This is my first post to this forum. Am interested in having conversation with/getting insight from others who've gone through or are going through what I have.

Here's my story - I'll try to be brief:

I'm 40 y/o physician, married 17 yrs, 4 boys ages 13, 11, 10, & 3. Was growing increasingly unhappy at home; only after reading "His Needs, Her Needs" did I come to understand WHY I was vulnerable to having an affair... I know now that of the 5 critical needs for men, my first wife was meeting only 1 of them. Looking back over our years together, I feel that I had tried on several occasions to make her aware of what things were missing in our relationship, but nothing ever seemed to change. I was growing weary of trying, and over time my feelings for her were fading; she was becoming less and less attractive to me in terms of personality AND physique. And eventually yes, I strayed from my marriage; I fell in love with a woman who I'd known for over 7 years, who was also in a failing marriage. We didn't go "looking" for it - we both were very ashamed of our actions.

BUT - in the end, we did choose to reveal the affair, to quit living a double life, to stop pretending to have feelings we no longer had for our respective spouses... And so we made the very difficult and unpopular decision to start a new life together. We each divorced & are now remarried, and I must say we both are very happy... more than we ever thought possible. Selfish? Yes, in part; but also merciful, and brutally honest.

Our children all seem to be doing as well as can be expected; my 3 older boys have continued to maintain straight A's in GT (advanced) curriculum, which I think is a testament to the commitment that I and my ex-wife have had toward making sure they all know how much they are loved, and to keeping our communications (for the most part) civil.

Of course, it goes without saying that my new wife and I have spent hours and hours agonizing over the pain that our relationship has caused others... but we remain convinced that the course of action we ultimately chose was the most honest one.

Here's an interesting twist on the whole deal: my ex-wife, and my new wife's ex-husband, have become romantically involved! Whether they will ultimately get married is anybody's guess... This is certainly something we never thought would/could happen! So our collective 6 kids (my new wife has 2, ages 11 and 7) spend time all together not only at our house, but also when they're with the other 2 single parents, who are practically inseparable. We don't know whether to laugh or cry...

Well, there's the opening scene - I'm open to fielding any questions about the how's and why's things happened like they did. I often still find myself almost in shock that this whole thing even happened to me; it has certainly humbled me, and I am no longer so harshly judgemental of those who fall into the pit called infidelity.

I sometimes still wonder if my first marriage ever really had any chance of survival, but careful introspection of the dynamics of that relationship and the direction we were headed causes me to think that it didn't. I have read countless books and articles on how to save your marriage, and am frustrated somewhat for this reason: every one of them starts with the premise that your current/first marriage can, if only given the right tools and hard work and time, eventually be made "perfect." They assume that every married couple in trouble were at one point in the past "perfect" for each other, but somewhere/somehow have gotten off-track, and just need help to get back to how it was in the beginning. Well, I beg to differ. I happen to believe that in some cases (but by no means most), a second marriage can be much, MUCH more fulfilling. And obviously, I believe that to be the case with me. I know that only 25-35% of marriages that stem from affairs are successful, but I truly, truly believe that we're going to be in that group...

Ok - fire away!

Ooops. The statistics I've seen are that affairs only lead to marriage 3% of the time, and 75% of those end in divorce within five years.

The problem is that your relationship was built on lies and continued to grew to fruition over the dead bodies of your wife, your children, her husband and children, friends and family, etc.

One thing you and your affair bride know about each other is that when the going gets tough, the easy way out is to cheat.

You are a little foggy, but that is to be expected. The reason I know is that study after study has demonstrated that infidelity and divorce hurts children, often for their whole lives. But you insist that yours are doing fine.

Welcome to MB and good luck. Just remember, that whoever cheats with you will cheat on you. The marriage is fresh and new right now, but down the line when things get hard, who knows what will happen? "Till death do us part" has been replaced by "till things get difficult."

Again, I said that ~25% of marriages that stem from an affair are are successful, meaning that 75% are not, which is what you said. And yes, I know that very few (~3%) of affairs lead to marriage.

Your comments are typical of those who, after knowing only a few "tidbits" of information, are rather quick to make judgmental statements. I used to be just like you! You still at this point really know nothing about me or my ex-wife, or my new wife. You haven't walked even one day in our shoes. You have NO IDEA what my life was like in my first marriage. But from your comments, it seems that you know all you need to know("he's just another cheater") to suggest that my new marriage is "built on lies." Would you care to be specific, and name these lies that you are referring to? The truth is that nothing could be further from the truth...

No need for melodramatic language here; there are no "dead bodies." And as for being "foggy," I'm not naive enough to think that this hasn't been very hard on our kids or our ex-spouses, and no doubt will leave permanent scars - but not necessarily open, festering wounds, much less dead bodies. The kids are going to counseling (as agreed by all 4 parents) to help them through this time, and in the counselor's opinion they are all doing better than most. I was simply making a comment that things could certainly be going worse in terms of how the children are adjusting, and I'm glad they aren't. Is this situation anything they ever would have wanted in their lives? Of course not. "Dead bodies?" Far from it. Spare me.

I'm amazed at your ability to predict, since I strayed from my first marriage and eventually divorced, that I and/or my new wife are bound to repeat the same offense again when "times get tough" in our new marriage. This I must say is one of the most irritating comments that seems to come up over and over, ad nauseum, by simplistic-thinking people who see the world as being a very black-and-white place, and who are quick to judge one's character with very little information. David committed adultery with Bathsheeba, and even had men murdered to cover it up... but did he also in time also cheat on Bathsheeba, as you suggest that I will do?

Tell me, have YOU ever cheated on your spouse? Do you know what it feels like to be in that situation, to be the Wayward Spouse? If not, then please keep your thoughts & comments to yourself. I opened my thread with the statement that I'm interested in hearing from others who've been through the same kind of experience that I have been through, meaning those who themselves have cheated, not been cheated ON. I didn't come here to have more stones thrown at me by judgmental strangers.

Anyone who's done what I've done knows that it is VERY painful for ALL involved, not just the betrayed spouses, but also to the betrayers. To suggest that having an affair automatically means that it's just a matter of time before one does it again is frankly offensive. If anything, I'm more committed than ever to NEVER go down this road again... I wouldn't wish it on anyone. We believe that having experienced this painful ordeal actually affords us some protection against its recurrence. Like the child who puts his hand on the hot stove, it only takes feeling that kind of pain once to learn not to ever do that again. I'm much, MUCH more aware than I ever was of how easy it is to fall down the slippery slope into infidelity, and have learned the hard way to not walk so close to the edge. I think most folks who've done what I did would agree; I can't cite a statistic and don't even know if this has ever been studied, but I would venture to say that of the 75% of marriages (from affairs) that fail, the majority do NOT fail as a result of another affair...

Believer, it is you who are a little foggy - or maybe it's just that you need to clean the windows on your glass house.

Mulligan... a very good friend of mine has been the WS. What she told me about her feelings during and after the affair...

"it wasn't about what I needed. The attention, the contact, etc. It was about what I wanted. I was very selfish, and find myself very ashamed of my behaviour."

The only pain she felt was the pain of guilt. When she had to look into her BH's face, and admit to an affair, when she tried to stop and could not... She felt a sense of entitlement... and that is what I see when I read your posts.

Oddly enough, my WH was her biggest enemy when she had her affair. He bashed her for her behaviour, called her every name he could think of, and could not believe that her BH would even think of taking her back. Two months later, my WH started his affair.

If I were you, I would worry about my new spouse cheating on me.

Good luck to you. It is not that I live in a glass house. And my marriage was not that good before my husband cheated. But I did manage to stick to my vows.

I'm sure you and your affair partner/new wife took vows too. Guess they didn't mean much.

I wonder why, if you used to be like B, you have now chosen to lead a dishonorable life. See, you think you have evolved and become better....that is all bs. You are much less of a man than you should be.

Shameful.

If you are interested in getting support here for your current life, forget about it. There are websites dedicated to such low life's out there...this isn't one of them.

Bad luck to you.

I think this whole "story" is fabricated. And BRAVE NEW WORLD... ..You gotta be kidding!

Hey doc, I bet your speciality is proctology right??? I figure it must be, since you obviously have a rectal cranial inversion coming to an infidelity website and spouting off about your affair.

why would you be??? You wake up with your affair partner every single day. Your affair never ended.

Mulligan,

It seems you like it cafeteria style. You take what flatters you, looking at Dr Harley's work and ultimately using it to justify your affair, by saying your wife was only meeting 1 out of 5 of your emotional needs.

What is telling is that I don't recall reading where you asked her how you were doing at meeting her needs.

I'm not saying your needs are not legitimate, or anything of the sort. I'm saying that you approached this from a very selfish perspective.

Your wife didn't meet your needs, no indication of how you were doing (according to her, not your own self-assessment) at meeting her needs.

Your current wife, again no indication that she was doing a stellar job of meeting her husbands needs.

So, while I don't discount that you had unmet needs, I can find no evidence that you were trying to do a better job of meeting your wife's needs.

So tell me, since marriage is more about what you do for your spouse than what you get out of it, how did your affair benefit your wife?

It was selfish, period.

And as you've read here already, the odds are much higher that either you'll do it again to your current wife, or she'll do it to you, or perhaps both of you will do it, since you both are already comfortable with that sort of behavior.

Again, you are cherry picking from Dr Harley's work. According to what I've read, you are all about getting your needs met, and agree with Dr Harley.

But you seem to reject the good Dr, who has far more experience with producing happy marriages than you do, when it comes to what a bad idea it is to get your needs met via affairs.

So call it judgmental if you wish. But the truth is, you are picking and choosing from what Dr Harley has written in an attempt to justify your affair.

If you read further, Dr Harley says there is never a good reason for an affair and an affair is never justified, ever.

So do me a favor and either stop using unmet emotional needs to justify your affair, or agree with Dr Harley's entire program, including the parts about how wrong, selfish, and hurtful and unwise it is to choose an affair to get your needs met.

I am so sorry you did not recover from your adultery and made a decision to marry a cheater in an affair marriage. At least you went into it with your eyes open. Since you willingly married a cheater who does not value fidelity or respect marriage, you won't be surprised when she cheats on you and vice versa. When you marry a cheater, guess what? THEY CHEAT! When that happens, and it will, you will have been a volunteer, not a victim. And you also know that you have a 70% chance of divorce.

The reason that affairages don't make it is because the traits that made the affair possible, deceit, thoughtlessness, and dishonesty eventually infest the affairage.

How tragic for your children to have to witness such a disgusting spectacle. You were willing to hurt your own kids and destroy their families for your own selfish pursuit of happiness. That you are "not happy" is not sufficient reason to destroy 2 families.

What you did to them was EVIL.

You taught them that anything is ok as long as it makes one "happy." Kids lose any sense of right or wrong. What will be your defense when they come to you at age 13 and say "well, it makes me happy to use drugs" or "have sex with my boyfriend?" YOU set that example with your filthy, evil affair and lost all moral authority.

How ashamed they must be. Or if they are not, which is even worse, then they have been taught that wrong is right and will grow up profoundly morally confused. And that is part of the abuse that many adulterous spouses inflict on their own children.

I am curious why you are here on a Marriage Builders site parading a filthy affair? The folks here see it for what it is. We see what you did to your families, we see the wreckage in your trail. It might look "beautiful" to you, but it looks like a pig pen to normal people whose minds are not warped by adultery and self serving rationalization.

And no, your kids will not be "ok." They will never be the same. They will suffer psychological and developmental damage that will affect them for life. Children from homes with bad marriages fare much better than children from broken homes. They will never be the same.

An Exploration of the Ramifications...nia State University College of Medicine

• Divorce is an intensely stressful experience for all children, regardless of age or developmental level; many children are inadequately prepared for the impending divorce by their parents. A study in 1980 found that less than 10% of children had support from adults other than relatives during the acute phase of the divorce.

• The pain experienced by children at the beginning of a divorce is composed of: a sense of vulnerability as the family disintegrates, a grief reaction to the loss of the intact family (many children do not realize their parents’ marriage is troubled), loss of the non-custodial parent, a feeling of intense anger as the disruption of the family, and strong feelings of powerlessness.

• Unlike bereavement or other stressful events, it is almost unique to divorcing families that as children experience the onset of this life change, usual and customary support systems tend to dissolve, though the ignorance or unwillingness of adults to actively seek out this support for children.

• Early latency (ages 6½-8): These children will often openly grieve for the departed parent. There is a noted preoccupation with fantasies that distinguishes the reactions of this age group. Children have replacement fantasies, or fantasies that their parents will happily reunite in the not-so-distant future. Children in this developmental stage have an especially difficult time with the concept of the permanence of the divorce.

• Late latency (ages 8-11): Anger and a feeling of powerlessness are the predominate emotional response in this age group. Like the other developmental stages, these children experience a grief reaction to the loss of their previously intact family. There is a greater tendency to label a ‘good’ parent and a ‘bad’ parent and these children are very susceptible to attempting to take care of a parent at the expense of their own needs.

• Adolescence (ages 12-18): Adolescents are prone to responding to their parent’s divorce with acute depression, suicidal ideation, and sometimes violent acting out episodes. These children tend to focus on the moral issues surrounding divorce and will often judge their parents’ decisions and actions. Many adolescents become anxious and fearful about their own future love and marital relationships. However, this age group has the capability to perceive integrity in the post-divorce relationship of their parents and to show compassion for their parents without neglecting their own needs.

Conclusions
• Divorce and its ensuing ramifications can have a significant and life-altering impact on the well being and subsequent development of children and adolescents.

• The consequences of divorce impact almost all aspects of a child’s life, including the parent-child relationship, emotions and behavior, psychological development, and coping skills.

• There is a significant need for child mental health professionals, along with other child specialists, to be cognizant of the broad spectrum of possible fall-out from a divorce and then to provide sufficient support for children of divorced parents in all the necessary psychosocial aspects of the child’s life.

[u][i]Abuse Risk Seen Worse As Families Change[/b][/i][/u]

- [b]Children living in households with unrelated adults are nearly 50 times as likely to die of inflicted injuries as children living with two biological
parents, according to a study of Missouri abuse reports published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2005.


- Children living in stepfamilies or with single parents are at higher risk of physical or sexual assault than children living with two biological or adoptive parents, according to several studies co-authored by David Finkelhor, director of the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Center.

- Girls whose parents divorce are at significantly higher risk of sexual assault, whether they live with their mother or their father, according to research by Robin Wilson, a family law professor at Washington and Lee University. . . .

- The previous version of the study, released in 1996, concluded that children of single parents had a 77 percent greater risk of being harmed by physical abuse than children living with both parents. But the new version will delve much deeper into the specifics of family structure and cohabitation, according to project director Andrea Sedlak.

It is "merciful" to destroy 2 families so you and your fellow adulteress could find "happiness?" To whom was this "merciful" exactly? Does anyone else hear that sound :eek:

This quote would have had more credibility if you had said it after stopping your affair. You talk about being aware of the slippery slope of infidelity but you are still splashing around in the mudhole at the bottom of that slippery slope.

Since your affair has had such a "happy ending" it would seem easier for you or you mistress wife to repeat the offense as it all works out for the best in the end.

Just keep your ears open when your wife gives you the same stories that she gave her betrayed husband about where she is going and who is on the phone. And be sure to not use the same lies on your new wife that you did on your first wife. You two both know that neither of you have any integrity so you'll have to come up with new material for your alibi when your needs aren't getting met again.

PS I am a former cheater that stopped cheating.

Is there a reason you're here? A question you have?


... or just trolling?

(And I don't usually make accusations like that. Anyway I'm not accusing, I'm asking. Otherwise the SOP is to alert the mods, of course.)

Marriage Builders does not promote affairs. This thread has been locked.