Thanks Black_raven. Believe me when I say that I do want to give my marriage a chance. I see my girls faces every moment of the day, and they are my life. I really do appreciate the things everyone is saying, and I hope it will help me to slow down a bit. I find it difficult to control things at the moment

What you have in you doesn't matter. Your WW and her lover are the ones who are driving the Affair Bus right now. They're the ones who get to decide whether or not to 'allow' the affair to continue. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to make the affair so undesirable for them that they end it.

Don't do this anymore. Talking to someone in affair fog doesn't work.

Ditto my last comment.



My FWH sold his car because it was a trigger for me. I understand how you feel. But wait on this for a bit. With proper recovery after the A is completely over there is a good chance that you will 'reclaim' your house and it will cease to become a trigger. I think it's a little soon to be talking about selling the house. In fact, both of you love it, right? It could become a point to build on for the two of you.

Please tell me you didn't tell her you might expose! You never threaten to expose! You are throwing away your ammunition.

Did she discuss her affair with you before she had it?

Exposure is not "Do they know or not?"

Exposure is "Did you tell them?"

Also, when you tell them, ask them for their support in ending the A. Six weeks of silence isn't supporting you.

Marriage Builders is a comprehensive plan for any marriage in any state.

There are plans to follow for a marriage with an ongoing adultery or addiction. Following those plans MAXIMIZE your chances of eliminating the adultery. They do not guarantee success, but you practically guarantee failure if you don't follow the plans exactly. For many people here with failure, you can read their story and see where they did not follow the plan exactly or did not act soon enough.

There are also plans to RESTORE ROMANTIC LOVE in a marriage. These plans have a 100% success rate when correctly followed by both people in the marriage. These are the plans couples follow in the recovery stage after an affair. Unfortunately, not everyone sticks to the plans, and not everyone follows them exactly. But when they do, they always work. (Again, you can look at failure stories and tell where people are deviating from the plan.)

A truly successful Marriage Builders recovery concludes with a fantastic marriage with both partners IN LOVE for life. Of course, as some people have noted, there are situations where success means "I gave it my best shot, but my wayward spouse has become such a despicable person that success means getting away from them."

Can you order Dr. Harley's book Surviving an Affair from this site's bookstore? The prices and shipping here are cheap and the shipping is quick and discreet.

DO NOT worn her about EXPOSURE or any other action you may take to KILL THE AFFAIR!!

One should never give the enemy there battle plan unless they wish for defeat.

You need to ask her family to help you in any way they can to end this affair.


My wife lived with OM and his parents for two months.

According to them, we where divorced.

Call OM's parents and inform them of the truth.
Find OM's wife and tell her.

I can tell you the MB plan runs about 50%, others run far less....

Gack1- My wife is not an enemy. I do not wish to hire a PI or sneak around getting info on this guy. I don't care about him or his family.

I know enough about the affair to get the picture. Probably more than I care to know. I have chosen to be very direct. If I need to know more, I will show up on his doorstep. I will tell my wife I am going there.

I believe that marriage is about trust. She has broken that with me, and is our job together to find a way to get it back.

I once thought like you, oh if I onley knew then what I know now...

At this time, your wife is not herself. Think of her as having been taken over by aliens.

And weather you like it or not, as long as she has any form of contact with OM, in any way, no matter how slight, that alien that has taken over your wifes body is an enemy of your marriage.


Gather info + Expose the affair = Possible recovery

Believe in trust + Believe in love = Divorce

You chose.

Penny for your thoughts?
(Are you thinking Troll)

You're missing the point. Your wife isn't your wife - she's an alien. This is not the woman you married.



Again, you're not understanding what gathering intel is about. It isn't to make him the surprise guest on This is Your Life, okay? It is so you have all the information you need for exposure. It is to find areas of weakness - you may find that he is a serial adulterer, which has happened to waywards on here - they think the lover is their soulmate and then find out that they're just one of many. That's cooled a lot of affairs.

Good. That will give her ample time to call him and warn him, so he can sneak his unsuspecting wife out for a surprise dinner and dodge you.

The OWH in my sitch told his WW that he was going to talk to me at the company Christmas party and out the A to me. Guess what - my H suddenly didn't feel like going to the party that year and we didn't go. Nice dodge, huh.

And this is the biggest point you're missing: you should NEVER completely trust your spouse. Look where all your trust got you. Your job together is to identify and meet each other's needs and affair-proof your M.

I'm not sure why you're on this site - you don't want to follow any of the proven methods of ending an affair. You want to completely, blindly trust your wife, who has shown you that she is not worthy of trust. You take every piece of advice we give you and twist it so you don't have to follow it. I'm not sure how we can help you.

mckl,

When I discovered that my wife of 32+ years was having an affair (actually the rekindling of an EA after 13 months of NC) I decided that while I had no assurance that we would ever have a great marriage, I was going to remove all possibility that I was the one preventing us from doing so. In order to fix my marriage, I first began to fix myself. I removed the reasons she might have for leaving me.

At the same time, I began to fight the affair. I did not contact OM. I did however begin exposure before my wife got home, holding off on exposing to some folks because she was actually visiting family right next door to OM at the time I discovered what was going on.

Over the next few weeks, I slept very little, dropped nearly 20 pounds because I forgot to eat, accomplished almost nothing at work, was impossible for anyone to get along with and made a lot of wrong turns including trying to educate my wife about affairs.

I eventually got it together and learned about Plan A, identified her ENs (I later found out I was pretty close) and set about figuring out how to meet them. After a couple of months, I was ready to just give up and pretty much suggested that my wife just go way and leave me alone.

She ended contact with OM a couple days later and though the next couple of months were pretty iffy at best and the year after that was still pretty much an emotional roller coaster, things improved slowly.

She was reluctant to actually do much of anything to actually improve our marriage and I just implemented MB unilaterally. As she saw the changes in me, she would sometimes ask questions and when we were talking after plenty of UA time, I would bring up MB ideas so we could talk about them.

After about 18 months, I bought Fall In Love Stay In Love and asked her to work the MB program with me. After several false starts, she actually worked through the process as spelled out in the book. Last fall, she helped my teach the MB methods to 12 couples at our church using FILSIL as the basis.

We repeated that class this spring and are now scheduled to attend training to become certified to teach other couples a program that uses Dr Harley's materials. Our marriage is not perfect and we still have problems, conflicts and struggles four years later but we now have a way to resolve those conflicts without hurting each other and when we can remember to actually do what MB tells us we should do, our love for each other grows every single day. In fact, we're more in love now than at any time in our nearly 37 years together. (There is a way to quantify that, BTW)

Can I guarantee that my wife will never again have an affair?

Nope...

But I am certain that I will never again allow our marriage get to the place where she considers an affair any kind of option. We now have a vocabulary we can use to communicate our needs to each other and we both understand what takes away from our love for each other and so can avoid doing those thing. We also have ways to resolve conflict that makes our love for each other our top priority instead of needing to solve every problem as if the problem is a crisis that demands resolution instead of something we might never agree on. We also realize that when her opinion and mine do not agree, that there is likely another option yet undiscovered that will meet with our mutual satisfaction and agreement.

It isn't a magic bullet; it's a process and the better we become at working the process, the more we fall in love with each other. We haven't talked about "the affair" in a long time now, but we have discussed affairs, cheating spouses, couples we each see as vulnerable to an affair and other things important to the MB process without a lot of negative emotional stuff. The 4 year anniversary of D-day passed this month and we were on a date that night and I didn't even realize it was "the day the world ended" until I thought about it a few days later while talking to a friend whose wife is having an affair.

The basic premise of MB is that whatever we do, it affects our spouse emotionally. It can affect him or her either positively or negatively and by maximizing the positive effects while minimizing the negative, our feeling of love for each other grows. We become more compatible as we do things that are compatible with each other instead of things that make us incompatible.

It requires a change in the way we think as well as the way we act. We must understand that when we are in a romantic relationship, the things we do affect the other and so be certain of how anything we do might affect him or her so that we don't inadvertently do something to hurt each other because when we hurt each other, we make being with each other less attractive until we want nothing more than to get away from each other.

There are many marriages that have recovered and have become great marriages. MB gives us the best possible probability of that because it seeks to restore the thing that brought us together at first, our love for each other. It does not dwell on mistakes, errors and failures of the past, but instead focuses on doing the things that lead to love and eliminates those things that cause love to wither and die.

Mark

Thanks mark
I appreciate you taking the time to write such a response.

Alot of what you explain sounds very familiar. I lost about 20 pounds, and worked very little. Sleep when it occured was filled with nightmares.

the affair has definately taken its toll on me. Although as far as me, I feel as I am healing from that hurt.

I love my wife, but feel that I am at a point where we could go either way. I want more than anything to be with her and keep our family together, but I also now realize that life goes on, and happiness is up to me.

I feel the need to take control of the situation. I have been reading the advice on this forum as well as the concepts.
I hear of the successes it brings, and want to try it, but I am struggling to committ to it.

As with everyone, I am very confused and hoping I can make the right choices.

thanks again

How did it go Friday night?

Lg

mckl,

What makes Marriage Builders different than the rest of the programs out there that attempt to restore a marriage that has been broken by infidelity is the fact that Dr Harley realized early in his research that since couples who were on the verge of divorce all reported that the one thing that might keep them together was to be in love with each other, helping them return to a place where they loved each other was the key to saving their marriage. The MB program, unlike most others, does not analyze what went wrong nor does it focus on what is making the marriage fail. It instead concentrates almost entirely on restoring the feeling of romantic love for each other.

But you have a more basic problem right now. You can�t really work on your marriage to make it a better one and restore the love you have for each other as long as she is in love with someone else as well. The affair must be broken first. You need to attack the affair itself and avoid attacking her.

You have to become the man she can�t be without, mckl. THAT is part of the solution to saving your marriage. The other part is to make continuing the affair as difficult as possible. Go read this thread: For Newly Betrayed Posters. Once you have read through it, follow some of the links. Pay close attention to WAT�s Quick Start Guide and Longhorn�s thread. These were the links that helped me in those early days when I was floundering about gasping to keep from drowning in my own self-pity. Also read the link near the end about Plan C not being a MB plan.

If you want to save your family, you need to do things that will make the death of the affair more probable and avoid doing anything that makes it sustainable. At the same time you need to be doing things that makes the marriage more attractive while eliminating anything that makes the marriage a less attractive choice. This isn�t a promise of success, mckl. But I can promise you this, if you don�t begin doing these things, and begin doing them almost at once; you will end up as a regular on the divorcing/divorced and part time Dad forums pretty quickly.

Mark

LG-
Not sure if you are referring to something inparticular about friday night, or just generally how the night was.

Anyway, we had a good night friday. We got a babysitter and went golfing(something we used to do, but haven't since kids).
Then to dinner and some live music. Came home sat by the water and watched the moon rise. It was a nice evening.

It would be nice to think that all we had to do was have more of those, but I know that it is more than that.

Hi mckl,

I am sorry you are having to go thru this. Just a suggestion: you may want to spend some time reading "My thread" by BTinTrouble to get an idea of how another BH responded just in the last 24 hours to kill his wife's affair.

Tom

Mark
I am starting to see the reasons why exposure is neccisary, but am struggling to commit to it.

Right now, I know that it is difficult for her to see him, because we are always together when she is not working.

Work is a safe place for her, because she works with her mom, dad, brother and sister who all know the situation and who he is.

Contacting him is another story. I may be new to this, but I'm not a fool. I know that a person can have as many e-mail accounts as they want and she can be contacting him. I do my best to keep track of things, but know that there are ways for her to do it.

I feel that I need to know that there is something to fight for, and she isn't giving it to me.

As I read more on this site, I am seeing how it works. Hopefully I will speak with you here in the future and not on the divorce forum. I need to find if the years ahead are worth it for me. I know I love her, but I don't know about her feelings.

Nor will she be able to give it you as long as she continues her affair. Her affair is an addiction and until you take the steps to separate her from her lover, she will have nothing to give you.


I do know about her feelings. Her feelings are feelings of obsession for the target of her addiction, the OM. She is like a crack head who is obsessed with crack. Nothing else matters.

But that is how it will proceed unless you do something burst her fantasy. I am just telling you this from the perspective of one who has saved her marriage from an affair. If you want to have the best chance of saving your marriage, you will expose her affair and cause as much trouble as possible. If not, then I would avoid that step.

Exposure is the single most potent weapon you have against the affair. It is the equivalence of bringing in a crowd of people to the crack house and watching the crackheads get high.. It ruins the high. That is what exposure does.

Exposure