Ok. here goes.

Right now you are being controlled by nothing but animalistic hormones, eminating from the reptilian part of your brain. The part of the brain where there are the most basic of instincts, such as sex, hunger, and breathing.

Basically that is what is controlling you.

You are high on nothing but feel good hormones. My xh felt that way too. It lasted with the OW about 18 months, and then he began cheating on her too.

You see, these are the crazy in love (or what you perceive is love)hormones. They will wane quickly. They are not meant by nature to last a long time. It's basically the stuff that gets people mating and creating little people.

Are you a slave to your emotions? Or are you going to try to heal your family from something so horrible, that it will affect your H and your child for the rest of their lives?

You know, this place can help you find the way to a happy and truly loving and IN LOVE marriage. But as long as you are kneeling down to a damn hormone, allowing yourself to be degraded by somebody who would "do" a married woman and disrespect you, then there can be no helping you.

If you want to choose the destructive route, know this. Most "affairages" (affairs which lead to a marriage) fail miserably. Basically no success rate. Your child will grow up in a broken home, being shuffled around from your house to your H's home, and when your affair relationship falls apart and crumbles and you're left with nothing, you will understand how damn destructive listening to your reptilian hormones can be.

God made us to respond sexually to others, but HE intended it to be for creating marriages and families.

Adultery leads to nothing good. Nothing.

Okay peachy, so explain this to me...if you and your ex-husband could have worked it out, you would have never met the wonderful man that you now call your husband. So how do you explain how this all worked out in your favor, with children????

He's mostly "wonderful" by comparison to the train wreck that was and is her ex wayward husband.

Ex-husband could have chosen to be "wonderful" himself and that would have made things a whole lot easier and better for all involved.

Peachy never would have known the difference between THIS wonderful man and the hypothetical wonderful ex husband.


Your choices don't include being the happy peachy in a God provided loving relationship...but rather are necessarily limited to either being her horrible, forever wayward, miserable and lost ex-husband OR the hypothetical "wonderful" ex-husband that decided to forgo his lustful and sinful nature and repent.

You either turn your life around or those around you and YOU mostly will suffer the inevitable consequences. It's a law of nature. Peachy's ex made his choices...the outcome is just as inevitable as yours should you continue on that same path.

Mr. W

Oh yeah...one way or another it does usually work out for the betrayed spouse. Although the advice you are getting seems to you to be geared towards helping out your betrayed spouse, typically it's not. We are trying to save you. It's YOUR life that's gonna suck if you continue on this path. It's your kids that are going to suffer (despite Peachy finding herself a new great guy...her son is stick stuck with the same POS dad).

Your spouse is going to make it regardless.

Mr. W

"Happier not married"

Too late. Sorry. You already chose. You already made the commitment. What gives you the right to choose again?? Just because people get divorced all the time doesn't make it right.


As far as never seeing a marriage you'd want to model...well, why don't you and your husband endeavor TOGETHER to become such a model marriage for your friends and family (especially your children). Presuming your parents didn't have model marriage look at what that's done to your thinking. How about stepping up to the challenge and breaking the cycle???

Become the model marriage.

You are only 30ish. I got married when I was thirty. Put yours and your husbands mistakes behind you and build something new and better. My wife and I did...so can you.

Mr. W

Let me say that if you have ANY feelings for you BH. Dont do this to him. I have had major surgery, lost my only sibling sister to drugs and buried her. NEVER has anything hurt me more and for a LONGER TERM than my wife cheating on me EMOTIONALLY. I still break down and cry and tears well up as I type this. I would rather burn to Death quickly than live one year betrayed.
Break the contact to the OM now and follow MB plan. A year from now you will read your posts and wonder what a stranger you were to yourself.

You have ignored the question about whether there is NC several times now so I am going to go ahead and read between the lines and assume there is still some level of contact (as defined for you earlier).

This is why you cannot get past your infatuation for the OM...so stop blaming the plan, your H and anything else.

NC is step #1. None of the rest of it works without NC.

You can't recover your marriage with your H until you have no contact with the OM.

And you're talking to the worst people in the world that no one would ever want to be married to. You see, we were all terrible husbands and wives. We all were inattentive. All of us made our wayward spouses miserable because we are horrible human beings.

OR

You can understand if we have already lived through the standard re-writes of marital history that waywards engage in and find the comments about how terrible your marriage is to ring hollow. What you're doing is very standard.

But it takes two people to make a marriage unhappy. How did you communicate your lack of happiness to your H? Was it direct or did you do so by dropping hints and hoping he'd get it?

I ask that because men don't do well with hints. Oftentimes a woman feels that she couldn't make things more clear, but the reality is that she's speaking a whole nother language.

So what did YOU do to make your marriage a poor one? How did you communicate with your H? What did you do to try to increase the quality time you spent together?

As far as your earlier comments about ending up with better "new" spouses:

The cost of any new found happiness comes at your children's expense.

They don't want you and your H to split, regardless of what you tell yourself, and no, they won't just be fine.

Look up the statistics on divorce for kids and see for yourself.

My kids are paying the price to this day.

The odds for the betrayed finding happiness again are very good. Those of the wayward are worse. The affair marriages they enter into don't usually last and then they wrestle with the guilt of destroying their kid's existence.

I am assuming you were asking about peachy's situation as some kind of implication that somehow this OM could be for you what peachy's H is for her......uh, not even the same thing. When someone begins a relationship with a man while married....it's isn't God's provision of a soul mate, it's adultery.

Nothing will ever get better until YOU make the choice to never contact the OM and close all channels of contact. How do you do that? You do it, you stick to it, and you just weather through the withdrawal, knowing that it is part of the consequences of making a bad choice.

There is not magical fat burning pill to fix this.

Damn straight.

struggling, contact can also be defined as you going online and searching for OM's name or looking at his picture on FB. It doesn't have to be face-to-face, or email/phone/text/whatever.

Suspending disbelief for a moment, if the suspicions of folks that think there is some sort of contact going on are incorrect, and there is no contact between you and OM, then something else is still in the picture here....Fantasizing about OM or any other attractive male in your life, someone at work, maybe? Are you letting your intimate EN's be met at all by anyone else of the opposite sex?

If you are stuck in continually fantasizing about how your life would be "different," you are ignoring the fact that in front of you is a man who has forgiven you, who wants to preserve his M with you, and that is love. As incredibly painful as infidelity is for BS's (which is something I can't even fathom, being a FWS), your BH is walking through fire for you.

For you.

Let that sink in, and then tell yourself that marriage is a joke.

As Mr. W said, become the model marriage. Be the marriage that everyone else you know is jealous of.

I'd give anything to be in your shoes, and have that chance.

Struggling,

How was your H able to meet your ENs sufficiently if he wasn't around?

Struggling,

I know how you feel.

I used to think this too. In fact, for the first six years of my marriage I was very ambivalent about staying with my wife, whether I could or would long term, used to imagine what it would be like with someone else etc. I had the classic Freeloader mentality.

Also, I had had no model of what a great marriage was. I certainly didn't want my parents' marriage even though they've been together 37 years. I am an atheist so any religious justification for marriage was utterly lost on me and I just plain wasn't sold on the idea. If anyone told me that my decisions were making a loving marriage impossible I would have flatly denied it.

Then I turned 31 in July 2007.

In January 2008 my darling wife whose feelings I had ridden roughshod over, whom I had verbally abused and sidelined virtually since we met found herself an OM, left me and moved in with him. The pain was so great there are no words in English to really describe it, I couldn't eat or breathe and it felt like someone had taken an axe to my chest. That pain lingered for months.

Needless to say I feel very differently about marriage these days and treat my wife very differently thanks to what I've learned here.

You have no idea what you're about to lose.

I appreciate that you're unhappy but the price you pay to fix that with your H pales in comparison to the price you'll pay if you break your family up.

You are suffering from the same syndrome we have all seen or lived. I had an A a long, long time ago. I thought the OW came into my life for a special reason. It turns out she used me as a @#ck buddy, and I guess I treated her the same. At the time, it was a perfect fantasy relationship. Looking back, we were just a piece of *ss for each other. I almost lost my M because of it, but my dear wife stuck with me.

My wife's recent A had her convinced of the exact same fantasy: the OM came into her life for a reason. She was tired of living like roommates with me. He was her "soulmate." My wife found it so easy to talk to him. He was a knight in shining armour. He would raise our young children. He loved her. He couldn't stop thinking about her. She never felt this way about any man before. He was "special."

You see, these A's really are the same old tired story. You believe you are in a marriage where you are "roommates" and you lead separate lives. This OM promises so much more. You feel alive around him. He is so special. There must be something cosmic about him coming into our life now. He will rescue your heart and make you whole again.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but your story is my story and my wife's story-- just change the names. In the end, your "special" OM is really just another skank-ho dude who wants a piece of *ss without the commitment of having to live under the same roof as you and your kids.

This OM is a man with zero morals. He doesn't respect you or your M. He would never be faithful to you if you were together with him. Why would he? And how could he ever trust you? A woman who cheats on her H and children. When you start seeing him as a parasite looking to suck the life out of you, you will quickly lose these feelings for him.

Focus on the gifts you have in front of you. Show your children a woman they can respect and admire for the choices she has made. You have an opportunity right now to show your true character.

What road are you going to choose? Your kids are watching...

THANK YOU so much wisertoday. That is exactly what I was looking for. I was NOT asking for forgiveness or trying to make people believe that what I did was right. I just wanted to hear from someone who has been in the exact same boat as me and tell me that there is hope and that love can be restored. All of you people who just wanted to point fingers at me and tell me what a horrible person I am did zero good because I already knew this.

There is hope and you have come to the right place. I wish you every success restoring love to your marriage.

This is good. Recognizing that your choices were poor is the first step to restoring the love you've said you wish to do.

A lot of us have been in the same boat that you are in, myself included. Of course you can restore the love in your marriage, but you absolutely cannot do so as long as you are in contact with the OM. Would you please answer the question that has been asked of you quite a few times?

Are you still in contact with the OM?

Have you sent a NC letter to the OM and severed all ties with him?

Until you take this crucial first step, there's nothing anyone here will be able to do to help you start down that path to restoring the love in your marriage.

I have not been in contact with the OM for a week or so and no I have not sent the NC letter. However, even if all contact from him is ceased, won't the questions or things/time that I enjoyed with him forever be on my mind or will those eventually wane as well? Constructive criticism only please.

The more distance and time between yourself and the OM, the more the fantasy will fade. Wisertoday could have written my story too. OM was just a garage band reject false fantasy FWB who cared nothing about me....and my feelings for him were based on thin air. The longer I went without any contact, working on my M and myself, the more clear this became.

How were you in contact? FB? Text? Email? All of the above?

We were in contact just through texting and an occasional phone call. We live 5 states away from each other, so am not seeing him.