You will naturally evaluate the success of any ongoing recovery effort.

For a WS that comes back for selfish reasons, and slowly drifts out of the fog rather than being snapped out of it, you won't know right away how they're going to end up.

As long as things are proceeding the right direction, and progress is being made, keep on. But if you're getting quite a few months down the road and a "F"WH is not meeting and exceeding your expectations, it's time to re-evaluate.

That doesn't automatically mean divorce by any means. Maybe some other approach would be helpful.

What it boils down to: even if it takes a while, once a WH is defogged, you will be able to see if they have what it takes. I'm very hopeful that your WH will find that in himself and decide to use it.

The important thing is not to act hastily. You have plenty of time to observe and decide, when the time comes.

Thank you TA and Neak. Your post is encouraging, Neak.

I had a bit of encouraging contact with WH today. He called shortly after 10am with the girls and he came to the door with their clothes and presents etc. I decided not to hide and kissed the girls and wished them a Happy Christmas. They ran inside to show their presents and I had this short conversation

Me: 'How could you have done this to us?'
He shrugged and made a move to walk away.
Me (annoyed):'the way I see things is that I left an emotionally abusive marriage but you manage to blame me'
WH; 'I don't blame you'.
Me: 'Well, you have to get rid of her'
WH: 'You're paranoid about that'
Me: 'Paranoid? Well then where are you staying tonight'
WH: 'XX Hotel'
Me: 'With her'
WH: 'You are ridiculous. Do you really believe that she is still here and didn't go home for Christmas'
Me: 'Yes, I do.'
WH: 'Well it's not true'
Me: 'Just get rid of her' and that was it.

I know I shouldn't have talked about him spending Christmas with her as I had intended not to but my tongue ran away with me there. I was also annoyed by the 'paranoid' comment since he used that phrase over and over to undermine me when I was questioning him if there was an A before D-day.
But the positive bit is that 6 hours later around 4pm he came back to the house with DD8's jacket and a few minor bits and pieces. I didn't see him this time,he just left them with my dad. But this means that he probably didn't spend Christmas Day with her but I'm also wondering if he deliberately came to the house this late to show me this as he would probably have discovered the things quickly. Maybe I am grasping at straws and it doesn't change anything in my Plan but it does give me a teeny bit more hope for the future.

I am solidly in Plan B now until full NC is in place and he is doing everything in his power to prove that, if and when that happens.

Apart from that we had a good Christmas Day.

Send him to my house. Let me know ahead of time. I wanna kick him in the shins with my pointy-toed shoes!

By all means do everything in your power to avoid him, but having said that, I think you handled that interaction well. Polite, acknowledging his existence, and refusing to let him gaslight you as he so badly wants to do, while staying on message. "DITCH THE OW!!!"

Now just keep dark as you plan, and life goes on in the new ordinary.

Hope you and your family had a great Christmas!

Thank you Cinderella. I hope they are stilettos and I give you permission to walk all over him!

Neak, thank you again for your steadiness! All is dark here for the moment. WH left a message last night for the children to call him in his parents house. I made sure to go for a shower once they were on the phone and I was glad because DD8 came looking for me to speak to MIL.

Life is starting to progress and I have projects I'm looking forward to.

Hi, just for illumination I am comparing these two Plan B letters.

The TULLY PLAN B LETTER:
Lovey,

For the first 19 years of the 20 we have spent together you managed to create a reserve of love of Saudi Arabian proportions in me for you. However, for the past year and in particular in the past 2 months since I found out about you and OW, you have been drawing heavily on that reserve every day to the extent that I have now hit Peak Love.

I am now afraid if I continue this way for much longer that soon I will no longer love you nor want to share my life with you no matter what you do.

After our conversation on the plane last Thursday I have now realised that the marriage you are offering to me is not one I want to be a part of. As long as you are willing to be in contact with someone who has tried to destroy our marriage, and to be untruthful with me, I am not willing to be just another leg of the triangle.

When you decide you would like an honest, loving, kind, considerate, passionate marriage, of your own free will, then I would dearly love to have that with you. Until then I would rather have nothing at all. I am breaking all contact with you in order to preserve the love I have left for you.

Please believe me, lovey, I am not writing this in anger. On the contrary, I am writing this out of love for you and our family.

G.F. has agreed to be a mediator between us so that if we need to inform each other of important information regarding the children we can pass it on via her.

I look forward to the day when you make a firm choice for me and for our family, and end all contact with OW for the rest of our lives, so we can once again unite as husband and wife.

Love,

Tully
_________________________



The Unedited Querty PLAN B letter:

Dear WH,

I can no longer let you and OW continue to disrespect me. To remove the pain caused by your affair and to stop you from disrespecting me I am no longer going to have any contact with you what-so-ever.

There will be no form of direct communication. All contact will be through a mediator, probably X or her husband. When I know who the mediator is I will have them send you their contact information. The mediator will only inform me as to the nature of your request and what action you are requesting.

I will not accept phone calls, mail, email, IM, or any other form of direct contact while you are in your affair.

You are welcome to contact the kids whenever you wish by skype. I will leave the room when you call them.

When you come to the island I will not see you or speak to you. You can pick up the kids from Babysitter and drop them off with her. I will work out a schedule and you can change it if you need to by organizing with Babysitter. If I leave the apartment, you can come inside and play with the kids in the apartment.

I will be open to direct communication once the following conditions are met and/or agreed to.

1. You agree to stop seeing OW. You write a letter of no contact to her. Before you send the letter I need to see it. I will edit it and I will send it. I will need proof that you are no longer in contact with her and I believe the only way to achieve that is if you are here on the island. I also believe the only way you can stop seeing her is if you spend a few months here.
2. You must be willing to live transparently – I see all e-mail, skype and we ask telecom for all cell phone records to be sent to us directly.
3. You must be willing to go to marriage counseling with me to the psychologist of my choice, be it in English or Your language.
4. You must be agree to be present in the lives of the children and in my life – you must agree to spend 10 hours per week alone with me, no work, no computers, no cell phone. 10 hours per week alone with the children, no work, no computer, no cell phone and 10 hours per week family time. No work, no computer, no cell phone.
5. No more yelling at anyone. No yelling at the kids, ever, under any circumstances. Forever.
6. You must not have any contact with men who are cheating on their wives.


If you do not wish to work on our relationship by seeing to these conditions you can communicate this to the mediator. I will then begin divorce proceedings. As I have told you, I am still willing to work on our relationship but this cannot be done under the present circumstances.

I love you,
BW
_________________________
Me BW 37 American
Him WH – 43 European
Married 7 years.



Now I will make some observations. I always like specifics when it comes to...well...everything. This is why I would respond more to the Querty Plan B letter than the Tully one. In the Tully one, there are only two short notations on what her husband has to do to recover the marriage. In the Querty one, there is ALL OF IT THERE! Which is numbered and listed out. He only has to go down the numbers and he can see what he has to do. In the Tully letter, he does not have the STEPS of what he is REQUIRED to do to save thier marriage.

Tully it may be crazy, but to clarify to your husband what he must do to recover the marriage, you may want to send a second Plan B letter and word it more like Querties. The reason I say this is your husband is scientific minded, right? Then he would understand a clear "checklist" sort of letter better than a vague one.

*Also, when your husband writes you or e-mails you I get the idea, that it is like he did not "get the drift" of what you tried to say to him in your original (vague) Plan B letter. In other words, he does not have it LAID OUT to him just WHAT HE MUST DO> Quitting the OW is NOT the ONLY THING he needs to do to recover your marriage but that is the only thing you asked for in your PLAN B letter.

This could be the FOG or it could be his denial, for the reasons he does not get what you want. But how can he meet your requirements if you dont list SPECIFIC requirements OUT IN NUMBERED FORM?

A scientist responds to requirenments or "conditions" listed out in NUMBERED FORM! I know I would respond better if I knew EXACTLY what I had to do to recover the marriage. Also I would have more respect for a person who laid it out for me in MY LANGUAGE and VERY SPECIFICALLY.

On the other hand, I would know also if I was NOT MEETING THE REQUIREMENTS of the PLAN B letter. Because they were so clearly numbered out for me! It would be easy to see where I WAS.... and where I WAS NOT meeting those marriage requirements.


The key is I think, to let him know EXACTLY the steps he has to take to recover the marriage and LEAVE NOTHING to misunderstanding. Also give him the STEPS you need to recover the marriage. Not for him to merely do some VAGUE "get rid of her" MOTIONS.

Do you see what I am getting at here? Others can help too. I am just giving my uneducated observations as a fellow wife and human being and because I care for you.

I wager that another, "numbered and totally specific" plan B letter laying out SPECIFIC steps to recovery might shake your husband up and might really "speak his language"...It also may give him a new respect for you.

Telling your H "you want him to decide to have a loving, passionate, etc, marriage is VAGUE and he probably thinks you have all that.

If I were in your shoes....I would try a second Plan B letter, since he did not seem to understand the first one or understand what he has to do. I have to be honest, if it were me recieving your first letter, I would not understand specifically what I needed to do to recover the marriage either going by the first PLAN B letter of yours.....tooo vague.

Hey, what have you got to lose!? Before you think of giving up why not send him another PAN B letter, a very clear, concise, and very very specific and almost "scientific" PLAN B letter.

Edit Querty's perhaps.....to fit your own situation..... and have the mediator get it to him. I would be stunned if he did not respond well to THAT KIND OF PLAN B LETTER!!!!!!It would be right up his alley!

I do see what you're saying, Stella, and this is JMO, but Mr. Tully does have one very concrete step besides NC.

He knows that if he will only talk to SH, that Tully will at least temporarily open communications with him. If he isn't even strong enough to show that he wants a little bit of contact, he also isn't strong enough to handle a list of what to do for marital recovery.

It should be a detailed and comprehensive list, yes, but I don't think it's time to give it yet.

Stellakat, I read your post a while ago and I've been giving it some serious thought. You are right that WH doesn't 'get' what I want from him but I'm wondering if adding complexity to the letter with a list of requirements wouldn't have made things worse. I only want one thing at this time: a commitment to NC with OW.

He has resisted this with a ferocity that had destroyed a huge amount of my love. He already sent 2 NC emails during Plan A which I saw and edited but they didn't work. He told me over and over that NC between them was 'impossible' given their professional circumstances. In our last conversation before PB he said 'OW rang me saying does Tully not realise how stupid she is to demand NC between us and I could only agree with her.' I know they both work in a narrow field of research in physics but as Neak as said several times (and I agree) it's not up to me to find the solution. He must.

In the first draft of a Plan B letter I had 4 bullet points of requirements but the general opinion was that it needed to be pared back (and with hindsight I would pare it back even further)

PrincessMeggy said this:
Turtlehead said:
And many others included Neak, SugarCane and Black raven all agreed that short and simple was best.

This said, given the lack of reaction from him some people, especially Sugar have questioned if I have been clear enough in my Plan B letter to show him the way back. So I sent a message via an IM to say that if he wanted to send me an email outlining exactly how he proposed to make NC work and I specifically mentioned career, house or lab moves then I would be open to receiving this mail from him. The mail I received a few days later (page 43 of this thread) had no mention of NC in it and was instead filled with accusations, blame and threats.

Later, conscious of being in an impasse, I contacted Steve Harley and, following his advice, asked WH to contact Steve with an offer to subsequently meet WH to discuss the future. Yet again, he responded with an accusatory email (page 57 here) and said that he would only contact Steve if I read his blocked emails which I hadn't received. I replied saying that I had never received the emails but that in any case I wanted to focus on positive, constructive words and actions.
Also he said this: This is so blatently a lie (although he has probably convinced himself that it's true). My brother was stunned by this statement as it was clearly obvious that he had no intention of 'begging'. AT that time my brother was doubtful of the wisdom of not talking to WH and would have been the first to weaken and phone me inside the house to urge me to talk to him but he could see that all WH wanted to do was force his desires on me.

Through out all this I have been passing the same message through the IM and all other people who are in touch with him saying that I need a guarantee of NC with OW to even envisage returning to the M.

I don't want you to think that I'm being closed-minded on this, Stella but honestly I don't believe that confusion is the problem of my WH. There are none so deaf as those who will not hear. Yes, I agree that there will be a list of conditions for R but I think that by discussing them now I would be allowing him to deflect attention from the one thing that he doesn't want to give up on and which is essential to me. It also means that when I communicate with everyone involved. my message is clear and unequivocal 'he has to get rid of OW'. This is why I would recommend to Qwerty to have a short, one-demand PB letter so that the message cannot be diluted, twisted or deformed as my WH has tried so desperately to do.

Tully - Your husband comes from a culture that treats women as "chatel" or property. And he's not used to property speaking back to him and having needs and a will of her own.

Stella - this is the reason more detail in a Plan B letter wouldn't work for him. The airplane conversation was a deal breaker. It gave Tully a full view of what her life would be like if she remained in France.

Tully - I hope in your heart you still feel the rightness of your actions and responses. Your husband is still balking at having a "marriage" instead of what he envisioned of having his mistress and caretaker of his children all happily in their place in his life.

It may take him months to call Steve H. You are not in any hurry.

KaylaAndy, I have to disagree with this statement. Sorry but this is a unfair generalisation of a country that has been good to me and one that doesn't represent at all our M for the past 20 years. Everyone who knows us and comments on our M mentions that we had such an 'equal' partnership, one where neither of us dominated the other, one where we gave the impression of being 'united against the world'. I am not French but Frenchwomen are not any more submissive than other nationalities and I am extremely wary of national stereotypes. (I read a thread here today about how God wants wives to 'submit' to their husbands who must be the true 'leaders' in a M. This is a kind of thought-process that would not be accepted in France or most European countries.)

Of course WH knows very well that I have a will of my own and a strong one at that. But I am completely stunned at how he is capable of twisting the truth and logic to fit with his own version of the truth.

While the culture may have become more "modernized, Tully - how else could you explain your WH's belief in that plane conversation that these conditions would be acceptable to you?

Could it just be his gross sense of entitlement brought on by the affair? Where on earth would he believe you would accept his dalliance with OW during the day while you happily take him back each night?

I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I hadn't seen as many WH be so blatant about the "arrangements" with Betrayed Wives here in the states. But perhaps it is just a crazy sense of entitlement.

The wayward heart still baffles me to this day.

KaylaAndy, in the plane he was not saying that he would continue to have sex with her. What he was saying (and I think he honestly belives this himself) is that he wanted to keep in touch with her 'to help her through this difficult time both emotionally and professionally'. He believes that as long as he is not sleeping with her that contact is OK, no matter what I said. Of course I know that contact will lead to sex again and I have been saying firmly that any form of contact is unacceptable to me but he is so blinkered and dogged that he won't see the truth. He is like an alcoholic who agreed under pressure to stop drinking but thinks I'm ridiculous for wanting him stop working in a bar.

As for the wayward mind, he is normally an intelligent, logical man but here is one example of how he denied logic. One morning OW sent him an email saying that she would be in X lab at this time and Y lab at this time 'just in case he wanted to avoid her' (an NC email had been sent by WH a day or so before). He told me this but didn't tell me that she has also called in to his office in the afternoon to return some t-shirts he had left at her place. (I found this out through another colleague) I tried to confront him with the illogic of her actions but he insists that she is a wonderful, honest person with no ulterior motives even after I pointed out that she had to have taken the t-shirts from her flat that morning before sending that email. This is frustrating in the extreme.

As for 'modernising', this is a value statement that I don't think is relevant here. I have lived in the States for 2 years in total and in France for 13 years and there are cultural differences between the two countries but I don't think I could say that one is more 'modern' than the other.

I'm a little startled by this. I agree with Tully that this is not an accurate description of France or French men, in my experience. Most French wives I know (of both French and English husbands) have entirely equal power within the marriage, if not slightly more. This is northern Europe, not southern India.

I'd say that the overwhelming obstacle for Tully's WH is that the stakes are very much higher for him than for the majority of WSs. To achieve NC is not a matter of writing a letter and changing phones. It means significant professional embarrassment, in a career in which he has probably invested huge amounts of effort and passion. Scientific, academic worlds are remarkably small. For Tully's WH to avoid all contact with OW would probably mean quitting his life's work and changing career altogether - losing most of the prestige and respect he has built up in his discipline.

That's not impossible, but I suspect it's a much bigger personal sacrifice than most WSs have to make to reclaim their marriages.

I'm inclined to think that Tully's WH's intransigence and refusal to negotiate come less from a 'lord-and-master' attitude, than from a profound fear of how much personal sacrifice is likely to be involved in achieving NC.


TA

TA, you are right. WH's career is much more than a job for him. He is deeply passionate about what he does. At one point of his career, before he got a permanent position, there was a problem with getting a contract for him but he went to work every day for almost 6 months without getting paid for it (supported by me but I didn't mind because I could see how much he loved what he does). I know that he has dreamed of winning a Nobel prize although this is something he would never admit to anyone but me. I suspect OW flattered his ego in this area even more than I was capable of. The situation is complicated by the fact that she wants to keep contact with him for professional reasons as well as personal ones. She got an exceptional Phd result and they were jointly published in a top journal but the general feeling in the lab is that she is not that talented but just got this result due to WH. (WH denies this, telling me that she is brilliant as well as beautiful and angelic by nature).

I know that there are only about 400 people working in this field throughout the world and as WH was her PHd supervisor the expectation is that he would mentor her and assist her in her career especially as she has no permanent postion yet. I can't say if WH could change fields of expertise (he has done so in the past) or if what he can do in a practical way to have NC but it's up to him to find a way because I can't live with anything less.

Hi, I know you want your H to break contact, any wife would!

Could you figure out how he works during the day and where he comes in contact with her? And figure out (not for him but for you) where he could break contact without leaving this job?

I would be proactive and figure this all out...for him...and for yourself. Just so you will know:

IF he can break contact in THIS job
IF he has to leave THIS job to break contact
IF he WANTS to break contact.


I would also be hitting the issues of IF HE WANTS TO BREAK CONTACT. Push the issue of him calling Steve again and again thru any means a Plan B would allow.

If he does not WANT to break contact, though he CAN break contact with her, then you are sunk for now.

I want to say also that I think he is the lowest form of creep. No one that corrupt should ever win a NOBEL prize. Life is so strange and unfair. I am sorry for your pain with this creepy man.

Maybe you married a man who was never a "family man" but rather should have led a life of singleness, one night stands, and research deep into the night every day.

How did he go about choosing you... and a family? This seems out of place for a man like that....

Stella, no I can't figure out how he could break contact with her. I tried desperately for 10 weeks before I left and failed. No, he doesn't want to break contact even though most of the contact is coming from her. (at least it was when I left, not sure what the state of play is lately) And I'm not sure that I will insist any more for him to contact Steve. I can't force him to do so and Steve was very clear that it would be pointless if he came under coercian.

And by the way it's a Nobel prize for physics, not morals, that he dreams of. Although did you know that there is no Nobel prize for Mathematics (the Fields prize is the equilvalent) because Albert Nobel insisted that there be none because his wife had an affair with, and ran away with, a mathematician?

Stella, I'm not sure that I understand your point in your last post. I am not in the mood for defending my WH right now but I think that a major point of this website is that there is a big difference between the WS and the S. We were together for 20 years and he didn't have another A before, never mind a one-night stand. We have 4 children whom he always adored and spent time with. And I'm not sure what you mean about there being a contradiction between him choosing to be with me and his passion for research. I'm passionate about things too but that doesn't make me a bad wife or mother. Sorry if I've missed your point but you've lost me here.

Sorry if I went off track. I always like to look at what KIND OF PERSON the cheater is because it may offer one or two clues as to why they do what they do and how to attack the issue.

If it is not a question that makes sense to you, just ignore it. And you dont need to defend him as being a family man.

I will put it a different way.

Which is more important to him, his family or his work?

Hi tully,

I'm sorry that I was not in touch over Christmas. I have written to you about this.

I think that Stellakat and TA and have made really good suggestions here:



I'm not sure, tully that you have followed their suggestions right through, to see whether NC is an insurmountable problem for you and H.

I do understand why you say that H must solve the problem and that you will not do it for him. In fact, I think that I said this to you very strongly when you were still living in France. I believe I said that you should stop policing him and monitoring him and trying to solve the NC problem (I'll lose this post if I go back and check!); he should want to solve this problem to stay in the marriage and if he didn't want to, then you had your answer.

You have not really answered Stellakat's 3 questions:

IF he can break contact in THIS job
IF he has to leave THIS job to break contact
IF he WANTS to break contact.

tully, does there have to be some level of contact in THIS job, now that her contract at the French lab has expired? I can see that there must be strong links between the French and Irish establishments, but how much of that would necessitate personal contact between him and her? Does he have to write to her as part of a team? If he hadn't had an affair with her, would he have to speak to her on the phone as part of his job?

I was under the impression that he "could not avoid speaking to her" because she was making strong attempts to keep their affair going after the NC letters and he would not put the phone down on her. Is that correct, or would there also have to be job-related contact?

Does he, as TA suggests, have to leave the professional field to establish proper NC?

Suppose there is no need for professional email or phone contact; in other words, the French and Irish professionals are not closely involved in a project. What contact is left, and can that be avoided? If the remaining contact would only be through conferences and the refereeing of papers, could that be managed? If somehow he could avoid attending conferences where she was giving a paper, and if he took you to conferences where he was presenting, and he did not attend conferences in which he was not presenting, could that work? He would also have to decline requests to referee books and papers she had written, and ask that she not be a referee on his.

In the above arrangement, there would be some professional embarrassment of the kind that TA describes, but perhaps not enough to mean an end to his career. What do you think? Are the repercussions for his career as serious as TA suggests?

If there is a way of solving the issue of career contact, then there are ways of solving remaining issues such as your marital home being in the same village as her parental home.

Stellakat is right; he has to want to break contact for any of this to be relevant. We know that your WH did not want to do this while you were in Plan A, and he has been wilfully obscure about whether he wants to do this now. He has said that things are over between them, but will not state unequivocally that there is NC, or that he will die trying to achieve this. He continues his "paranoia" game and seems prepared to maintain his righteous attitude even if that means losing his family for good.

I don't know whether the job can be such a big obstacle, even though I agree with TA that, unlike in most situations, he must do much more than write a letter and change a phone number to achieve NC.

I think, as you do, that his attitude is the problem, and I don't know what you can do about that. Plan B does not seem to be shaking him off the fence yet. It seems, at the moment, to be helping him fence-sit until you say "enough' and he can say that he did not end the marriage.

He knows that OW went home for Christmas, so you know that they are in close contact and that she is still affecting his judgement. I suppose you have to just wait for that situation to change now.

I'm sending my warmest best wishes across the Irish Sea to you and your family.