No contact has been in place for a little over 2 months (last contact being in the middle of November). It is possible that she's still in contact in some fashion, but I really doubt it. They certainly aren't in contact in terms of actual communication (they can't talk or write to each other in any way, and they certainly can't see each other face to face). I monitor as well as I can and I'm about 90% sure there has been NC since the middle of November.

1) I didn't contact OMW. She knows though, I'm 100% sure of that.

2) My wife is still in fog pretty deep, but it's very clear that she's coming out. She occasionally says things that indicate that she's starting to feel remorse.

3) I have found a few new hobbies. I bought a particular piece of sporting equipment that I've wanted forever, and I use it every day.

4) Honestly I see a lot of hope too in my situation, but I wonder a lot if it's false hope.

5) My LB's are all gone. My big ones were DJs, AOs, and SDs. AOs and SDs were easy to eliminate, but DJs has taken months, and only now can I say that it's pretty well eliminated.

Of course there is hope. It is still early in recovery. Either way you come out a better man.

IP,

She probably is rewriting history to some degree. She might also have some valid complaints. Do not confuse the complaints that are the result of her affair with those she might have had that were valid before the affair.

She is probably still in withdrawal, but I would snoop to verify NC is being maintained. If she has any contact at all she is still living in the fantasy and will not be able to reconnect with you no matter how long you give her.

Love busters really only fall into specific categories and all of them can be identified in yourself and can be done away from. Whether she considers them to be love busters or not really makes no difference, they still do damage though maybe not as bad as if she equates one with being a love buster, though she might not be able to call it such because she has no reference for the terminology of MB.

If she has NC and you have correctly identified her top 3 or 4 ENs and are meeting them and you have killed all love busters and she still is not responding I suggest that she is till seeing OM as "the one" and is still in the fantasy of the affair. I would also suggest that there may be some sort of contact even if it is indirect (as in someone is feeding her info about OM that keeps her connected to him.)

How long since alleged NC began?

Are you doing things other than rehashing the affair when you are together?

Are you spending at least 15 hours per week with her doing fun/recreational type things?

Plan A is supposed to get the commitment from the WS not follow it. Once commitment to the marriage is secured recovery can begin and Plan A is ended though meeting ENs and avoiding Love Busters needs to be for life if you want to avoid falling into the same patterns that led to the affair.

Just so you know, being a controlling person is what every BS who tries to fight an affair is accused of. Unless you had serious control issues before the affair and even before the disconnect from you that she underwent prior to the affair, I would not focus a lot of energy on that.

Remember that it will be little steps that lead to recovery not some giant leap. Withdrawal can take 3 to 6 months and in some cases perhaps even longer. Any contact with OM and that timer resets to zero for all intents and purposes so look for sources of contact to rule those out and then be patient and set daily expectations to weekly and weekly expectations to monthly time frames.

Just like the fog of a misty morning, the fog of an affair burns off slowly, but rule out contact if it seems to be going nowhere.

In order to have a recovered and happy marriage you have to learn to meet her ENs and avoid all love busters anyway. So keep doing that until the fog burns off. It will be meeting her ENs and avoiding love busters that will make the fog go away if it does. If it doesn't begin to lift, look for continued contact of some kind.

Mark

IP,

I see you answered some of my questions while I was posting...

Why have you not contacted OMW?

If your wife has not written a NC letter, OM has not made it clear that there will be NC from his end and OMW has not confronted him and made him accountable and gotten him to cut ties to your wife, she could still be holding out hope for the future in regard to OM leaving his wife and calling for her then.

Plus, OMW deserves to know the truth and if a liar is her only source of info she hasn't gotten the truth yet, be sure of it and call her.

It also gives you another set of eyes to keep them both honest.

If the affair partners parted ways reluctantly vowing their undying love for each other and promising to reconnect some time in the future, no commitment to the marriage will ever be possible.

Mark

I'm really trying to sift out what's true. I have friends helping me with this, and they're all mutual friends who have been brutally honest with me. I'm really trying to find out where I went wrong with her and fix it permanently.


I'm snooping to a degree (no keylogger or DVR, for example), and it's enough that I'm satisfied. Plus I can notice changes in her behavior that indicate that she's coming around to me.



Two months, roughly. There was eye contact (no communication) about a month ago though, which I'm sure counts as contact.



We almost never talk about the affair (once every 3 or 4 days, if that). My WW is a conflict avoider, bigtime.

Also, we probably spend about 40 hours a week together, whether it be just talking, eating out, watching TV, playing board games, etc etc. I would say that about 20 - 25 of those hours are spent by ourselves (undivided attention).

The main reason I don't want to contact OMW is that I don't want to upset the balance of things. Right now I really believe that NC is in place to stay, and I am doing a good amount of snooping to verify. Obviously I could be wrong, but after all this I can't imagine my wife would keep lying right to my face.

A liar is my only source of information too (WW is the only way I know any details about the A), so I don't know how contacting OMW could bring out any more of the truth for her.

On the other hand, there is some truth to what you say. My WW is holding out some degree of hope for a future for them to be together even now. I ask her questions like "what if he called today and asked you to run away, what would you do?" and she always used to respond, "i don't know". Lately her answer has changed from "i don't know" to "i hope i wouldn't run away but how can i say for sure", which I take as a sign of progress. Obviously, she's not all the way there, but it's early in the game yet.

Indeed. LOL.


Interesting you would place so much stock in anything that person would say actually. Perhaps you would be happier posting on her site.


WOW - a point of agreement.


Aphelion - your situation is really way out from the norm here. You allowed your wife to continue working with her OM. You didn't follow MB - you just cut and pasted the bits you like. You are not qualified to make comments on how MB works when followed completely. You NEVER instituted absolute No Contact - that is a cardinal unbreakable rule.

Same situation with me.


It's not a lost cause. SF in our marriage is better than it ever was for our first 23 years of marriage before my wife's affair. It is much better now.

Some of the male BS's here don't have SF with their wives at all - for a variety of reasons.... SOme of them have never held their spouses feet to the fire and really fully recovered from their affair. Some just stay together for the children.

How long has your wife been in NC with the OM? She is quite possibly still in withdrawal. SHe is still withdrawn from the marriage so the best thing you can do right now is wait until she is withdrawn from her OM and do Plan A as best you can.

On her terms? Not exactly a humble and contrite heart. Your description of her is very typical for a WW in withdrawal.


Again - this is her withdrawal talking - she will be sickened by this one day soon. She will not always be comparing you. She will forget OM eventually.

If you will not have a NC letter and expose the OMW then you most likely are going to have the affair continue with the OM or a new affair with a new OM.

You are acting from fear. Good decisions never come from fear. Only bad results.

Comments on a couple of things here...

First, the fact that a spouse "loved someone else" is not the death of a relationship together. Unless you lived in a vacuum during your teenage years you probably fell in love at least once and likely more than once before you got married. Love only becomes something magical and mystical that can only happen with "the one" if we buy into the Hollywood/romance novel idea of love, what it is and how it happens.

If love is something that happens TOO us then the fates are at work and who are we to question the fates. For those claiming to be more biblical y based in their world view this can lead to "God made me fall in love" or "God brought us together." It is how the affair partners decided they were meant to be together in the first place.

But if love is a feeling we have that is really only a response to stimulus then it would seem that it can be created almost at will by someone meeting our ENs in the right way while avoiding Love Busters in order to get their balance in our LB$ up.

This is the entire premise of MB and the reason for Plan A being the first step in trying to break an affair. If Dr Harley is right that love is how we react when certain conditions are met then we can fall in love many times over. The problem occurs when we fall in love with different people each time.

So if LOVE is MAGIC then once our spouse has fallen for someone else the MAGIC is gone forever. But if LOVE is a response to what WE do then WE can do it again and again and again. In order to maintain romantic love throughout our marriage this is in fact what we need to do so that we fall in love with each other over and over again as the years pass and different chapters of our lives unfold.

Now as for the idea of not upsetting the balance...

Do NOT mistake equilibrium for stability. When your WW is perched on the fence and not leaning toward leaving you for OM it is easy to think of it as a victory and it could be in the long run. But your GOAL needs to be to get her OFF the fence and securely on your side of it forever.

Conflict is only bad if it is never resolved. Resolving conflict is how we move forward in life whether it be together or apart, for a period or forever, as loving spouses or distant acquaintances. The conflict right now is dying down, but she has yet to decide which way she will go. She is straddling the decision and unless you force her to make one she will never do so or worse yet make it based on a position of renter rather than buyer.

If she stays with you only because you are currently giving her more than OM and for no other reason, she isn't really staying at all but merely waiting till something better comes along. TR touched on this I think that unless you can get her to become a buyer there is as much danger of a new OM as the rekindling of the affair with OM1.

Now I'm not saying to jump all over her and try to force her to decide by making it uncomfortable to be around you because THAT would be counterproductive. But you do need something to leverage the situation away from sitting on the fence being comfortable. With YOU has to be the most comfortable position or you will forever be waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Exposure to OMW can provide the impetus needed for her to make a decision. If she goes the other way at least you can heal and move forward. Right now you are stuck, neither in recovery nor battling a real affair. But the fantasy of the affair lives on and even if she is not pining away for OM but merely longing for someone to create that feeling in her once more she is resisting your efforts to be that man while waiting for the next "magic" to happen.

If your only source of info regarding what OMW knows is your wife and her only source of truth was OM then the truth is somewhere long down the road from what you have been told. (Most likely scenario at least) Contacting OMW can make the fantasy bubble explode once and for all. If OM and his wife are fighting perhaps your wife will reconnect with you. If OM and his wife divorce your wife might run off to join him, but at least you will not spend the next 25 or 30 years wondering what will happen if OM calls one afternoon..

And we have not yet discussed the fact that OMW has the right to know the truth about her marriage. If her only source is her lying cheating husband, she does not know the truth. It will only be the truth that will allow her to make the decisions she needs to make that concern the rest of her life, just like you needed to know the truth in order to decide what to do, she needs to know it as well.

Mark

I went back and re-read this post a couple of times this morning.

WOW!!!

In 18 months on this site, this single post may hold the most TRUTHS of any other single post that I've read.

It should be posted at the top of each of the infidelity forums and be mandatory reading for all newly BH's.

I also see where some of the vets took exception to Aphelion's claims, and have attempted to discredit and embarrass him for his mistakes in attempting to R his M.

I guess I see it differently, as another man who has also made some serious life mistakes that I regret.

Just Learning gave me some great perspective at one point when I was having a hard time dealing with FogFree's A ... paraphrasing, he said ... "The measure of a person is not in the mistakes they make, but in how they recover from those mistakes" ... as a person who had overcame a few major life screw-ups, this statement resonanted with me.

In that light, I view Aphelion's current perspective as PRICELESS, because he has a wisdom that is acquired from personal experience. I see a BH who attempted recovery, although not a perfect attempt ... just like every other BH we've seen here ... and has learned some valuable lessons about the falacy of successfully recovering from a WW's A, except under the most limited circumstances.

Make no mistake, I couldn't/wouldn't have tolerated what Aphelion has for the past decade, but HE DID (with the recognized obvious mistakes ... just like every other BH), just like this site promotes, and his perspective from the other side of this nightmare is INVALUABLE.

NOTHING WORKS 100% OF THE TIME ... and there is valuable information to be gleened from those that fail for those who are willing to employ a little independent thought and evaluate the results vs. the claims.

This is very typical here and we all know who is guilty.

They attempt to build a strawman rather than discuss.

Well she doesn't have a humble/contrite heart. She is definitely still in withdrawal, but the fog is lifting slowly.


I hope this is true, but I've heard conflicting stories around here. Some people say that recovering after WW's affair is hopeless unless she's immediately remorseful, and others say stick it out and she'll forget.

I'm almost 3 months from D-day, and there's *some* remorse, but not to the extent I'd want.

I do not have a NC letter from my wife. Should I push for that?

Also, I have not exposed to OMW, but I know for a fact (100%) that she knows about what's going on. Her source of information is OM though. Should I go out of my way to contact her anyway (even though she already knows)?

that's exactly what some of us are trying to say here.

@Mark:



I agree 100% that this is our current status. She's placating me and making 1/2-a$$ efforts that are on her terms only.



How would exposing to OMW give me any leverage? Do you mean that it would simply allow me to get more information about the A? I just don't understand how this would help me at all if we both already know.

IP705,

Just a couple of question for clarity:

1. If you had only had sex with 2 different people, would you be able to "forget" one of them?

2. As a BH with only one sexual partner in your history, can YOU "forget" that your WW had sex with OM?

When you get coflicting information, its up to you to decide for ourselves which message holds more truth FOR YOU.