Mindshare, I know, I might be believing what I want to believe. I still can't believe that this has happened to me, neither can most of my family and friends. As my sister said we seemed like such a 'solid', 'united' couple and I think, for the vast majority of our time together, we were.

I have tried to enforce boundaries and I think I have to some extent but maybe not as much as you all think I should have. H just rang me from his parents house to say he had arrived. I can hear in his voice that he's dreading what he has to tell them. He said he'll ring me tomorrow to tell me how it went. Deep down, no matter what he has done I can't help it but feel that he is a kind, good man who I love deeply (I know, I feel pathetic for writing that!) and who I want back. Although this is what has kept me fighting for the past weeks it also makes what he has done hurt all the more.

Tully

It doesn't matter if the contact came from her, it was still contact and he let it continue. H finds OW slightly pathetic but he's still there to make her feel better through this tough time. How does WH view himself or does he not say?



It depends on how you view it. I didn't want my H staying with me out of fear or obligation. If he couldn't act because it was the right thing to do for our marriage without me prompting him or threatening him, I don't think I could have seen his actions as remorseful.

You are not pathetic for wanting your husband to be the man you know he can be. You've been dealing with this for 6 weeks now and it's emotionally, mentally, and physically draining so it's easy sometimes to see what you want to see because you probably can't fathom how much longer you can handle this. Problem is you are trying to be a rational person and your WH isn't rational yet you desperately want to believe him.

Will be interesting to see how the talk goes with MIL. Hang in there tully.

Black raven, I have seen a change in how he sees himself recently and in how he sees me. He has been apologising a lot over the past few days.
This morning I got up very early and went downstairs to cry on the sofa. When I got back into bed he woke up and asked where i had been. I told him I had been thinking. I asked if he wanted me to ask the woman I had told about the A (the third party working on their project) to talk to OW about her career. OW is at a fragile stage and I feel that she is so young and desperate that she is ready to self-destruct her career. He asked why I suggested this and I said because her family and friends cannot talk about this and he obviously can't, her boss (our neighbour) is no good and so who does she have to talk to? He thought about it for a few minutes and said it was a good idea but said that he would arrange to see this woman himself and ask her to do it. I was happy that he reacted instead of being so unresponsive as he has been recently. Also I am happy that he will also have to face this woman and look her in the eye even if she is a tolerant, nice person.
He was amazed that I can be considerate of OW after all she has done. Then this morning he gave me a big hug and said 'thanks' before he left. I said 'what for?' He said 'for being you'. I said 'I thought you said that me being me was what made you turn to her' and he said 'I've said a lot of stupid things lately' I thought that was progress.

I understand tully. I do. I even had moments of feeling bad for OW. In hindsight it was more because I was a wreck and couldn't imagine anyone having to hurt as bad as I was. OW then showed her true colors and any speck of concern I ever felt for her disappeared.

This is all very fresh and raw but please don't concern yourself with OW. She doesn't care about you, your children, or even your H when you think about it. And trust me, if she thought for one moment that your H is going to leave you for her she'd be doing a victory dance in your face.

I don't want to imply that I'm being incredibly selfless here. Part of my reason is that I think that if she could go away and be happy somewhere else then she'd less of a danger to us than if she is miserable.

Dear Tully,

I have read your story and my heart goes out to you. This is only my second post to MB. My first is a very long one on MelodyLane's "Orchid and others - questions about MB books" thread which at the moment is on page 2 of GQ2. If you care to read my post there you will see the basic background to my H's long affair. I have had your exact experience of an OW who refused to give up contact and a husband who was unable to make her. It seems bizarre, doesn't it, that a woman who willingly began a relationship with a man whom she knew to be married can now refuse to accept his telling her that he wants to stay with his wife! This OW knew when she agreed to have sex with him that he was married and therefore engaging with her in a very limited way. He was not available for an open, honest relationship with her, and without being a fly on the wall in his home, she did not know anything about his attitude to his marriage and to infidelity. For all she knew, he might have been routinely unfaithful freeloader who loved having affairs outside marriage. He might have been very happy with you. You might have had a great sexual and family life. She was prepared to have sex with him on this unknown basis. Why now does she refuse to go?

Well of course, a major reason is that as the relationship progressed she 'saw' that he was not a heartless adulterer; he told her he cared for her and that their affair was the only thing that made his life bearable. With her, he was the kind, sweet man that you have described above, and then you forced him to choose between you and her, and because he had kids he chose you. He does not now have the heart to refuse to answer her calls, to put down the phone should she unexpectedly get through and to generally build an impenetrable brick wall between them. He is not prepared to be brutal to her. He is not prepared to show himself to be a cruel user of another person, as you are asking him to (in his mind).

Like me, at first, when you heard from your H that OW was not accepting the ending of the affair at all well, you probably understood. She had been in love, and having experienced heartbreak yourself (I imagine, at some time before you married), you knew why it was hard for her, and you also believed that your H bore a lot of responsibility for the state of her feelings. However, she is a grown woman, and you probably felt that she would soon gather up her dignity and consider the experience a lesson learned. She would not grovel to someone who did not love her enough to put her first. She might even realise that she had degraded herself by entering into such a relationship in the first place. If she had not disappeared instantly when you found out about the affair, she would do so soon. When she still did not decide that she was worth better than crumbs, that still did not make her into a psycho bunny-boiler.

I honestly believe that your H is committed to only you and the children, Tully, and that he has no intention of continuing the lies and deceit that he undertook when their physical affair was in full swing. I think that the changes you describe in his attitude, now that you are starting to withdraw from the fight, are genuine. I think that he loves and admires the strong woman that you are and indeed finds her behaviour now rather desperate and unattractive. If he did not want to leave you while the PA was in full swing (and I believe he did not), such a prospect is less appealing even as a mild fantasy, now that she acts more and more childishly and puts his marriage at greater risk than ever. He has told her that the risk of losing his marriage is unacceptable to him. She is showing a lack of self-respect in wanting him even if she only gets him by making you angry enough to break up your marriage. He is beginning to dislike her for this. He has not gone to her freely, but she does not seem to set high enough standards for her relationship and will accept him even if he is thrown out of his marriage, rather than leaving it voluntarily for her.

I think that you have seen enough to know that he is not committed to NC in the way you need him to be. You began this thread by describing how he has agreed to NC, and sent a letter the OW, but only because you have insisted on it. He does not believe in its importance; he thinks that he can maintain a professional relationship with his (F) OW. He is a little bit angry with you for not crediting him with enough intelligence to be able to end the affair in the way he wants to. He knows that you know that he does not want to leave your marriage. You can see that he is not in the least torn between you and OW. He wants to stay with you and your children and is not considering a life with OW. In that this is all clear to you, he is saying that that he can be perfectly grown up and detached about his affair, and that it is YOU who are stamping your foot and demanding an impossible standard of NC that he cannot establish because of his profession. He is disappointed that you are being so irrational that you would cause him to ruin his professional status and your whole family's financial security because you cannot tolerate a few phone calls and some very intermittent attendance by both of them the odd academic conference in the future. He has told OW that the affair is over and he cannot do any more to stop her contacting him. She is not a crazy stalker; she is a highly intelligent woman with a doctorate who has normal work and social relationships. She is not mentally deranged. She has suffered a great disappointment at having her relationship with him abruptly terminated and is showing the same sort of distress that we have all shown at such a break up. He is dealing with her distress by being calm and patient while explaining that he cannot continue the relationship, explaining why, and urging her to see that in time she will recover and find a more appropriate partner. He is not being unreasonable; YOU are being both childish and unreasonable. (This is all his view, and I hope you can see that I am not endorsing it.)

I think you are reluctant to see things the way others on this thread do because you can see your H's commitment to you, and his remorse and new resolve, and you think the kindly intentioned people on this thread cannot see this, because they don't live with him. Other people don't understand that he IS doing NC, but that the problem is OW isn't and that it is impossible to make her stay away. The thing is, Tully, that most of us DO believe in his love for you and commitment to your marriage, and yet we know that he will have sex with her again one day if contact continues in any form.

She has already persuaded him to keep knowledge of their contact away from you, and he has agreed because he feels responsible to her and wants to see her through this difficult time into the stage when she is strong enough to let go. I can promise you that that's what was happening when you found him on the phone to her a few days ago - he would not have told you about that call if you had not caught him red-handed. He will not tell her to go away and leave him alone; he has instead (unwittingly?) already increased her love for him by making the argument about putting his kids' needs before his own. He is telling her just how moral and principled he is, and this will make him even more desirable to her. Because he feels he cannot cut her adrift, he will, after a few days, tell you that after his last NC letter she seems to have accepted that he means what he says, because she has not contacted him. However, because he has promised her that he will not abandon her, he will continue to take her calls and perhaps even make calls himself to check that she is okay. He will open a secret email account and never access it from home. No more emails will ever be sent via his work account, since he does access that from home, and he will agree to transparency with that account. He will get a prepaid mobile phone and leave it hidden in the office. He will swear that there is no contact at work, at home, by email or phone, in the guise of a professional query or by any means whatsoever. He might make the odd slip, such as by throwing the itemised receipt for his international phone card (for use in a public pay phone) in a bin at home, where you find it, but he'll explain why he had to call her that once, and never will again. After several weeks of hid maintaining the NC line, although you will still feel uneasy, you will begin to believe that the problem lies with you and your mental state, and not him. You will accept his view that, if your marriage breaks up it will be because of your childish spite over the past and not over anything he is still doing. You will have to accept this logic because you will have no evidence that he has any contact with her whatsoever (barring that one slip). You will not be prepared to hurt your children by leaving their father, because you agreed to attempt recovery several months earlier and he did everything you asked. You will let him go to conferences and you will ask whether anything happened. He will swear on anything you like that nothing has and nothing will. You will become more and more unhappy and yet feel that you cannot ruin your whole family's lives without justification. How will you look at your children and explain why you left Daddy after Daddy did one thing wrong, something that a lot of people do, but unlike many he did everything he could to put things right? You won't be able to leave when there is no evidence, and yet you will become more and more unhappy and emotionally unstable living with a complete lack of trust in your marriage.

And then one day, perhaps a year later, you will discover that there have been many occasions of sexual contact since September 2008, right through the times when he begged you to believe him, implored you not to leave, appeared to open up emotionally to you in a way never seen before, agreed to go to counselling (if you really wanted him to, although it was unnecessary because the affair was over; perhaps you needed it more for yourself, and he would be fully supportive of your talking your problems through with someone who could help you recover from your unusually extreme reaction to this minor non-threat to your marriage), right through the times when you were close to breakdown because you could not trust him and also could not trust your own judgement, through the times you drank too much, neglected the children and then pulled yourself together, through the time suffered an unexpected early miscarriage, through your mother's death, and right through good sex, romantic breaks away, much greater emotional closeness between you, right through everything that you cannot imagine just now. You will realise in a year's time that he looked into your eyes and lied throughout all this trauma that you suffered and and you will see that you allowed this to happen. You can leave him then, or you can attempt to rebuild your marriage again, but whatever you do. you will have to struggle for years through PTSD from which you might never fully recover.

How will this sexual contact begin again? How will he be capable of doing this to you, after what you marriage have already been through? How will he love you enough to want to do at the thought of your leaving him, and yet continue a relationship with an increasingly pathetic skank with whom he would not dream of replacing you as his wife?

It will begin again because your H's OW will do what my H's OW did, and to the same effect. Yours has already told him that she is heartbroken, and her tears alone might break his resolve. If that does not work, or works only for a time, she will tell him that he used her because he told her he loved her and made promises to her. He won't want to admit to this brutality and so he will insist that he really cared, and that he is in an impossible position but he is at least a good enough father to put his kids first. She will keep suggesting that they meet. She will imply that without him, a nervous breakdown or even a suicide attempt is possible. This will be a partially effective threat; he will know that, on the one hand, a lot of people threaten these things and do not carry them out, but that on the other, if she even makes a weak attempt at self-harm, knowledge of the affair will get out and his reputation among his peers and family will suffer. He will keep talking to her. He might well have sex with her then. If he resists the blackmail threats, or is they stop working, she will change tack; she will pretend at times not to want him to leave you, and to be prepared to be his bit on the side for as long as he wants, as long as he does not leave her. She will suggest a last meeting to say goodbye and to put the affair to rest. He will have sex with her. These tactics will work for a while and he will have had sex with her a few times by the time he thinks again that he must stop. After he sees you so unhappy at home he will attempt to break it off with her again, so the threats and pleading will change and vary. She might threaten to tell you or even one of your children. Do you know what your eldest child's privacy settings are on Facebook?. Could she contact your children online, if she was determined?

After a while she will see that he will not agree to any more meetings, so she will turn up at some conference and ask him to have sex with her there and then. He will think you cannot know if he goes through with this because it was unplanned, and because he knows he will have time to calm down and lose the guilty look on his face before he gets home, and he will agree to have sex (poor thing). This will happen a few times. He won't admit, after the first time, that he knows that she'll turn up somewhere else, and he'll have sex with her again. He'll tell himself (and you, when you find out and demand an explanation) that each time she turned up at a conference he had no idea she would do so and gave into his sexual addiction to her - the addiction that he has already admitted to you. Each time will have been on a one-off basis. He did not continue his affair, he will argue; he had several one-off lapses. When you ask how she knew where to find him, he'll say that she knew what conferences he was attending was because he had to tell her the exact days he would be out of the office so that she did not ring when he was away and alert a colleague that something was going on. Or perhaps that she sought out details in the online publicity of all the people presenting papers at conferences on his subject. Oh, and of course, he was only speaking to her at all because he was trying to see her through withdrawal, he was trying not avert her suicide attempt, he was trying not stop her from lowing the whistle on his professional misconduct...He knows he promised and swore to you that he had never spoken to her, but you had never understood, she was so unstable, and no matter what he said she always rang again. He really tried to achieved NC, but you wanted him bluntly to tell her to eff off and he could never bring himself to do that...

And then, of course, she might become pregnant. My H's other woman was 45 when he first began trying seriously to break off the affair, and I should imagine that by the time the pregnancy tactic might have occurred to her it would not have been easy to achieve. Certainly, her H (to whom I eventually exposed) told me that her periods seemed to stop in 2005, but they did not stop altogether and my H risked unprotected sex with her after 2005 because they thought they had stopped for good. (Indeed, I had an very early miscarriage in late 2006, aged 47.5.) My H carried out the unprotected acts after she had already embarked upon her suicide threats, tears, turning up at his office and all sorts of things. If he could be that stupid with a desperate woman, so could your H. Your H's OW is young enough to conceive very easily, and please don't think she would not try such a stupid thing. If he insists on using a condom, she could still use the contents without his noticing. You have to stop this now Tully, before you suffer a breakdown and/or she becomes pregnant.

The urgent advice I should like to give you now is to stop trying to monitor your husband's behaviour and stop trying to judge whether you can trust him yet, or whether he is showing the right kind of behaviour for someone in NC and so on. Stop trying to use your judgement of his emotions and his character - you will only find out one day in the future just how easy it is for adulterers to lie convincingly. Stop policing his behaviour and above all, stop accepting the line that the problem with trust rests with you. He does not intend to abuse you further, Tully, but he will. You do not need any more justification for removing yourself from his manipulation than what you have already seen. Go into Plan B, right now, this minute. Ask him to move out, or take the children to your father's. but do not do the latter without checking legal ramifications of doing so. Write a Plan B letter based on the templates that can be found on this site, and do not spend one minute more agonising about why he cannot leave his job, or cannot take the new one or about how, whatever job he does, she can find him and contact him and one day attend the same conferences. I do know what you mean about her always being able to find him because of his profession. There are some professions and jobs that will allow a person always to be traced online. Both my H and I have such jobs. I can see that, whatever university your H switches to, in whatever country in the world, he will always be identified on the departments' website as one of their professors, with phone number and contact details included.

But finding the way to stop the contact is not your problem, Tully. He can stop this contact right now if he wants to; he just does not want to enough. He wants to be faithful to you while being kind and fair(!) to her, and I have told you where that will lead. If you go to Plan B, with a view to divorce if the affair continues for long, he will hate her. He will find that he can be 'cruel' and tell her that she is lower than the stuff on the bottom of your shoes, and that he will never go with her, even in the event of a divorce. If her pathetic, desperate contact makes his wonderful wife leave and take his children away from him, he will find way never to speak to her again, never to see her at conferences, and indeed, to make her never want to have anything to do with him again. You don't have to tie yourself up in knots worrying how to make her leave him alone. You need to protect yourself from his abuse, protect your love for him if you think you still want this marriage and let him do this work. Stop being his jailor or probation officer. Stop allowing him to tell her that you are forcing him to give her up by using threats about the children, while eventually having sex with her again. Stop accepting this degradation. Continue your marriage only when he demonstrates the highest commitment possible to it, and meets your high expectations of extraordinary care and protection.

Please do what I say, and not what I did, Tully.

Sugar.

Sugar, that was long, but it was good.
Tully, are you listening?

When there is still contact, then the Affair IS NOT OVER

Until there is NO CONTACT at all, you cannot even begin to work on your marriage, you cannot begin to heal and recover.

As long as he has ANY CONTACT with the OW, your marriage is doomed to fail.

Excellent post SugerCane. I've been there where my FWH worked with the OW and I saw how she continued to try to keep the relationship going and my H couldn't be a "jerk" to her (his words)

After she left the company and he no longer saw her every freaking day, the fog began to lift. Today, 2 months later, we are FINALLY beginnig the healing and recovery process.

Tully...He has got to have NC with the OW, NONE what so ever, not just for your marriage but for your mental health and for YOU By continuing CONTACT he is still cheating on you and putting you through HE!! and you deserve better than that.

Dear Turtle,

Thank you for your kind words. I really am incapable of producing short posts, I realise.

JoJo,

I will search your history when I have a moment, but did your H continue the PA whilst lying to you?

Tully's case is very difficult. Her H and OW do not work together at the moment. Her H is not in a fog produced by seeing her every day. I'm trying to get her to see that he is encouraging this contact even when it is not forced on him by work, and that his 'kindness' can only lead in one direction. He is choosing to do this to her, and she will pay a terrible price for accepting his argument that he is doing the best he can, and by trying to enforce solutions that he does his best to undermine.

On Monday I rang him (he works 5 minutes away) to ask something about one of the children. His phone was engaged for ages and I was sure it was her. I got in the car and drove to his work and he was on the phone to her.

...he agreed that contact was not possible.

Tully, this has been bothering me ever since you posted it.
Please re-read it.
He agrees that "contact was not possible" yet he's on the phone to her for ages PLUS the five minutes it took you to get there PLUS however long he talked to her before you tried to ring him.

His words are empty, hon. Right now his desire to end contact are a wish, like a person who desires to weigh less.

The person who desires to weigh less has to do more than sob in front of a mirror and wish they were thinner. No matter how sincere their desire to be thin, they have to exercise and change their eating habits if they truly wish to have a change in their life. They have to put ACTIONS behind their words.

Until he follows up action with words (i.e. until he files a restraining order against her, changes his work number, and whatever else it takes to get her to leave him alone) he is not REALLY wanting to end contact.

I am touched that you all have taken the time to think about my situation and to post such thoughtful opinions.

Thank you especially to Sugarcane for her perceptive and spot-on long post. So many of the things you said have rung a lot of bells with me.

Yes, I agree that he is genuine and believes that that he wants is to be with me and the children. Every time he has been up against the wall and I have threatened him to leave, he doesn't hesitate one minute and tells me that he loves me and wants to be with me. I know he means what he is saying but somehow he just can't seem to break the final ties to this girl.

He told me that she said more or less this on Monday - she said she feels that he lied to her and decieved her (I know! who's she to think this!) into believing that he would leave me and that she now hates him. He felt awful about this.
I don't think she said this but she is threatening to self-destruct her own career because she 'cannot achieve anything without him'. He feels very bad about this too. I suggested later that he ask the third party of this project (the woman I told about the affair in order to prevent contact) to advise her on her career and get her to pull her act together. He thought this was a good idea and will ask her to do it.

I have been nervous of this for a while now because I think she is capable of it.

I am thinking giving myself two and a half more weeks before deciding to leave. I could Plan A for a while. The reason why is that it would suit me much better logistically than right now. It's not that easy to leave the country to go to another one with 4 children with a language and culture difference involved. And I have no where else to go here. I'm not sure it would work to ask him to move out because he is so convinced that he wants to make it work here that he would refuse to go.
I know you may think I am being cowardly but I am a stay at home mother and the children are very attached to their dad. He is very present and involved with them. Also it is so, so hard to walk away from a great marriage of 18 years even if the last year or so was awful.
Another element is that OW is supposed to leave at the beginning of November but I am pretty sure that she is not going to go and that's why my threats have no impact- because they are only effective if she intends to leave and I think she won't. H says that she will because she has to, that she has no choice and that it's the best career move for her but I'm not sure that it's going to work that way. Still, I'd like to hang around and see what happens, if she does go.

Anyway I have a couple of questions:

Do you think he needs to 'hate' OW in order to get rid of her? Because he keeps defending her even when her actions are indefensible and he seems to have an amazing ability to deform facts to defend her. I wonder if my criticisms of her only encourage him to defend her.

If I try to leave, he is going to do everything in his power to stop me and will promise me the sun, moon and stars (as he has before) How do I deal with this? Do I ask for specific things or do I leave anyway? And when do I come back?

What specific things should I ask for to ensure NC?

Turtlehead, yes, he accepted that the conversation was a long one that lasted a half an hour (although he's not great on time) She did most of the talking (confirmed by my listening at the door before I went in) and was very angry and hurt at him, all of which he found hard to take. He was a bit shocked and upset that she called him a sh!thead but I said to him not to worry, I think that too but we'll both get over it.
The situation is terribly difficult because I do believe that he is genuine in his intentions but he's just not following up with action on the one issue I have always demanded - zero contact.

Sugarcane,

I've read your long post on the other thread and it has given me food for thought. It seems so sad that your marriage is the way it is today. Do you think that this perception of marrage is an irreconcilable difference between you?
I lived with my husband for 10 years before we got married 10 years ago. But lots of people do that here. About half of our friends are married and half are not but they all have children and if you didn't know who was married and who is not you couldn't tell the difference. I don't really see a big difference in their level of commitment.

Dear Tully,

I am so glad you managed to read my post on this thread. The post on the other thread might be less relevant to this immediate problem because it was asking whether the different approaches that people have to marriage have an effect on infidelity and its resolution. However, I hope it gave a resume of our backgrounds. I will discuss it more another time.

You asked me about the execution of Plan B.

I would really urge you to ask for the help of others with this, Tully. I understand the theory and wholly support its use, early in an ongoing affair, before the BS suffers terrible emotional damage. You might remember from my other post that I did not discover MB until several D Days had taken place for me and I had enabled more damage to be caused to my marriage by trying to outlast an ongoing affair. In other words, I have never used Plan B, so I have never had to work through the practicalities.

However, you have had some of MB's experts posting to you - MelodyLane and Pepperband are two Even though, as I understand it, they have not had to use the plan themselves, they have helped many posters through it and they are serious Harley scholars. Ask them to help you with your questions. Pop into one of their active threads and ask them to take a look at this one.

The other thing to do is to read the threads of people who have put the plan in place. There are many of these. I can think of ChaiLover, Dancing Machine and LilDoggie immediately. tst is the husband of SexyMamaBear. She posted here a lot last year and put the plan in place. When tst ended his affair he came here and has been an incredible help to people. LilDoggie's husband, Flick, has been through the same experience and is also posting here. There are also a few lawyers on the forum; Mr Wondering comes immediately to mind. The law where you live will be different from that in each of the American states where most posters on this board live, so I'm not saying that you can get appropriate legal advice for where you live from someone who practices in Michigan (Mr Wondering), but all these posters can help you think of issues and practicalities that you need to put to a lawyer or citizens advice body where you live.

There is actually a forum here entitled Plan A/Plan B. That must be full of posts from people going through those stages. It does not matter that the posts are dated; they will have thoroughly discussed the issues and practicalities that you must examine.

One thing that I thought of when I was hanging out the washing yesterday (!) was about your leaving your house. Don't do this without clear guidance on your rights. What would happen, for example, if your H moved OW in? Could you ever get her out, even if you moved back? Could he sell the house without your agreement? Where I live in the UK, a jointly owned property can be sold unilaterally by either party.

Could he claim that you have abandoned the house, and your right to return to it, if you leave? If you stay away for months, could that affect the amount of settlement you get in the event of a sale?

Do you have the right to take his children to another country?

I would try very hard not to leave at all. If you can get him to leave you will not have to deal with some of the above issues.

I detect a misconception in your post; correct me if I'm wrong. You seem to think that Plan B equals ending the marriage. It does not; it is a way for the BS to remove herself from the immediate environment of an ongoing affair. Dr Harley has articles on the basic concepts, including this one, on this site. Please read all his articles and advice letters if you have not yet got the books SAA and HNHN (and even if you have).

I must go now. Please put a shout out to those with knowledge and/or experience to help with Plan B details.

Thanks Sugar cane. As for Plan B. The best solution for me would be to go to my dad's house and stay there. The girls could go to the local school and it might do them good to be in English school for a bit. Also I would have my family with me (I have brothers and sisters around) who could help me with the children and give me support and love. We are a very different family from my husband's who believe that the best way to deal with problems is to never talk about themp. The problem with this is that I think that I don't have the right to take the children out of the country without their father's permission.
I know H would not move out because he believes genuinely that he is committed to the marriage and that he is totally convinced that his life is here with us but, as you said, probably doesn't see the problem with giving her a few words of support and a bit of kindness. In these circumstances there is no way he would move out and I also know that he would absolutely hate to live alone.
I have nowhere else to go here. Unless I take the children out of school and go to my parents-in-law. I rang my MIL last night and gave her my version of the story and, apart from a half-hearted attempt at under-the-carpet-brushing, she said that she understands me completely. I'll have to think about this a bit more.

By the way, is there really no other way to make him see through her and to cut her out of our lives?

Hi Tully,

I forgot to tell you earlier that I had to dash off but that I would be back later to answer your other questions. I've got a few meetings for the next couple of hours but I will be back after that.

In the meantime, could you just fill me in a bit on the affair? I know the context, with his having been her PhD supervisor, but what have you found out about how it actually started? Who propositioned whom? What did they do on their first date? How many times did they go to these conferences, and for how many nights? Where were the conferences held? Did they stay in the same hotel room for the whole conference? How did they keep that away from their peers, if so? Where else did they have sex?

Can you give a few more details about D Day?

What has happened since the phone call a few days ago?

Please clairy for me where you live now, where OW lives, where your parents live and where his live.

Are you British? (This is nothing to do with affair-busting; just curious!)

Please put a shout out for more help on this thread. I have a PhD in "BS stupidity after infidelity" and I can tell you what NOT to do. You need much better help with what TO do than I can give.

Must dash,

Sugar.

Thanks SC, I have to rush too - got to buy new runners for my youngest but I'll let you know this stuff later.

Thanks so much for you interest and help.
PS I'm Irish and my H is French.

Suger,
My H's was an EA that he called (but not anymore)"Just Friends"...

My husband did work with the skank. She moved to another office (same company), across the street, about 3 months after dday. Then DDay 2 happened in August. I found out via a keylogger on his laptop that he had initated contact with her again. Of course in his caveman brain he was still thinking () that "She's my Friend" not realising yet that, She was his emotional support.

Well during that conversation she proceeded to ask him to do things that they had done while "Just Friends", knowing that their relationship and the things that they had done together had almost (It was still on the fence if we were going to make it) destroyed our marriage.

At that point my FWH saw exactly what she was, that she DID NOT care about his marriage, in fact she wanted his marriage OVER.

Almost 4 months to the day, with a lot if help for MB and it's bloggers, the MC and telling him over and over again the difference between a "Friend" and an Affair, he FINALLY came out of the fog.

He now holds her 50% responible for their relationship where before he would not blame her for anything, it was all his fault.....

He is now truly remorseful and sorry for what he not only did to me but to our marriage and he works exceptionally hard every day to prove himself to me. To be completely open, honest and transparent.

In fact.....he went to his employer and asked for access to his busiss cellphone calls. We are FINALLY on the road to RECOVERY.... :crosseyedcrazy:

SUGAR.... I saw a lot myself, things that I did from Dday 1 to Dday 2 and the way I felt in your post is what I responded

Your international situation could make this tricky, but where there's a will there's a way. IF there's a will, there's a way.

If you're willing to consider about Plan B at all, find out what the rules are with children and international lines. Just from the little you said, MIL sounds like a frail reed on which to lean, and should probably be a last resort, if any resort at all.

Any update on WH's conversation with his parents?