I found this site a few days ago while desperately searching for a means of coping with the pain caused by my WS. I guess to receive any usable advice or help I will need to tell my story from the beginning and be as honest as I can about my own failings as a husband. I have been married for 20 years this year and have three sons. My wife and I met when she was 19 and I was 21 and we began a passionate courtship that ended in marriage after only five months. Our first child was already on his way and believe it or not I was the happiest guy on earth. For the first decade of our marriage my wife was a stay at home mom for my two sons and they were the happiest years of my life. As the kids got older she yearned for a job to get her out of the house, so I convinced her instead to go back and finish her college degree. It was a couple years of hardship, but my baby graduated with honors and started advancing up the ladder of her chosen profession. I was moving along nicely as well and eventually made General Manager at the manufacturing plant I work at. About 5 years ago my wife started showing signs of restlessness that I foolishly ignored. I was happily married and couldn't consider that maybe she was not, that I was not showing her the level of affection and support that she needed. What I didn't know was that a co-worker had began to show her affection and showered her with complements and that she was moving into a full blown EA. I discovered the truth after getting suspicious while he was at our house for a ball game. He followed her around like a puppy dog and my wife was obviously nervous. I began snooping and discovered that they were flirting relentlessly via email and that he was actively trying to get her to leave me so they could begin a new romance. He is married with a child of his own, but is a serial cheater. I caught this early enough that from the emails that I new that this was mostly flirting and a lot of begging on his part but my wife was still resisting a PA. I confronted her and she admitted everything. We wrote him an NC email and the EA ended. Things improved for us to the point that, oops, baby number three was conceived in the months following the EA. My wife and I were not equipped emotionally to deal with a new child, but I promised to bear the burden for her as much as possible and I lived up to my promise. After his birth I arranged for several months of work from home and I spent night and day changing diapers, cleaning house and cooking for the family. When my employer hired a new General Manager, this no longer was an option so we found day care and I continued to change diapers, cook, and clean. Everything was going fine until my General Manager was let go and I was promoted to General Manager. The company was struggling and I took the position without a pay increase and had to increase my hours to boot. I still kept up with all my duties at home, with one exception. I put too many things before taking care of my wife's needs. A few months ago, my wife and co-worker began the EA again. Only this time she was much more of a willing participant. I was unaware until the day she came home and told me she was in love with him. For two weeks we struggled to keep things together, but one night we had a fight and she decided to leave. She had him pick her up and she stayed with him at a motel room. The next day she moved in with her parents and we talked on and off for a few days, mostly me begging and crying and her justifying all of her actions due to my lack of satisfying her needs. I had all but given up by late in the week and made an appointment with a divorce attorney. Just as I'm walking out of the attorney's office she calls and asks me to lunch. It was the day we decided to get back together. I was giving her the plan A like crazy and have been ever since, I just didn't know what plan A was until yesterday. We took a few weeks off work and left town. When we got back she quit her job and has been at home for the last month and a half. Everything has been going well, except I am an emotional basket case. I constantly vacilate between guilt, pain, jealousy, anger, despair, and hopelesness and I don't know that I will ever get over the EA and PA she has had with him. I've been so flaky at work that I had to accept a demotion and agree to counseling to keep my job. Add that to her lack of employment and I am losing my house and my sanity to save this marriage. I'm committed to saving the marriage no matter what the material costs, but the emotional costs are wearing me down. She has been showing that she is committed to saving the marriage as well and says all the right things. She has been very generous sexually, but has started to say that I am wearing her down, which I believe to be true. I've been using sex as a crutch because I can't stop thinking of the physical and emotional aspects of her adultery. I've been very emotional with bouts of crying and it is wearing my wife down as well. I can see her frustration growing, now I am to clingy, to needy and she has been having trouble dealing with me. She says I am finaly giving her everything she has ever wanted, only too much of it. I'm now too emotional. All my attempts to reign in my emotions only lead to bigger out burst and I am desperately looking for some help.

You have got to vent here. Speak about her affair for an hour once a week. If you have done damage to her please understand that the impact of this affair is often regarded as worse than death of a loved on. You are in mourning. Recovery may take longer than two years. She must understand the impact of the affair. Get her to post on her own thread.

There are many things which have to be analyzed. How did the affair begin? How can the affair continue? STD check? How do you implement extraordinary precautions? What did OM offer?

I would recommend that you jointly visit a MB-weekend course.

You have a fair amount of reading to do from the article section.

hanging,

Have you & your wife read "Surviving An Affair?"
What did you learn from it?

hbat,

Welcome to MB. I'm sorry that you are here because of these terrible circumstances.

I think one of the first things you should do is speak to your doctor about your emotional state. You seem to be at crisis point and it might be that medication is in order.

A good diet, no drinking, good sleep and regular, vigourous exercise will also help your emotional state, but it can be hard to start those things when you are already unbalanced. Speak to your doctor.

Thanks for the helpful advice. I am so glad to have somewhere to vent. I do not feel I can talk to anyone I know of the personal devastation I am suffering. I have been trying for weeks to see my doctor. Unfortunately he has just returned to the country from an extended European vacation and I have had three postponements from him as he tries to get back into a schedule. I do have an appointment pending where I will try to get the refferals I need to have insurance cover some of the things I may need. I will also request a check for the STD which scares the hell out of me. As I said the guy is a serial cheater and always has some poor married girl on the hook. He's a smooth operator and this wouldn't be the first job he's had these problems.

I'm not trying to make excuses for my wife, other than he seems to have a talent for recognizing women with potential weakness. I guess I should consider myself one of the lucky ones. My wife seems to be willing to do anything necessary to preserve the marriage if possible. We have been spending as much time as possible talking of things and she has been forthcoming when I ask questions, even painful details.

I have ordered the good doctors book on building an affair proof marriage but it has yet to arrive. I have been trying like hell to build up the love bank, but at times I know my emotional despair is making large withdrawls. Fortunately she is trying hard to make deposits as well.

We have taken extraordinary measures to seperate her from OM. Her cell phone number has been changed and the billing is emailed to my work address for review. Her email passwords and facebook passwords have been given to me. Most encouraging is that she and I together went to her employer and gave her immediate notice that she was leaving the firm and in detail why. I was actually in the office when all was confessed. She also explained to our two nearly grown sons, in less detail, why she left and accepted full responsibility for what she did. It was tough and I sat there and bawled like a baby the whole time.

Today she suggested that we do anything I feel we needed to do to get our fresh start going. She even suggested moving to be closer to her sister or my brother, which means leaving the state. The biggest roadblock at this point seems to be my inability to hold myself together.

2009 has been a very tough year for me emotionally and I feel that I was headed for some sort of mental crash. I know that I placed a lot of strain on this marriage in the last year with the promotion at work. As I said the company is enduring tough times. 70% of the workforce has been cut, and those cuts were made by yours truly. I have had to sit with close to 60 people this year and explain to them why I needed to let them go. Those that have remained have taken 20% pay cuts and started paying part of thier insurance premiums. It has been very draining and I have been checked out both at work and at home for some time. When she came home from work that day in October and told me she was in love with another man, the highwater mark had been met and my mental collapse was kicked into high gear. Reading through this forum has provided some of the only inner peace that I have felt in months and I am so grateful to have this resource.

Yikes, hanging,

Please break up your posts into paragraphs. It is very hard on screen to read text of more than about 3 lines long. You could go back to this last post, click the "edit" button and insert breaks. Also, for each post, click "preview" to see how the post will appear on the thread.

I'll have another go at reading your post now.

Thanks for the tip. I have never been one to post on an internet forum until now. I've been writing these late at night when I can't sleep and they do look like confused ramblings I admit.

Hanging,

5 years to be dealing with an affair is an awful long time. Even if you believe the EA ended for part of that time, you must have had anxiety and worry every day that she went to work with OM. This can lead to things like PTSD and emotional breakdowns when the BS deals with this too long.

Did you tell your doctor that it is urgent and you need to see him ASAP? If you haven't, can you do so today? If he still won't see you right away, pls ask for a referral and get yourself in to see somone ASAP, OK? I know my sister went on ADs during her H's A and it helped her a lot. I have another friend who started suffering panic attacks and went on anti-anxiety medicine and that helped her a lot too...

Next, even thought it might be difficult at first, try to limit A talk. Timing is important, and you don't want to constantly be in a "betrayed" state. I think I have heard only one of five talks should be about the R and I know others here have set aside certain times of the week, etc for A talk. When you think of questions outside of those times, jot them down, save them for later...

Last thing, was this A ever exposed to OM's W?

Yes, it has been a very rough five years. There is not much point in telling OM's W. He really came back strong a few months ago with the come ons to the wife because she started an A of her own and left him. He has been served the big D by her. She knew of the EA before me.

I have not pressed the doctor with a sense of urgency, my fault there. I will call Monday and request urgent need for appointment. I'm afraid of taking any pills as my wife started taking them during the end of the EA.

She was depressed because of the inner conflict she was having within herself over what she was doing and went to a doctor for her depression. The doctor prescribed her a significant dose of Paxil and shoved her out the door with no monitoring or follow up calls. She claims that the pills made it much easier to indulge herself without guilt as they dulled her feelings.

I was very suspicious of this claim, but she has backed it up with the emails and cell phone texts she gave me when I demanded full disclosure. Yes, she is shamelessly flirting with the guy for months, but keeps insisting that she is married and will not have a physical relationship with him. Within two weeks of the date the pills are prescribed her emails take a 180 and she is 100% planning to leave me and the kids for him.

The first thing we did when she came back was disappear from the face of the earth for three weeks. No communication with anyone outside of our parents, who were caring for the kids. I took her phone and we stayed out of state with no computer access and she quit the pills cold turkey. The SOB doctor still has not called to see how she is doing or why she has not come in to get her prescription refilled.

This led to my demotion at work, but I knew I had to completely isolate her from OM to have any chance of saving our M. It was during those weeks that she saw my true feelings for her as I got her off the pills cold turkey. Even though I was dying inside, I was there for her through the shakes, nightmares, bizarre visions, and violent mood swings.

I agree that I need to dial back the talk of the A with her and I will be biting my tongue some. On the good side, the book I ordered from this site, His Needs, Her Needs, Building an Affair-Proof Marriage arrived in the post today. We will be reading the first chapters together tonight.

There are a lot of different anti-depressants, that won't make you feel numbed out. Please do take care of this; your family needs you to take care of yourself.

fwiw, consider yourself lucky (I know, I know) that your wife has taken this 180 turnaround and is working with you. You have a good chance of happy recovery here.

How do you know this, from OM? Because I will tell you we have seen over and over the OM claiming he was separated or D and it was a lie. So if your info is from OM, I would ask you to verify this with OMW yourself.

The part about your W attributing her full blown PA to being put on ADs is ?? It sounds like she is claiming the ADs lowered her inhibitions? Alcohol can do that but I don't think ADs do. Anyway, As happen because of a lack of Extraordinary Precautions and because she allowed another person to meet her ENs, and hopefully she will be able to recognize that after some time, maybe reading the books will help her.

Would she be willing to post here?

Shortly after I discovered EA 5 years ago, OMW called in the middle of the night hysterical because she too found the emails. I believe that is why there was a break in the EA, because both my WW and OM were exposed and I confronted him and demanded he leave us alone. Stupidly I did not press my WW to quit her job at that time. I know of OM and big D from snooping with a couple of my WW co-workers a few months ago. OMW decided she had enough of his ways and had a PA with the kid's soccer coach and has since moved in with him. I've seen them at the movies together once.

I'm willing to let my WW attribute the PA to the pills, at least in the short term until I recover enough emotionally to be able to approach her about it without being hysterical.

At this point I am desperate to find ways for me to stop being so emotional that I drive her away from me. It has been great to have her back the way she was years ago. Nurturing, loving and kind.

I have been taking extreme caution to try to eliminate any contact between WW and OM. She has quit her job, changed cell phone numbers and I have access to her email accounts. I basically detonated a nuclear weapon at her work when I went with her to turn in her notice and hopefully have this guy feeling betrayed by her, as he is probably going to lose his job over it. Also, now that she is home, she is caring for the youngest child and my other nearly grown children are coming and going without warning. She is always careful to ask me before going anywhere and always asks me to go with her if I can. If I'm not going she will take one of the children. She does not go anywhere alone yet. I think she is trying to get my trust back.

My WW has been reluctant to read our new book with me, so I have been reading Dr. Harley's book by myself. That is until last night when she came to me and gave me a big hug and told me she read the first three chapters while taking a bath. It was the first time she seemed to genuinely realize the amount of pain I am in and has promised to do whatever it takes to help me forgive her. Hope always seems to breathe new life into me just a I am about to give up.

Just stay calm, and loving, and respectful, and dedicated to your marriage. She'll see it.

Oh, and make sure you always look great and smell better!