As a BS whose WH has NEVER told the entire truth, I can assure you that your wife not only did not deserve to have you commit adultery, but she does NOT deserve your lying to her.

The LIES are what will destroy your marriage. Yes, your wife may choose to divorce you for your adultery, but your best chance of saving and restoring your marriage is to get off your self-pity pot and humbly confess to your wife without blaming her or excusing your adultery.

My WH also told me that the ONE OW he finally admitted to (I KNEW he had cheated, BTW!) was "nothing" to him. HAH! If she was "nothing" to him, then I was LESS THAN NOTHING to him for the time he was rutting with her.

Be a man and face up to the consequences.

Do the RIGHT thing for your wife and tell her the truth.

Look for a poster called tst on these boards. He is what you should aspire to be: a repentent FORMER WH who has proven, beyond any doubt, that he loves and treasures his wife. My advice to you is to do what he says.

Yeah, he feels for the guy, who knows he used his W like a whore.

Gee, what a big hearted guy, you are, NH.

That makes everything ok then. Why on earth should OWH's still be upset????

After all, you "feel for him".

I hope OWH finds his way to this site, b/c we will ALL ecourage him to tell your BW.

But, even if he doesn't find, MB, I believe he WILL tell her.

I'm absolutely convinced of it.

You keep saying you don't know how to tell your wife...

You open your mouth and just do it...

When you do it, make sure that you OWN IT ALL...

It is all yours after all...

Don't you dare act as though any of it is her fault...

Though the state of the marriage leading up to the affair belongs to both of you -

The choice to have the affair is 100% yours...

Do NOT bother saying anything about the state of the marriage thing at this point...NO...Not your place right now...

You say: I did something despicable to you.

I committed ADULTERY with OW's full name. [Do not try to pretty it up by calling it a cute, watered-down name - call it what it is.]

I will tell you everything. I will answer any question you have - I will answer your questions as many times as you need to ask.

I am willing to do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to help you heal from what I did to you.

I would like to stay married to you, but I realize that this is your choice, not mine.

Do not pepper this conversation with cheap, self-serving sounding "I'm sorry's"...Talk is cheap at this point...You will have to demonstrate your TRUE REMORSE over time in ACTION - once you truly are remorseful that is, and not just feeling guilty...[I also know that right now, you don't know the difference]

Mrs. W

P.S. AFTER YOU TELL YOUR WIFE...If I were you I would call the MB offices and make an appointment with Steve, ASAP...You do the heavy lifting...It starts with truth.

What Mrs. W said!

Let me let you in on a little secret about the above. You absolutely, positively CANNOT be "cleaned up" while you harbor this lie. That is IMPOSSIBLE.

Until you tell the truth, you will remain foggy and wayward. A huge liability to your wife and yourself.

There is NO OTHER WAY, but TRUTH...

There are no short cuts.

I KNOW that you will remain in bondage while this lie is kept under wraps...I have seen it over and over here. A wayward that continues to lie remains foggy...They remain "soul-sick" as Pepperband once called it...

That lie is poison to both you and your wife...If you really want to clean yourself up, you must tell the truth...

When will you tell your wife, NH?

Mrs. W

Hi NeedHelp100

Welcome to MB......

I see that The Welcoming Committee has been doing a great job!

I just love the folks here on MB

Let me introduce myself, I'm an adulterer, cheater, liar, con, and downright scuzzy person (see, we have a lot in common) that came here to MB after doing everything possible to destroy my wife, my family and myself.

By the grace of God I was given another chance, the same chance now before you!

You have the same choices in front of you that I had in front of me nearly three years ago.

To tell the truth or to lie and deceive your wife.

I chose to lie! I continued to lie even when she found the truth. I lied so much that I destroyed the woman that was innocent in all of this. The folks on this forum witnessed the evil man I had become as my dear wife poured out her heart, month after excruciating month, with each stroke of her keyboard. It was abhorring to watch as I continued to worry only about only myself and my appearance, while pretending to be concerned about all my victims, until I tore my wife and family apart. I was a man more interested in damage control than in being honest, but the truth was revealed; I was no more than a coward at best.

I'm sad to say that you are that same man I once was!

I'm sorry to tell you this, but each day you wait is adding to the length of time it is going to take your victim to recover.

Waiting compounds the damage done. It is so similar to compounding interest.

Might sound strange, but trust me on this one. Each day you postpone the truth is going to make it harder for your wife to heal.

You asked many questions, but aren't they all about self preservation?

Aren't you more worried about your own skin here? It sure looks that way to me......Just re-read the questions you've asked.....



These all reek of, "What's going to happen to ME"??? Never once have you asked, "after I tell her the truth, what can I do to help my wife".

Do you see the difference?? A normal man, in his right mind would clearly see the difference.

If this statement were true, you would not be trying to save your own skin, you'd be busy plugging the hole that's sinking the ship.......

The hole is your dishonesty!

Dishonesty is the character you are attempting to protect now.

Can you see this??

Do you see how sick of an individual this deception is making you??

The mess cannot be cleaned up until your wife knows the truth!! I'm sorry it just can't!!

You are just sweeping the pile under the rug!

So NeedHelp..... Sunday (tomorrow) would be a great day to be free....... Your wife deserves the truth from YOU. Don't let it come from another.

The Truth Will Set You Free! This is the only thing you can expect from all of this...... You can become a man of integrity again, with time.

The consequences will be there no matter which direction you turn.... But trust me, the truth WILL find you out!

So how about it?

Listen to this!
Actually, listen to EVERYTHING tst has posted to you. He is a straight shooter and one of the best to grace these boards. You are very lucky he has taken an interest in your thread and that he is posting to you.

Anyway, I wanted to say I have seen time and time again on here where the wayward spouse (WS) was afraid to tell their betrayed spouse (BS) because "I don't want to hurt her" or similar. Trust me, the hurt has been done, and as tst said every day you do not tell her is another day you are actively lying to her. She will definitely see it this way.

I have seen couples on these boards trying to recover from a short emotional affair or a one night stand that happened 5, 10, or 20 years in the past. Except for that one brief, or shallow interlude the WS was faithful.

You know what the BS inevitably struggles with the most?
How could he have lied to me ALL THOSE YEARS.

The BS learns that all their memories, everything they thought their marriage and family was, was nothing but a lie for weeks, or months, or years.

The longer you wait the worse it will be for both of you. If you truly care for your wife, excise this poison now so you can begin to treat the wound and heal. Do not leave it to fester and poison your marriage any further. Believe me, if you are harboring a lie, your marriage is being poisoned.

What she doesn�t deserve is the continued dishonesty. You can�t control having cheated -� too late for that; but you can control how you react to it. The way you choose to react will show you to be either (A) a stand-up guy who admits his mistakes & pledges to do better & starts to act on that pledge; or (B) someone whose first priority is to cover his butt. No, she didn�t deserve your cheating, but that�s already done. What she really doesn�t deserve is to have her husband continuing to live a lie towards her.

You�re not fully owning it yet. If she e-mailed you, you e-mailed her back. You made decisions to get into the situation. If alcohol played a part, you made a decision to impair your own judgment. You decided to go to where she was. You got in a car and steered it there. It�s not like you were just walking down the street & she walked by & your clothes blew off & you accidentally collided. You made dozens of choices in the run-up to this affair (just like I did en route to mine), all of which you made in order to at least keep your options open to go on the next step. Own those choices.

Yeah, early-on after my affair, I also used to say stuff like �She initiated things,� �She kept pressing after I tried to break it off the first time,� �She came onto me really hard because she was dissatisfied with her marriage,� etc. But while there are elements of truth to all those comments, the larger truth is that once I saw that it was possible that this woman was coming on to me, I still made my own choices. And I chose to put myself in position to get into a friendship that became an emotional dependency (emotional affair), and then I chose to let it become physical.

That�s good as far as it goes, but it won�t get you much credit. And any credit you get from your wife for having the decency to break it off on your own will be undermined if she finds out from someone other than you.

Amen to good intentions. So you realize that �model, ethical person� doesn�t have any room for maintaining a coverup from your wife on a topic like this, right?

You need to take everything she ever said to you with a grain of salt. Most of your info about him came from her. She lied to him plenty, so you�d better believe she bent the truth to you, too, when it suited her interests. You can be sure of that. My OW made it out to be as if her H was too clueless & inattentive to find out. Boy, was she surprised when he hired a PI and caught her in her lies. Anyway, the state of their marriage isn�t a concern of yours. It�s good that you feel lousy for becoming a stumbling block between them � that lousy feeling means you have a conscience. Apologize to the man if you haven�t already, without excuses, swear to him that you�ll never see her again, and wish their marriage the best -- and then leave it at that. You need to focus your priority attention on your own relationship w/your wife now.

NH, I don�t know what this means. The more you fish for an excuse to stall, the greater the probability that the snake that you let out of the bag will sneak up and bite ya. OM could be Googling your wife to get a little envelope or e-mail to her right now as we speak.

My wife & I both thought we had an above-average marriage. We never fought, we got along well. But we let ourselves get too tied up with taking care of the kids, our careers, devoting tons of hours to volunteering in different roles in our church, to the point where we�d just put each other on �auto-pilot� most of the time. We were making love maybe 3 or 4 times a month, some months. We never did much recreational stuff together. In the evenings, she'd be on her laptop and I'd be on my computer, in the same room, but not talking to each other. She was all about the kids, and I was selfish enough to let her bear that burden mostly alone. We could�ve corrected those things, but we were lazy about communicating. We swallowed unmet needs of ours, instead of swallowing our pride to express those needs, and in my case, a �situation presented itself,� as you might say, and I started making a whole sequence of selfish, morally bankrupt choices. You can read up on some of my old posts if you�re curious about the details. (My first 2 months of posts got wiped out by a server crash here last October.)

When my OW called me to tell me that her husband had found her out (in other words, found us out), I knew my marriage was in mortal danger, and I knew I had to tell my wife before she found out from anyone else. I was so convinced of this that I called my wife at work, because I didn�t want to risk waiting until the end of the workday. Then we both went home from our respective jobs and had a talk, in more detail than we were able to discuss on the phone from our respective offices.

For my wife, it was like the most vicious kick in the stomach you can imagine. And it was worse, coming from someone � me � whom she expected to have her back, the last person she could�ve imagined doing this. I begged her to keep me. She didn�t throw me out. But I don�t know how close it came to that.

You asked, When does it get back to "normal"? "Normal" shouldn't be your goal. Like I said in my first post to you, "normal" wasn't good enough to keep you from getting where you are now. You need to aim for a marriage, a partnership, a spousal communion, that's better & deeper than what you & your wife had before. For me, it still doesn't feel "normal", mostly because I still have a hard time comprehending that it was ME who did the things I did. I don't know if I'll ever feel "normal" again. But I don't want my "old normal." I want a "new normal." So far, the "new normal" that my wife & I have is better than the "old normal." But it takes effort, and for you it'll take honesty & transparency toward your wife.

For you, it�ll maybe make some difference, in that the longer an affair goes on, the more of an emotional component there usually is, and the harder it can be to break the wayward habits. This is not based on my experience, but just from what I�ve read around this site & in �Surviving an Affair� (the book I & others have advised you to get.) My affair of 2 & a half months (half of which was emotional, half physical) doesn�t qualify as a long� relationship � there are folks on this site whose spouses were in affairs that went on 2 or 3 years or more. But 2 & a half months was plenty long. 2 & a half weeks would be plenty long. It�ll probably make no difference to your wife. Betrayal is betrayal. Sorry, that�s not what you wanted to hear. Don�t look for mitigation in your past circumstances. Create mitigation by your present & future actions & conduct. Step #1 is to get the truth out.

As usual, tst has said stuff better in about 100 words than I�ve said in 1,000. If you don�t listen to me, listen to him. The next step is up to you, but only until that snake strikes.

I'm surprised that I'm hearing so much self-serving justification from you about why you "shouldn't" tell your BW, and meanwhile the OWH is holding a HUGE hammer over your head and is ready to let it drop (HIS exposure to your W.) Are you seriously waffling over telling your wife, knowing that he eventually will?? It's not a matter of IF - it's a matter of WHEN. Are you really so callous that you will let the OWH be the bearer of this terrible news? Really? Because if you really, really want to drive a knife into your poor, unsuspecting wife, that's exactly how to do it.

Man up, nh, and do the right thing by telling your wife. THAT'S the first step to becoming the man you want to be.