Please be advised that unless you have independently verified any of the information that the OW gave to your H regarding OWH you really can't give it much weight. I can't tell you the number of times a BS comes here having been told all kinds of stories about how horrible the OPS is and how horrible the OP's marriage is...only to find out after exposure that it was all a lie.

You really need to call up this poor man and tell him the truth. Anything less than that would be cruel.

Who has a lack of insight? That is like asking for "insight" on how to safely play chicken. That takes no insight; rather it takes insanity. You are asking us to tell you how your husband can continue making the same mistake [contact with his affair partner] and achieve a different result. That takes no insight whatsoever. It takes insanity and denial.


You don't mean not "possible," you mean not "convenient." Big difference. And it is rarely convenient. I know of people who played Russian Roulette and lived to tell the story. Does that mean it's smart to play RR?

Oh, I don't know. A divorced one, perhaps?

Goomer, please take some time this weekend to read up on Dr. Harley's concepts and principles. Dr. Harley is a practicing psychologist, with over 35 years experience, the author of multiple books, selling in the millions and translated into multiple languages.

If you wish to be immediately dismissive of what you can learn here, I wish you well. I'd lay odds you'd be back -- after your husband has decided he no longer wishes to be married to you because another woman is filling his emotional needs better.

There have been two professors' betrayed wives on this forum. Both of them are divorced/divorcing.

One is Tully, and I can't remember the other one's name.

Tully's WH never ended contact. She had to go to Plan B after a time, only to have her WH kidnap her children back to his country, which forced her to have to go back. She had not denied him access to the children, but she had gone home to her family for support.

The other one quickly decided that after a long, loving, and companionable marriage, she wasn't putting up with a cheater and divorced him pretty quickly.

Ladylonglegs, I believe was her name.

Yep, she had her own career, dogs, the house her wine parties and decided a randy old man with the morals of an alley cat weren't for her.

Were you setting us a test to see whether we would demonstrate enough "insight" to satisfy you, which we have failed to do? We didn't give you the 'nuanced response" that you required, and you are incredulous - at what - how dim we are?

Goomeri, I can give you a "personal experience story". My H had a managerial-level job that required him to travel from London to Brussels, spending about four nights per month in hotels there. He conducted his affair with a married woman connected with the Belgian end of his job.

When I first discovered the affair after 6 weeks, I'd never heard of Marriage Builders. I had no idea of Dr Harley's uncompromising requirement that the conditions under which the affair began and flourished must be eliminated. I had no idea that it was in the least bit reasonable of me to expect my H to change his job in order for our marriage to survive.

Only after about 6 D days, spread over 3.5 years, during which he buried evidence of the affair further from me, did I come across this site and Dr Harley's writings. Only when my H changed his job (which involved stopping travelling and taking a demotion, a pay cut and a very boring desk job) and when I informed OWH of their affair did my nightmare of false recoveries end.

I have a dear friend in real life whom I met here, whose WH, like yours, has an academic specialism that puts him within reach of a Nobel prize. He too had an affair with his doctoral student and he too "could not cut off contact with her because of conferences" and the like. As with your H's OW, this OW left their country, France, and moved to Ireland for a job, and the WH's argument was that the affair could not continue with her in another country. She'd actually finished her PhD by then, and so contact would be ONLY at conferences twice or so a year.

My friend is now divorcing her H because the affair continued in France and in Ireland, despite my friend not believing that physical contact could be possible. She too had access to her H's emails and phone and saw nothing but professional emails. However, after she realised that contact was continuing and she went into Plan B, her H announced that he wanted a divorce and moved in with OW, who quickly moved back to France. The affair had never ended and this man walked out on a stay-at-home wife and four young daughters for a woman 17 years his junior.

The people who post regularly here, who have posted to you, will not help you find imaginative ways to cut corners against Dr Harley's PROVEN recommendations and our own hard-won, first-hand knowledge. We know that cutting corners on this programme leads to failure, and we will not give you bad advice because you are incredulous or surprised at our lack of insight.

You have spoken to us as if we are dummies, unable to think for ourselves and earn an A* on your strategic thinking test. Well, I think you can work out strategies to cope with continued contact for yourself. We don't need to prove our intelligence by helping you to fail.

If you are looking for personal stories of false recoveries, cake-eating WSs, PTSD, mental breakdown and worse caused by continued workplace contact, then you will find many here. There might be the odd maverick poster who comes to this thread and tells you how your marriage can thrive with continued contact. The vast majority of us, though, who have lived through the nightmare of continued contact or who have read the many stories here and learned from them, will never help you to cut corners. You do so against our experiences, and Dr Harley's expert advice.

Tully is my friend who lives in France. She has made a wonderful personal recovery, but her marriage did not survive the contact and her four daughters are now shuttled between her home, where they live for something like two weeks out of three, and their father's home where he lives with OW, for the third week out of three. This is court-ordered and she can do nothing about it.

A good friend recently told me "Priorities ... our lives must live out our priorities."

If his career is your priority, then his career will thrive at the expense of your marriage (even if there hadn't been any affair)

Misconception #1: YOU are not forcing him to do anything. The consequences here are 100% the result of HIS poor choices. Why is HE not stepping you to protect you from his poor choices? Why are you the one who has to clean up the mess and "force" him to do what is right?


Misconception #2: That your marriage counselor is actually out to save your marriage. If you look closer, you will see that their goal is virtually always to Stop The Conflict. And if that means counseling you to separate or even divorce, they will not hesitate to do that.


Misconception #3: Your lives are ALREADY torn apart. Your lives were torn apart by your husband's cheating. Getting away from the OP who was happy to help him cheat will only heal your lives, not "tear them apart" any further.

It is understandable that you desperately want to put things back the way they were and simply move on. I tried to do that, too. My XWH was a huge cheater in the corporate workplace. He also made big money and provided a nice lifestyle - and he would never, ever consider leaving that job where he'd been climbing the corporate ladder. So he stayed.

He was like a crackhead going to work in the crackhouse every day. I had a nervous breakdown and was briefly hospitalized (and was perfectly normal before this).

Oh, and he moved out and he filed rather than knock it off in the workplace.

We have been divorced for over two years now.

If you think your lives would not be "torn apart further" if he stays in where his OW is - I am here to tell you that you have NO idea. And I hope you will believe what we are telling you before you end up like me, with a broken family and legal and financial fallout that continues to this day.

I am not sure why you are so eager to protect your husband from the consequences of HIS choices, because if he will not stand up and clean up this mess himself and most of all PROTECT YOU - you will have nothing left to save.

You can trust me on that one.

Goomeri,

In regard to his offering to copy you on all correspondence, you should know that many, many WS will purchase prepaid cellphones to communicate with the affair partner. You can and should put a keylogger on your home computer, and on his laptop if he hasn't already set himself up as administrator without giving you the password; however, you generally can't do that on a work computer. If he has internet on his phone, you might be able to get spyware for his phone, depending on what kind of phone it is.

You can't trust him to tell you the truth.

Including about whether the A was really only an EA. Have you asked him for a poly? Because very often they only fess up to an EA when it really was a PA...

So were the OM's e-mails to my FWW, and vice-versa. Didn't stop them from boinking on the office desk when they got the chance.

FWIW, I was one of those who questioned the "NC" thing in the beginning. I regretted it afterwards.

Its hard to screw on a desk from different hemispheres. Or in public in front of half a dozen colleagues.

I am sorry you regretted it. We'll see what happens. I think life in the big wide world is more complex than is being recognized. What if an OW has a child of the affair? Surely joint parenting violates NC. Oh yeah, NC is total and all that matters and all men are [censored] who are just like alcoholics.

Don't get me wrong, I recognize NC would be so simple if I was willing to ask him to become a HS teacher. He would do it I believe. But it would create its own problems for the marriage. Lots of them.

I don't believe there is a God out there with one single answer that can be applied to every individual case. I guess if you've taken the Harley Drug you disagree with that. That's your prerogative and I wish you well.

Well, I've heard of phone sex, internet sex with the help of a webcam, plus there are planes flyng back and forth every day.

Even without that, there is the emotional aspect, which is just as deadly, if not deadlier than adulterous sex...with secret emails, text messages, and phone calls with each telling the other how much in love he/she is.

As far as conferences go, I've never heard of a conference where the participants were in public for 24 hours. At some point, the participants usually go to hotel rooms, and not always alone.

Hello Goomeri,

I remember for myself it being so hard to think that my beautiful blonde green eyed wife could look me in the eye and SWEAR ON OUR CHILDRENS LIVES that she had never had sex with my brother.

For years...

Until I demanded to know WHY things didn't seem quite right.

You have to ask yourself if you want to be part of an eternal triangle because that is what it will always be.

Do you really want that other woman in your bed and your husbands head every time you make love?

Do you want to look at your husband and wonder who he is thinking of when you are making love?

Your wandering husband has no reason to stop the affair...

and he won't on his own.

It may or may not be an emotional affair...if she was agreeable to having sex...

they had sex.

You are an intelligent woman married to an intelligent man.

Instead of telling us you can't or won't do this or that...

ask us WHY you need to do this or that.

Make us back it up with answers that make sense.

I work in medicine and sometimes I have to do something painful to someone I really don't want to have to do...

to save their life.

The same goes for your marriage...

It may not always be what you really want to do...

but it is your best hope to save your marriage.

Read the concepts and see if they make sense to you.

God bless.

Jim

When D-Day came around for me (I confessed my A), we weren't sure what I should do. I mean, I was rising in my career, was recognized in profession, doing traveling all over the state, training and involved with a certain aspect of the Kennedy Center, blah blah blah. But I had cheated on my DH. And I discovered something.......

I am not THAT important. I am not Madam Curie. I am not Pavlov. I am not Galileo. Yes, I have achieved some things in my chosen field.....but there isn't going to be a rift in the space time continuum if I have to alter it some in order to save the relationship that is the most important earthly relationship I have.

I don't think your only two options are A) let him rub shoulders with OW whenever or B) teach HS, though as a public school teacher myself I am a bit offended that this is such a humiliating step down. There must be other way to think creatively and "insightfully" about this. I mean, one sign of high intelligence is a certain amount of expertise in "thinking outside the box."

So brainstorm. We did. And I am still traveling, still doing professional development, still working on grants, etc. And I have not spoken to OM in......way over 4 years.

It can be done.

Could you tell us a little more about your situation? Where do you live, how long has this been going on, how long have you been married? How deep did this emotional affair go? How did you find out? Are you absolutely sure you know everything there is to know? It does make a bit of a difference how far they went. (Why wouldn't she when her own husband officially set out to have an affair?)

Please think about the things that have been mentioned to you. They do make sense. I am a scientist myself and know it can be hard. When you would decide that no contact is no option, it would be best if you go with him to his various congresses. Nothing speaks against that. You can take a good book with you, or maybe you take an interest in the technicalities of his job. Even if you decide no contact is not for you it would be good to know that he would give up his job for you if you insisted on it. I agree that if the job is more important than his relationship with you, he will not invest enough in his marriage an he should be asking himself about his priorities in life. Because fame is passing and in 10 years his colleagues will hardly know he ever existed.

I wish you all the best and a husband who puts you first.

Goomeri,

A couple of comments just in case you are still reading here:

After I became familar with Dr. Harley's concepts and marriagebuilders, I was amazed at the similarity between adultery and other addictions. Whether the brain stimulant comes from outside the brain or is made within the body, the effects are very similar. The recovery includes removal from the object of the addiction and the replacement of those feelings with others, i.e. no contact is just the first step in recovering a marriage.

You made a comment about co-parenting in the case of an OC. Actually, the recommendation is still no contact with the adultery partner and the illegitimate child. Yep, there are horrible consequences of adultery for the innocent.

Since it appears as though you will not ask your husband to end all contact with other woman for life or leave his exhaulted profession (he is SO important in the world), at a minimum call the OWH and inform him about the affair. He has a right to know about his life. You really do not know what is happening in that household and marriage. Exposure to him could have the added benefit of his insistance that his wife leave the profession.

Finally, I think you are in for a rough time. Even if your H does not continue in this affair, given the lack of consequences and recovery of the marriage, the probability of additional affairs is high.

Or even if you didn't insist.

This is such an important point. Please don't overlook it.

Where do you rank?

Goomeri, I was standing right where you are standing right now. I came up with many, perfectly logical, reasons why I should not demand NC, and why I should not expose her A to her office. After all, each situation is different, right?

I ended up regretting my position on the subject six months later.

Yes, my FWW stayed with me, but a lot of damage was done to our M while she continued to work with him, and that damage only ended when NC was established. I could have avoided six further months of scarring to my M if I'd demanded NC in the first place.

You have the benefit of reading the experiences of several persons here who have either done the Harley thing and recovered, or like me did not do it and didn't fare so well. You can choose to ignore it if you wish. That's YOUR prerogative and I wish you well.