When you pick her up, tell her that you want her home with you in order to work on things together. If she's truly staying at your other place out of 'respect for your feelings' she won't argue about it. If she wants her space to be with the OM, she'll more than likely refuse.

do not compromize with her. She needs to give up OM. You will be in a lot of pain for a long while if she sees OM and keeps living with you....
I have gone thru a similar situation with my WH during his first A and he was seeing OW and coming home to sleep with me and then off again to see her 2 days later....
Do not be a door mat. In the end, they will not respect you and leave you anyway.
blessing

It's hard to interpret any "signals" when you're really completely shattered. If she starts to be avasive I'll explain to her that respecting my feelings mean that she should come back home with me. Thanks for the advice.

I wasn't talking about the religious committment. A civil marriage in any country is a legal and public committment to stay together and take care of each other, and it provides protection to a spouse who is forcibly divorced or abandoned (if it didn't, my son and I would be living in our car right now.)

Civil marriage provides the legal committment, and a religious ceremony (if the couple desires one) provides the spiritual committment. Even if "all" a couple has is a civil ceremony with a marriage license, that is still legal and binding and provides public notice of your committment to each other.

But - living together is not a "civil marriage." In the U.S., in some states, merely living together for a certain number of years does make for a Common Law marriage even if the couple never took out a marriage license and never had a ceremony. The law will eventually recognize them as married if enough time goes by. I don't know how that works in other countries.

It doesn't sound like you had a marriage of any kind - not a legal civil ceremony, and not a Common Law marriage.

You may be confusing "marriage" with "wedding". "Marriage" simply refers to a couple becoming legally married, no matter what kind of ceremony they have or don't have. As long as there's a valid marriage license and vows are exchanged in front of someone legally entitled to perform marriages, that's all you need.

"Wedding" refers to the ceremony itself. It can be religious or not religious, and very simple or huge and elaborate. But a wedding by itself is not legally binding. We have had a few nutball wayward spouses here who have had weddings with their affair partners - even while still legally married to their betrayed spouses.

But again - it does not sound like you and your girlfriend had either a wedding *or* a legal marriage. That's why we're not sure what we can do for you.

Okay - let me try this again. You *did* have a legal, civil marriage in front of a judge and you *do* have a marriage license. That makes you a legally married couple and no one here on MB would disagree with that.

Apparently you just did not have a large and/or religious wedding ceremony. That's okay with us, too. Big weddings are nice but they don't make you married by themselves - stating the legal vows after getting a marriage license, either as *part* of the wedding or simply in front of a judge, is what makes you legally married.

But the ritual of a wedding is very important to most people, because that's where family and friends gather to witness this change in their status and give their approval to it. It sounds like this would have been important to your wife (and if you are legally married in your country, then yes, she is your wife.)