Background:

WH and I lived overseas for 3 years. DD 3yrs and DS 1yr (born O.S).

Always had a great marriage.

DH resigned July 2010 as we wanted to move home, boss asked him to stay on until Dec 2010. As our lease was up and it was extremely hot where we were living we decided the kids and I would move home at the end of August and he would visit us twice in that period. Once in October and once in November.

December 7 I got a FB msg from OW's colleauge exposing the affair. I was shocked as DH had been calling me, texting me and acting like all was normal although I did know he started hanging out with some new people who I didn't know.


At first he denied the affair but then when he realised I had proof he admitted it. Told me he loved me etc etc. Told his boss he had to return early, cancelled his visas and left.

He agreed it was a terrible mistake that took place because he was so lonely and vulnerable and the whole time loved us still but was weak when presented with an opportunity to get sex (makes me want to vomit typing that).

He didn't want any more contact with her or the people he was was hanging out with at the time. Sent an email that I approved which outlined that it was a mistake and that he loves me and the children and that he used her for sex only and that she held no piece of his heart.

She didn't respond initially.

I found out that he'd told her he loved her(says he said alot of [censored] just to be nice and says they had no connection apart from phisically - said the people he hung out with always said 'love ya' to eachother which I have confirmed from reading some messages between the others on FB). Affair was happening for 3 weeks.I know this for a fact. I called her on 2nd Jan. She told me she was so sorry. Said that she knew he didn't love her and that he loves us dearly. (stupid whore).

She answered all my questions eg how many times they had sex etc. He of course had lied and said twice when it was 5 times etc. I confronted him, he cried his heart out and told me he didn't want to hurt me and that he'd lied so much he hardly knew what was the truth and what was lies and didn't know how to get out of the tangled web.

I asked her to never contact him or us again. She agreed.

We have been trying to work it out but in the mean time I found her twitter page (Vomit again!!) etc. Then she emailed him ( i was monitoring email account) I intercepted the email straight away and told wh). He told me to close the account and that he didn't want to know what the email said let alone have any contact with her or her have any way of contacting us.

Her email said she was hurt by his email that said nc and that it was a mistake and that he used her for sex etc.

Im pretty sure he is NC. He gave him his work email that i can monitor, I check his phone etc. He tells me he is so so sorry and that he was living a seprate unrealistic life and got caught up in the affair and the stupid people he was hanging out with had condoned his behaviour when he got the guilts coupled with alot of alcohol and those two combined convinced him 'it would be ok'.

He says the whole time he never stopped loving us and always told her he was coming home to us. She had even confirmed this (without me askin her - she told me that off her own back).

Is it possible that he just made a really bad error of judgement at a time we were living so seperately? He is a very very decent man aside from this. He is my best friend, my rock. We had some very stressful times when he was away with me buying selling some of our properties, finding a house to live in whilst getting up to our baby twice a night and me complaining about all of it. He said he felt so helpless and so started drinking with these other 'singles' (a mate from work who had parties all the time) and then met the OW and kept partying with them until I discovered the A.

We're on the road to recovery. I love him and I know he loves us althought I keep asking myself how a man can do that to his wife and children when he 'loves' them.

I am having trouble though because im always tempted to stalk her on FB, twitter etc. It consumes me most days and others i think 'were moving forward i must let it go now'. I am on a rollercoaster still of resenting him to trying to fulfill his needs. We talk ALOT and I am certain I know pretty much all of it now.

He is a very busy man trying to fill up my love bank. He maintains he doesn't want any contact with those people etc. I thank god that we are in different countries.
What do I do now to stop myself from nose diving back into the resentment and anger and all the why??? questions that he just answer any better than what he's already given me...
Sorry this was so long guys

Hi! Sadandmad,

Sorry that you're here, but I'm glad that you found this forum. There are a lot of excellent people here with lots of experience.

Lots of info for you to read!!!! weekends are slow, but more people will start helping during the week.

I'm just going to add to your concern regarding why people have affairs, and I hope that it helps you.

Like your WH, I was a good person, nobody would believe that I was capable of being a WS, not even myself. I was certainly not looking for it! The problem is poor "BOUNDARIES". Some people have great boundaries without even realizing it. For example, for me it would have been difficult to have an affair with a co-worker because I'm an extremely private person, so I never have intimate talk with co-workers. Now, having frequent lunch with male co workers, even without intimate conversations Would have eventually let me under the right circumstances into having an affair. That's why boundaries are SO important for married people. Everybody is capable of having an affair, if proper boundaries are not in place. Specially people like me, who thought that I would never in my life do something like that.

Now, it's really important that you and your WH understand this to avoid a future affair. If you don't, next time it could be you or your WH again.

Being alone for work purposes is what I called (under the right circumstances) would lead a person without proper boundaries to have an affair. My BH used to travel a lot, with friends who were single and some who were married who live a single life. He knew that they were a bad seed, so he avoided going out with them, or he would go back to the hotel before things would get out of hands. He's never had an affair, but not because he's a Saint, it's because he has great boundaries.

So you see, you could have been meeting ALL his needs, and without proper boundaries, it wouldn't have matter.

You both need to sit down, talk about this, and make sure that you both understand it.

Proper boundaries, that's all it takes to avoid affairs!!!!!!

Hope it helps, I'm no VET. But a lot of them will be helping you soon....

Hi sad, welcome to Marriage Builders. It sounds like you are on the right track. It will take about 2 years to recover from this. A big part of recovery is ensuring that the environment that led to the affair is changed. In your H's case it sounds like living apart and his feeling of neglect contributed to that environment. Traveling jobs are invitations to affairs so hopefully you recognize the dangers there. Dr Harley recommends never spending the night apart.

Do you have the book Surviving an Affair?

Like Rizos said, good people have affairs, the problem is boundaries. Here is how Dr Harley, clinical psychologist explains it:

here

here

Hi sad ~ I'm sorry you are here but glad you found this forum. It can help you tremendously!

It sounds like you are exactly where you should be right now. As Mel said, get "Surviving An Affair" and read that, it will be helpful. Read and learn all you can on this site.

It would be very helpful if your husband wrote out a list of EPs (Extraordinary Precautions). If he does this and begins living by them you will find your recovery moving on quickly. EPs are ways he will protect himself and your M from another affair. You can find examples here on the forums of what EPs look like.

Welcome to MB!

Thanks everyone.

In your experience, do you think he loved her?
He claimes he didn't ...says he didn't have any chemistry with her but she gave him what he needed (sex and company) when he was alone... Am I stupid to believe he didn't love her? This is a huge one I am battling with.

Thanks everyone.

In your experience, do you think he loved her?
He claimes he didn't ...says he didn't have any chemistry with her but she gave him what he needed (sex and company) when he was alone... Am I stupid to believe he didn't love her? This is a huge one I am battling with.

Hi sad, welcome to Marriage Builders.

Did he love her? No. But he loved what he was getting from her, and there is a difference.

To understand what your WH's emotions were, you'll have to understand the makeup of an A. It is emotion. It is the act of having needs met. It is not reality.

My FWH told me that anyone's head could have been attached to his OW's body - it wasn't her, it was the emotional needs she met when he was with her. That made sense to me in a weird way. I hope it makes the same sense for you.

He thought he was "in love" with the way she made him FEEL...not her personally. Bozo the clown could have stroked his ego and made him feel the same way and he would have thought he was "in love" with Bozo.

Once the fog lifts most FWSs will tell you this exact same thing, even if they aren't familiar with affairs or how they work, they will still come to realize they weren't in love with the AP ~ just the way the AP made them feel.

This is obvious when you see how fast the FWS dumps the AP when push comes to shove.

Hi there,
I think all waywards tell the same story, at first they feel like they are infatuated or in love with the OW/OM and then as time goes on they realize that this person also has issues and lots of things they don't like about them, they aren't the moral people that they expect someone to be in a relationship.
After a while they realize that the affair person was just filling the needs missing in the relationship in fact the waywards probably think things like I wish my wife/husband was doing the things missing, and they realize they aren't in love just making no effort themselves to solve the things missing in the marriage. They are only in love with the feeling. When that fog lifts and they come to their senses they feel differently. Even though while in the fog they are very convincing and have themselves convinced it's the OP and not the feeling........I agree when they are actually faced with chosing the OW/OM they soon realize they aren't better and to have them is a big cost to them in terms of family and financial......
The affair partner isn't worth that, for something that might not work.......
to much of a risk...............
You just have to let them go through the process and set up boundaries you aren't willing to live with........
You have to respect yourself and let your spouse feel the brunt of his decisions.

sadandmad,

If, only 2 months after d-day, your H is realizing that he didn't actually love her, then he may be ahead-of-schedule.

If he told her he loved her, he may well have felt so at the time. Or he may have done so in order to not feel like as much of a cad. I don't know, & can only speculate.

Some of us do believe, or at least fool ourselves into believing (at the time we're in the affair) that we're falling in love. This is because the infatuation of having certain emotional needs met in sudden surplus -- whether it's attention, affirmation, affection, recreational companionship, or sex, or combinations of them -- feels pretty much the same as what we think of as "falling in love."

Throughout the first 7 months of our recovery, it really upset my wife on the occasional times when I'd allow that I felt that I'd "loved" the OW. There I thought I was being honest with my wife about how I felt, because that's indeed how I'd felt at the time. However, it took me over 7 months in recovery to realize that it wasn't love.

It was, just as the previous posters have explained, that I loved the way I felt when I was suddenly getting this surfeit of attention, admiration, recreational companionship, and eventually ,the sexual aspect that followed.

OW and I used to say we loved one another, used to say that we couldn't have done what we did, couldn't gone as far as we did, without it being love; but in reality, it was infatuation (and a selfish one at that).

Infatuation withers under adverse conditions (like, for instance, the weight of beginning to realize how one's infatuation & affair has hurt one's spouse). Love sticks. That's the difference.

It took me two years to ask that question out right. The fear of hearing "yes" kept me from it. The answer was "No". But it helps the wayward to label that infatuation as love to justify their behaviors. In the light of day, without the "unreality" of the relationship they figure out what "real Love" is, and how very close they have come to losing it.

This is a good place to read and learn. You and your WH can recover and rebuild a M that is not only A proof in the future but even better than what it was. Read here, post here, ventilate here when you need to. A's cause all of our doubts and fears to surface, our job is to not let them consume us (easier said than done).

Read Surviving an Affair, His Needs Her Needs for starters.

Fled

I don't know if it is of any help, but I (as a FWW) knew even during my EA (at least in the brighter moments) that it was the feeling I loved, not the person himself. I remember wishing on several occasions that my DH would say/write those very things to me that OM had written.

And yet I struggled with letting go and withdrawal. So true that it is an addiction. I wonder if this is of any difference at all what this feeling is labelled as? "That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet..." (in a reverse way).

I was just looking around and found your response, jessi, and am a bit floored.

With all the craziness going on w/ WS, we've been reading SAA together this week...and I don't know if it's wishful thinking, but this is where WS has been going -- realizing that it's not the OP she's in love with, but the ENs he met and her LB being filled, not depleted. Even said to me yeaterday she understands I couldn't compete w/ OM LB deposits becasue they were deposited in a 'fantasy world'...and until the OM went away, wouldn't be able to deposit my own loveunits...


Literally said last night to me: The OM isn't worth the risk, for something that might not work...I realize OM isn't better and to have A is a big cost to me in terms of family and finances, the marriage, friendship, etc....

The real downer is sometimes when she speaks, it still sounds like she's 'debating' with herself OM or ME?!?

Head back over to your own thread, dad. I'd like to reply to this but I don't want to hijack this thread.

helpfordad,

all the processing and actually picturing her new life is a good thing, do you honestly think he has anything better to offer her, you have a loyality and a love and a protection that she has grown to love and need in her life, what can he really offer her, a life of doubt and lies, there is a whole lot to be said for the statement if they can cheat with you they can cheat on you...........we all know the truth of life and the things we can count on...........I think when she puts her list together pros and cons then she will see how dumb she would be to chose a liar and a cheater as her partner........
we all know it the fogginess right now stops her from rational thinking..........
My husband did the same thing in the beginning, it's like they have to process their logical side to come up with the answer.........
Let it happen my friend.........sit back and watch the emergence of your wife coming back to who she really is, the woman you fell in love with.

I do feel it more and more, her coming back, out of the fog.

WS said to me at dinner Sun. -- I did this terible act, THEN tried to get to know OM...he makes me cringe...and yes, if he cheated with me, he'll cheat on me (refereed to the Jon/Sue story in SAA).

BUT...she is so emotional about it -- even admits she's putting too much emotional attachment with it -- it's takeng her sooooo long that it feels like MY LB is almost empty at times.

Sorry, Mb...getting 'lost' today :-)

Are we really in recovery if I am still depressed, cry lots and ask him the same questions about the affair over and over?

I get that she met his needs, but I don't get why he didn't stand up for our love and tell her to get lost.

Some days I feel like I can move on but other days I want to get on a plane and kill this immoral human who put my husband in a trance. Yes I know it's his fault, don't get me wrong, but I would love to have a crack at her and let her know that she has no selfrespect. This is the second man she's done this too. The first one was engaged.

Also, am I in recovery if I still have urges to internet stalk her?
Ugggghhh I hate what this stupid A has made me become!!!

Someone please tell me that he didn't mean the stuff he said to her.. He's adamant that he loves me and is sticking around no matter what and that I am more amazing than what she'll ever be, just how do I believe it wholeheartedly and just freaking move on?

I wish there was a magic pill....

There is no magic pill ~ recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes most couples 2-5 years to recover from an A and that is IF you are doing everything right. Here is your list for where to start ~ you need a PLAN:

~order and read the book Surviving An Affair, from this site
~begin following all of the MB concepts, they are on this site as well
~do the ENQ and the LBQ
~have your H write out his EPs

This should get you started.

Another question

During the 3 week affair, he played his guitar for OW and the group of low lifes he was hanging out with. So much so that he wrote her an email listing the songs that 'made him think of her and can't get out of his head'. Most of the songs are songs he used to play in his band.

Now that he's returned to our home country, his band is getting back together. He asked me if I minded and I said I don't like it but I will not tell him he can't do something he loves because I thought that would be a big LB.

However now that it's the night of band practise I don't like the idea. I don't want him to be thinking of OW. He says he wont. He says it's playing with the other guys that he loves. I am beginning to think now that it's a LB for me.

My psychologist suggested to let him play but don't go if it will upset me but then I think he will be in a situation with other women who may be drinking etc etc etc who will be filling up his LB with eyes on him while he's playing.

What do I do? Do I make him quit the band? What will he tell his mates? Am I depleting his LB? Do I have a right to at the moment?

I sort of don't know at this point in time how much I am meant to be filling up hi LB without giving him the idea that I am completely unharmed by what he did so recently.

I don't live in the states so am trying to find Surviving an Affair in a bookstore here.

Any thoughts appreciated please

Read up on POJA ~ it states "do not do ANYTHING without your spouse's ENTHUSIASTIC AGREEMENT". You are not enthusiastic about this and so he shouldn't be doing it.

You also need to eliminate everything that allowed him to have an A ~ you haven't done that and no wonder you are anxious about this!

You are right, it is ~ you shouldn't have agreed to this. It is never ok to agree to something that you will be resentful for.


Drop this psych ASAP. And your H should NOT be going anywhere where there are other women who are drinking and partying when you are not there. That is a HUGE no-no.


1.) You tell him you are not comfortable with this. There are so many LBers on his part I don't even know where to start: not protecting you after his A with EPs (Extraordinary Precautions); continuing with IBs (Independent Behaviors); not following POJA (Policy of Joint Agreement; making SDs (Selfish Demands)...the list goes on.

2.) You POJA with him the topic of staying in the band. Right now I would say he needs to quit since it's triggering you so badly and your M needs the UA (Undivided Attention) time more than he needs to be playing with his buddies like a teenager in a band.

3.) You have LOTS of rights at the moment but you have to SPEAK UP. Stop agreeing to things you will be resentful for.

You really need to get familiar with all of these concepts if you want to save your M. Pay special attention to Lovebusters, ENs, PORH, POJA, UA time.

http://www.marriagebuilders.com/graphic/mbi3550_summary.html

I suggest you get reading and ask your H to do the same. You won't save your M unless you have a PLAN and this one works.