To whom did you expose, and when?
Do you have anyone left to expose to?
Her anger is anticipated, and a good thing. It means exposure is working and the affair is not all peachy.

You have two choices: suck it up and ignore her, or look her square in the eye and say "I am prepared to do whatever it takes to save our marriage." and then change the subject.


Not being argumentative means you're avoiding the LB of angry outbursts. That's good.
Plan A also means meeting her top ENs. What are her top ENs?

The stick of Plan A is what keeps you from being a doormat. Meet her ENs, sure... but stand up for yourself, don't enable her affair, and call her on her lies, deceit, and manipulation.

I think that you have to read the article on boundaries. Leave the room if her temper overflows. She is doing this to get your attention.

Exposure is a very necessary LB. Do it all at once. Keep a COOL head at all times. Do not argue with her (read the articles).

Plan A is about the carrot and the stick. The stick is most definitely exposure. The carrot is about meeting her needs.

It is incredible how much my WW will try anything to avoid the issue. Tonight she is using the guilt treatment. She is saying she will sign anything, do any (except dump OM) because she is so sorry that we are where I (with my porn addiction... her latest excuse) caused us to fail. I did not listen when she asked me to stop and had she been firm like me we would have broken up years ago. Truth is she caught me sneaking a peek at few pictures. Made a huge affair of it and I stopped. Course this all happened coincidentally when she decided I no longer needed access to her phone/email/computer. I locked mine down as a reprisal. Childish but at the time I could not understand what the big deal was. I handled it wrong. I should have listened but beating me to death with it while she keeps an EA going with OM is hard to take.

I know she is scared of the future. I know she wants this to go back underground. It is amazing how this is so cookie cutter with the other stories here.

I won't do it, but my wishful thinking is that Plan A is enough. I know I MUST stand firm and insist that there is no turning back. This is going to require Plan B. I have seen no true remorse from her. I won't till she has hit bottom. That makes me sad.

I told her in a kind voice that I believe in reconciliation but that it could only happen if he was gone. There was no other way. She cried. I walked away.

Another thought I just had... what is the chances as she raises the stakes she will offer up sex? I am not being shallow here. I have always felt a strong chemistry with her and frankly I want to get myself ready if that is a weapon she tries. This really sucks being so unkind to her. I know she has been very selfish with me and I must continue to focus on her shallowness and unkind acts. That will easily keep my fires extinguished. It's easy when I think of the control this jerk has over my wife.

She is saying all this because she is intoxicated on her affair. She is furiously trying to manipulate you into agreeing to be a part of her threesome. She wants to have 2 men meeting her needs.

This is going to get worse until you bust up this affair. You need to expose the affair, RC. Exposure is the most powerful weapon you have because affairs thrive on secrecy. My suggestion would be to stand your grand about NC, but expose this affair to family members and close friends. Is your DD being taught that adultery is acceptable? It is disturbing that your W is being allowed to use those children to NORMALIZE her sleazy affair with her OM.

Dr. Willard Harley: I'm in the process of rewriting "Surviving an Affair" to add information about plan B. Some of the main points are as follows:

Whether in plan A or B, the world should know about your husband's affair. All of your relatives, your friends, your children, and the licensing board for your husband's lover. In some states a licensing board will revoke a license if a counselor is having an affair with a married person, client or not. This is because it's well known that affairs hurt families, especially children. And counselors know better than to have an affair.

The reason for the wide exposure is not to hurt the unfaithful spouse, but rather to end the fantasy. Your husband's secret second life made his affair possible, and the more you can to to make it public, the easier it is for him to see the damage he's doing. Keeping it secret does damage, but few know about it. Making it public helps everyone, including the unfaithful spouse and lover, see the affair for what it really is.

<snip unrelated >
When I first started recommending openness about an affair, I wasn't sure what would happen. But I did it because I knew it was the right thing to do. Now I know that for most couples it marks the beginning of recovery."

What exposure? Are you saying you exposed to someone and she is angry about this?

Yes I have told my entire family, my DD knows, I called her best friend night before last and working on all of our joint friends. There is not a lot left. She is unemployed so work is out. The only ones that I have left are her parents and brother. Her brother is lost cause IMHO and parents will side with her no matter what. That is not conjecture, been down that road before. When her oldest DD got pregnant I was the focus. It was my fault.

I am very active in a social organization. My friends are spread out all over the state. They all know. That was her comment today. You've told everyone (poisoned their minds I did) and I will never go to to a dinner with you again. They will talk about me and I won't put up with it.

I am sorry I have been unclear and rambling. I am a little distracted. You think this is bad, I teach part time in the evening and I feel sorry for my students. They have not seen me since this all blew up.

Amazing how they do that, huh? ALL your fault! yeah, right

Exposure is working. That is why she is trying every trick in the book to get to KEEP OM and YOU.

Isn't it amazing? That only proves that it is human nature, that the mind does ABC when it enters into an affair, and the resulting actions are XYZ. Just always happens.

You need to do some more reading. To realize that what you are now going through - the exposure part - can take a day, or it can take 3 months. Don't waste your time worrying about Plan A or Plan B yet. Just hold your breath and make it through the exposure.

We'll help you work through the other steps as they happen. For now, just keep smiling and stand firm.

Please don't make the mistake of assuming what anyone will do. Half of the benefit of exposing is not what the others do, but that feeling of being stuck out in the wilderness naked. Powerful stuff.

And I promise you, no matter what her parents ultimately do, just the fact that your parents are judging you is often enough on its own to stop the affair.

RC, do you have a porn addiction?

MicheleG

Uh no. I realize that is a fair question to ask and pertinent to my issues if it were true.

I used to read a humor blog (fark.com) that used to have a few daily links to some nude pics. She was snooping on my computer and looking at my browsing history and that was what got her upset. I had alwsys made my computer open to her and I don't think was hiding anything. It was a few years ago and the wrong thing I did was to tell her that if she were more attentive to me, that maybe I would have not looked. The thing is that she has never called that event porn addiction till now. Suddenly that has bothered her all these years and all of a sudden with a EA being exposed it seems important to label me as something too. I am not trying to dismiss this. I made a mistake, I tried to apologize. Did I 100% stop looking? No. No sense telling a lie. Can I justify this.... not really, but does that compare to an EA? If I had spiraled into chat rooms, paid for porn or phone sex I could see an issue. A few free pinup pictures is not the same. I don't think I am gaslighting. If I am I will gladly explore that with my counselor. I am looking for honest opinions.

On another topic, I am in my mind working plan a. How do I handle her gaslighting? She is making some incredibly wrong statements like I talk to a male friend as much as she talks to OM. She tells me he affects our life. Do I rebut? Do I take the time to get the cell phone bills and show her that it is a not true statement? Seems like a lot of work and maybe a LB? I replied to this morning email barrage that we will just have to agree to disagree.



rosecroix

RC, I would call her parents ASAP before she calls them and spins the story. She will call and pre-empt them with a story that features you as the demon who is just angry about her "friend" because she objected to your "porn use" blah, blah, blah. So when you do call you will be spending your time defending YOURSELF from her lies.

When you do call, be sure and ASK THEM FOR THEIR ADVICE. That is real important because may buy their buy in. Hopefully they will speak to their DD.

I'm a big fan of FARK.com myself. What RoseCroix is talking about are Playboy style pinups. We're not talking about anything graphic. There's no sex in them or women spread eagle doing anything crazy. I may have taken a gander a time or two The site itself is very cool and very funny. To call someone that visits the site a porn addict is a bit of a stretch.

If anybody wants to confirm this the site is safe. They removed the pinups a while back and put them on a seperate page.

Regardless of how graphic the pictures are, if your partner takes issue with it, it needs to stop.

Most definitely call her parents today! This morning!

As for your question, here's the thing. You can NOT talk logically to a wayward spouse. Once they have that addiction under their skin, NOTHING you say makes any difference - it is only another reason for her to spin everything around (like your past 'addiction') so that she gets to keep getting her drug of choice.

Do NOT try to make sense with her right now. Just keep repeating your rules. NO OM. NO OM. You're doing great; just keep up the same thing. Plan A, yes. Be on your best behavior EXCEPT when it comes to the EA. Refuse to budge on that.

I kind of equate it to raising a kid. If you waver, you're lost. We were having an issue this week regarding a limousine for D18's prom. H kept trying to reason with her on what HE wanted to do, kept trying to get her to buy into his way. She kept arguing about doing it her way. After 3 days solid of arguing, I just said 'Enough! I am making an executive decision! You are my child and you will do it the way I tell you to! We are going to do XYZ.'

And she was happy! She just wanted someone to put down the rules and make us all abide by them.

Not saying your W will be happy, but that if you stay adamant about your rules, she will not be able to make you waver. She will see that you are set, you will not be manipulated, and she will give up and make a decision one way or another. You need to be strong like a parent needs to be strong, for their own good.

I agree. I admitted my mistake was/still not being willing to work on the many issues in our relationship, but I have learned here that must come after the NC is in place. In a good relationship I would willingly not do something that upsets my partner. Then my LB would be full and I can take the hit on doing something that I may not agree on. We are not there. I see the issue as only a smokescreen to threaten me with exposure. Anyone she tells with the exception of her parents are going to already know she is in EA. Hopefully that will let them take what she says with a grain of salt.

There is no doubt that getting them involved could help. Maybe I am just trying to rationalize something more I don't want to do? It's just that I have seen them be supportive of WW in the past when they should not have been. They are ostriches. They won't look.

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THEY DO OR DON'T DO!

WHAT MATTERS IS THAT SHE KNOWS THAT THEY KNOW!

THAT IS ALL THAT MATTERS!

Got it?

Call them. Now.

RC,

I haven't followed your thread in its entirety but have looked in a few times, but now I see the "Expose or Not Expose" question coming up and wanted to chime in.

Exposure is the single greatest weapon at the disposal of a BS. It can make more difference in the long run if you get a chance at recovery than almost any other single thing you can do. The truth is the truth. It is not relative. There can be no “your truth” and “my truth.” Two things in direct opposition cannot both be true. The two can both be false, but cannot both be true. The truth is, if there were no affair there would be no conflict in regard to what she is doing, because she wouldn’t be doing it at all.

As already stated, what those you expose to do with the truth doesn’t really matter, because it is the truth. Your choices are to tell the truth or allow your WW to tell more lies that will influence the way others interact with you and with your WW. If you ever get to the point of the affair ending and your WW wanting to reconcile, people will not support her efforts to return to you if they believe the lies and garbage that she told them during the affair. This will forever keep in the back of their minds that you are the bad guy in all of this and that your wife has just cause to leave you. They will always wonder why she returned. Unless of course, your wife suddenly has an epiphany and decides to tell them the truth herself, which might happen and does more often that many would believe, but that could be years down the road and during that time you will be fighting an uphill battle to be accepted by those who have believed her lies.

In addition, a great part of an affair, especially an Emotional Affair that has not yet been consummated by full blown adultery, is nothing more than a fantasy. Fantasies can only exist in secret where the light of truth cannot reach. By exposing the truth to those that know your wife and might be on her side initially, she now not only has to justify her actions to herself and you, but also to them. Once they know what is really going on, she has to admit to them that she made a decision to have an affair and though they might still support her because they love her and want her to be happy, they will in deed know reality and not just the fantasy. This will change greatly the way they interact with her and also modify the advice they give her, changing it from “Leave the loser” into something more along the lines of “I want you to be happy, but…”

Exposure to OM’s family, especially a wife or girl-friend also causes him to suddenly have to face the reality that he is making a life altering decision if he continues the affair. It makes him choose between heading along the path he is on and turning back to the life he already has. It will change forever the way he interacts with those around him

Much of the pressure exposure puts on the affair is because not only do the affair partners lie to those around them, they also lie to themselves AND to each other. In an effort to get their next fix from the AP, they will do or say almost anything. They are acting purely in selfishness and really don’t care at all about the happiness or desires of the AP because an affair is one of the most selfish acts you can commit. Each is acting from his or her own motives and not from a position of unity. They have not in fact become one with each other and so together they have nothing of value. All they have is what they share during the affair.

This leads into the fact that you and your wife have a history together. While she has been busy rewriting that history in an effort to make what she is doing justifiable, not just to others but also to herself, she does in fact have memories with you that are not what she has dragged out as her reasons that make the affair palatable. Even if you end up divorced, those memories will remain forever and she will eventually have to face the reality of what she has done. Once the high of the affair has worn off, she will miss you if you are no longer around. That’s not a maybe, but a given unless she has suffered some sort of serious mind altering trauma due to disease or accident. Her amnesia right now is self-induced.

Do NOT discuss exposure with her, before or after it is done. Especially do not discuss it before it has happened so that she can’t spin what you do into you being a crazy person and that is why she has to get away.

And when you expose be ready for the ka-ka to hit the air-mover device. She will say things that will make you cringe. She will tell you she was thinking of reconciling with you but you have blown it by exposing her dirty little secret. She will tell you that you have ruined any chance that she would ever return to you. She will tell you that she could never trust you after what you have done (I always laugh when I hear this one…the cheater can’t trust the one they betrayed.) She will say things that will make you want to curl up and cry…

IGNORE IT! It is the alien that has abducted the wayward spouse talking.

Expose start to finish.
Expose because it might help.
Expose because it will put the truth out on the table.
Expose because it is the right thing to do.
Expose because it is the best weapon you have!

Mark

I appreciate the kind words. I know the day she found out I called her best friend, as you said the Ka Ka hit the fan. The OM's family/friends etc are an unknown. I know only what she has allowed me to know. I've met him once. I know his phone # (it's plastered all over my cell bill) but nothing else.

He is online, but I do not know his email address.

More and more Plan B is looming. I have not let up that he's gone or we are done. Nicely of course. She has remarked that she could get over this if I would just let up. I am not falling for it. It was guilt last night and anger this morning. If this wasn't so painful it would be fascinating to watch, in a clinical sense.

She told me in her first marriage that her exH always told her that she would fail and come crawling back. She prided herself on not doing that. I think they left on really bad terms and burnt up what was left. I need to make sure that I am supportive of her in every way (except OM) and encourage her to leave. That part is at least working. She told me tearfully yesterday I was pushing her out of the house and our marriage. It was surprisingly easy to tell her that the only person that needed to leave the marriage is the OM. Not kidding myself, but separation will be easier since there are no kids. My first divorce was excruciating since I did not get to see my DD for 3 months. This time will be different, painful but I will get through this and fight to keep my marriage.