Now print this off and tape it to your dashboard.

clark is exactly right. He is pointing out how that small thing - conversation - helped your feelings for your H. Imagine if you did that for 20+ hours per week how quickly your feelings would evolve?

Athena, I know you might find it hard to believe, but those of us who have recovered marriages here, have passionate, romantic marriages today. In these recovered marriages, their feelings far exceed the feelings one felt in an affair.

Exactly.

athena99,

I am a betrayed spouse as well so I can understand your husband's view point, he has been hurt as well by all this and yet he puts himself aside for you and your children, that is a great guy............
I think you lost sight of the part in the marriage vow, for better or worse, I think you expected him to be perfect and when he wasn't instead of talking it out so he could meet your needs you went outside the marriage to get that fix. No body is a mind reader, he probably thought he was doing everything right, taking care of his family with pride and honesty I might add...........
Right now you seem to be holding a loyality to someone who doesn't deserve it, a man that lied to everyone including you, some day you will realize what that relationship was really about, him not you, not his poor wife, did you hear yourself she was distraught by his behavior.......trying to work on her marriage, and you sat back and justified and participated in that cruelty to another woman like it was okay, you should be ashamed of yourself..........
Athena this is your chance to right the wrongs from the inside out.......you need to work on you and the kind of woman, mother, wife you want to be, wouldn't you love it if everyone respected you for being a good role model a great wife.
Look at your list of things that are great about your husband again and thank your lucky stars he loves YOU, you have been given a gift by an angel here on earth.................don't blow it again....................
Someday soon you will look back and not even know who that woman that could have an affair is..................you will know you have grown and learned what it is to be the best Athena you can be, the woman you really want to be......
You are here looking to fix this so we all know that there is a great gal in there waiting to find her way.

I am. Very. She is a wonderful person and I treated her so badly.


I will try my hardest not to.


Thanks for those words. I do want to fix myself - I owe it to BH and my kids ... and to myself.

Athena,

I knew they stopped SF and were having serious problems in their marriage. .

Athena almost every guy who preys on Women uses this line, I feel embarrised for the guy who is saying it when I overhear it.

Someone here talked about a laminated card that guys carry around with cliche lines, you can be sure that one is on it.

I think my wife has heard it about 10 times from guys trying to pick her up.

God Bless
Gamma

Athena,

Right now you have a chance to redeem yourself. Think of this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try and right all the wrongs you have committed. You can rise from the proverbial pigpen and become a woman your family and friends respect, admire, and love because of the integrity, self-respect and class you exhibit.

You will grow 10-fold by making responsible decisions! Show us all you can be that person.

Hello Athena and glad you're making the intelligent choice of ending with the POSOM.

How about this perspective to take the "shine" off the om once and for all?

My xwh was in an ema and one of the LIES he told the ow was that we didn't have sex.

Oh wrongo. We not only were frequent in that area, but we were trying to have another child and had just built our dream home.

You see, lies are said by the other people, the waywards, to lure in the potential affair partner. Do you seriously think that my xh's other woman would have jumped so quickly into bed w/him if he said to her the following:

"Hey cutie. I'm not available, just built a gorgeous home with my wife, have sex all the time, she's really attractive and we get along, and are even trying to have another baby, but would you like to be my illicit affair partner? We can sneak around all the time and I'll like to my wife about you and I'll lie to you too, but I promise, you'll want to believe my lies."

Do you think she would have stuck around? Heck no. In order to carry on such a thing as an affair, you have to LIE. It's the basis. The ground rule. What goes with the territory. There's nothing honorable or special about a relationship which is nothing more than a "liars with benefits" type of arrangement is there?

Call it what it is. It's not pretty. It breaks peoples' hearts, lives, and the lives' of the children involved too. It's a cowardly and selfish thing.

Let's face it, you're doing a fantastic job here, but I'd like to help you quicky wade through the final bits of fog and frenzy and help you see what the posom is..and that's a pos.

Fwiw, after my divorce I met HONESTLY and we were both single, a fabulous, loving man who wanted to honor me by having a good relationship with me, proper foundations. I am his wife today. Odds are, Helo, your bh, felt the same way about you, which is FAR DIFFERENT than what the posom did to you.

DH=honors Athena
POSOM=lied to Athena to bed her and make her degrade herself.

The choice is clear. You work on things and go thru the steps, do all the hard work, because the real man who loves you is doing that too.

In fact, I'll sum things up in one sentence and introduce a new anacronym here: EMA is really LWB= Liars With Benefits.

Athena,

I haven't finished trying to catch up on today's posts, but this one struck me with respect to what you already said. You said of your H
How many of these traits do you have? You lie, you wanted to have earlier affairs, you did have a 10 year affair, and you really don't feel bad about it other than you miss OM.

How many of these traits does OM have? Few if any. You know he is a liar and I find it interesting that you say he never cheated on you as a way of implying love, but the man who hasn't cheated on gets no credit, love or respect.

Your Om doesn't even love his children or he would NOT be having an affair and risking tearing their family apart. You did, OM did, and your H? I would bet one of the reasons your A$$ isn't on the curb right now is that he doesn't want to hurt his children.

YOu claim you have/had no boundaries before and even during your marriage, and yet you create this illusion that your OM does (he didn't cheat on me), when in fact you KNOW he did, if you call having sex with and remaining with your W cheating.

You may think all of these traits come easy for your H, but clearly they do not or you would have them, your OM would have them and you don't. It isn't easy to have the treats you attribute to your H, especially in face of what you have done.

Oddly, you don't respect him for who he is, what he brings to the marriage, and his willingness to make you happy.

This brings me to my last point for now. Men need feedback from their women, especially if the woman is more experienced and knows what she wants and needs. He did not fail you in the bedroom, you failed him.

I'll now read on.

JL

Athena, I had a marathon read to catch up on all of the posts(98 WOW). One thing that I wanted to point out to you, because I can't remember seeing it(although I may have missed it), was that all of this started because YOU EMAILED OM. THAT is why you were feeling this way. You turned your clock back. You did it because of WORK.

Does this co-worker know about the affair that you had? I suspect that he/she doesn't. You got a FIX because you figured that OM would see your email and think about you. That set you back to DAY 1. THAT is part of what happened here Athena.

Also, I am glad to see that you worked through the UA time.

t/j To ALL of the posters that helped Athena today, I THANK YOU. You guys ROCK. end t/j

No, that co-worker does not know about the affair. It was a corporate person who neither OM nor I knew before. OM has been reassigned and working on something that a few people on my team needed to provide info for - not just me. I think it was probably out of his control and unexpected that I would be asked to send anything his way.

I think you are correct - even though I didn't think of it as contact - it was. I was not looking for a response and I told BH about it, but in the back of my head I knew I could still reach him. And that did set me back to day 1. I guess this is exactly the kind of situation that would warrant quitting.

Last night BH and I reconnected a lot and I am over the moon today I packed up all of the triggers from my office and will drop them off at Goodwill on my way home to my DH. Then I will pack the triggers up there and get them out of my house.



That goes DOUBLE for me (and Helo)!!! I needed some *ss-kicking and you didn't hold back. THANKS!

You are right.

He is a good man and that isn't easy to come by - I should be more thankful for what I have.

I didn't think I could be honest with DH about my wants and needs, but now I know I can be and it is exciting. I do see how he thrives on my feedback and appreciation.

WHAT THE [censored] WAS I THINKING ??? <-------- I think this needs to go on my dashboard too.

Offer BH the opportunity to help you. Let him SEE that you are destroying the remnants of this betrayal.

You've been holding on to all these mementos all this time, you can count day one when EVERY SCRAP OF FILTH is gone.

You might actually start seeing some real recovery once it is all gone.

You don't just owe it to your BH, you owe it to yourself to do this right.

Here you go, Athena.

Will it do him any good to see the items before I get rid of them? I don't want to cause him more hurt.

That's up to him. I asked to see everything my H had. It was important to me.

I think asking him to participate is a good thing, he will feel important to you and he will view it as working together for the marriage which is the most important thing to both of you...........put things in a bag so he can't see, if he asks then show him and make sure he knows that you think the items belong in the garbage now along with the relationship.
Tell him you see the light now.............and how you realize the OM just used you.......and how stupid you were to almost lose the best thing that ever came into your life...............
Tell him you will spend the rest of your days making up for this heartless act.......
Tell him you thank god everyday for the second chance he is giving you......

You see MB's response - I'll add to that. Seeing what they are probably isn't as important as what they represent, and your willingness to destroy them, and allowing him to participate in that, will be a signal of commitment to recovery.

I'll elaborate on mine, as well:
It was important for me to see all the items he had because I needed to visually process them as tawdry 'affair items' and not something romantically magical. I needed to give them less power than my mind wanted to.

So, I saw them. Yep. A "love" coupon book like you would buy in a cheap novelty store at the mall. My first thought was "HOW old was she???" A couple of mash notes that made me embarrassed for her, the poor little tramp. Poor spelling, poor penmanship...she should have used Word and spell check, LOL. Things like that.

Once I saw them, I had power over them and 'owned' them.

Now, athena's H may have no need or desire to do that. That's up to him. It was therapeutic for me.