Hi,
I ended an affair two months ago completely and my just told my wife yesterday. We will have been married for 4 years this april and have been together for close to 7.
The affair starting with my "desire" to have better sex than what we had in our marriage and ended because of the guilt and desire to want to try to fufill a meaningful marriage. My wife long ago stopped being "into" sex and had developed a habit of "just being there". I am 34, in shape and have always been a concious and capable lover, but...at some point my wife stop wanted to kiss, foreplay and other aspects of lovemaking which add to the experience have been non-existant for years. I tried many times and brought up these facts in a positvie manner and the response was, "im going to try to work on it" "i don't know why i dont like to kiss". But that was the extent of the answer.
I think (subjective) that our hustle and bustle (i own restaurant, wife is teacher, own two houses, mother in law with alzhiemers, step son @ age of 20 and bi-polar doesnt want help, in constant trouble, wife continues to aid him, fiancially strapped (though who isn't) has help to contribute to our distance/my affair. I don't want to pawn this off on outside infuence--my actions, i believe in accounting for--but i would also be dishonest if these didn't add. I am the one who makes all payments, balances our funds, and spends a bunch of time worrying about our future ends up helping step son out of messes (but never listened to when it comes to disciplin) cooks, cleans dishes, helps with wash..jeesh, i guess what I'm saying is that I'm involved.
After ending the affair, I have been pushing for us to see a marriage counsler. We have both signifigant positives and negatives in our relationship and feel the need to expose both in front of a trained ear. I am making phone calls today.
I have no desire and have had no contact with the women i had an affair with and the duration of the relationship lasted for roughly 2 months. I love my wife, our marriage and am learning to be better at it. I understand that there is a chance that my infidelity might end our marriage, but I want to, in absolute honest terms, to attempt help repair and fix our relationship. I feel my actions are low, unfair and a "typical" action taken when maturity and goodness would of led to an obvious and different action. Thats everything in an extreme nutshell...any insight would be great.
Thanks
Rob

Hi Rob

Absolute honesty is a good start. No contact with OW is essential. Even a possibility of contact is to be avoided for your wife's sake.

Hand all passwords and access codes to your W.

Arrange to go for a polygraph. The faster all details of the affair is exposed then the more steady the healing. Create a journal for your W that she can access written details that she can review these at her leisure.

Be prepared for triggers that will set your W off into angry tirades- Sometimes even two years or more down the line. Be patient.

Get "Surviving an Affair" Dr Harley. Start reading.

Rob,
Welcome to MarriageBuilders. I hope you find what you need here. The posts you will receive will probably be quite direct as most people around here don't mince words. Even if you receive a post that you don't like, try to read it from an objective viewpoint rather than discarding it out of hand.

One thing I noticed in your post is your focus on sex. As a typical guy, I place a high importance on this in the marriage as well so I understand your viewpoint. But you are operating under the assumption that she also views sex as a path to intimacy, which is probably unrealistic. As a general statement, it seems that most women find sex to be the result of intimacy, not the path to it. This is something I didn't really understand in my own marriage, and I thought the problem was with my wife. I found out just how wrong I was when she had a physical affair.

Men generally want sex to show love, whereas women want sex when they feel love/loved. Now you wrote out a laundry list of things that you do for your wife, but are these really the things that she wants from you? I strongly urge you to read the information on this site about Emotional Needs and get your wife to do the same. Maybe all your cleaning (Domestic Support) is really not that important to her. You could spend 20hrs per day doing things for her, but if they are not things that she values, you are not going to achieve your desired result. Its the old axiom, work smarter, not harder.

From my reading on these boards, sex is rarely the actual problem. Its a manifestation of another problem, that neither party me able to easily identify. Its possible that your wife's only understanding of the problem's existence is that she is not that interested in sex. She probably doesn't know the source any better than you do.

Do the Emotional Needs questionnaire on this forum to identify whats most important to her. Maybe she wants you just to sit with her, hold her hand, and talk. Maybe she likes non-sexual touching, like massaging her shoulders, running your fingers through her hair, and sitting on the couch with your arm around her. The point is that the two of you need to learn to communicate better. As Gary Chapman says, learn each other's love language.

Once you do, you will almost certainly find that the two of you continually become closer, and as she feels loved again, that will manifest in increased sexual desire for you.

To sum up this long post...meet her needs and she will want to meet yours.