to take the blame for what she did. Maybe, at this point it helps her rationalize it if she can blame me for pushing her away.

If she only gets that type of treatment in the first week, she's very lucky. I have issues with containing my anger after nearly 2 years.

I was pretty full of AO and LBs the first month or so after D-Day. I have conflicting opinions about it. On the one hand, I recognize that those are not productive ways to deal with one's anger, frustration, and pain. On the other hand, I question whether it is really possible to deal with that level of emotion productively. Sometimes, I think that you just have to get that stuff OUT, and that stuff is ugly.

Don't beat yourself up too badly for it. Recognize it for what it is and apologize, as time passes your emotions and pain will become less intense and easier to manage.

Excellent job not owning your W's stuff. REALITY is not a lovebuster.

Don't get me wrong, I still have anger issues. I am just conrolling them a little better at the moment. I just don't know how long I can keep it up. Sometimes, even when things are good, I will have something trigger me and that picture of the 2 of them on teh floor is all I see. Without some true repentance on her part, I know I can only go on for so long.

It will take quite a long time before you feel good again. That is just the way it is.

Come here and vent when you are angry.

It is perfectly okay to tell her how hurt you are, but not to explode and call her names.

And you don't want to just sweep it all under the rug and pretend it didn't happen.

After going through this nightmare, you need to insist on having a better marriage than before.

Well, I at least got a little good news today. After readign a few of the posts on here a few weeks ago, I got a little scared and went and got tested for STD's. The Dr called today and said everything came back clear.

I haven't asked her to get tested yet, but I will not have SF with her until she is tested. I guess I need to go ahead and have that talk with her tonight. I can only imagine the response I'll get. But, that is just another of the consequesnces to what she has done.