Hi, eveyone. I'm new here. I came for some advice.

I have three kids that I don't want to be away from for one minute, but I think no-contact with my wife and kids might be the best way to reverse this divorce right now.

Is that crazy? Am I doing the right thing?


Background:

Wife and I have been married 7 years, together 12. We had some tension running in the past few years that mostly had to do with how I was handling treatment of my occasional depression, and the less-than-optimal way I have been running my freelancing business.

When she realized that I hadn't been telling her everything about either, she was hurt and accused me of lying. I resent the accusation that I 'lied', and think it's a lot more complicated than that.

If there were more money in the bank, I don't think this would have happened.

We have kids - 6, 3, and 15.

About two months ago, things were not right. She was staying up too late, extremely secretive about what she was writing/texting to friends, and wouldn't come to bed. I confronted her and she said she wanted to try a separation, maybe 6 to 12 months to give me time to work stuff out and so she could stop being mad at me.

I freaked out and did every wrong thing. She asked for space, I'd pester her. I begged, pleaded, cried, spied on her (and got caught). She still loves me. So many times she said she wanted things to work out, but I wouldn't leave her alone, and eventually she just filed for divorce and I found out in the marriage counselor's office.

I did sleep outside the house for 4 weeks, but for the first 2 and a half weeks, I couldn't leave her alone. I figured out how to do that, and she commented in therapy that she thought that things were on the right track to work out.

I made a terrible mistake - I was going crazy (like not being able to work because I was distraught or obsessing about the separation) from couch surfing and not having a regular routine. She convinced me she wanted to give things time to work out in therapy one day and I told her I need to start sleeping at home for a while because I couldn't function.

She didn't tell me how this upset her, she just decided that I was saying she had to reconcile with me right then, all or nothing. The next day, she decided to file divorce. I found out a week later after it was already done.

SO FRUSTRATING. We could have talked. We'd learned to give each other space, aknowledged we love each other and want to give things time. I could have been back out of the house in a couple of days once I made better arrangements.

People say she's a [censored]. I say she's the love of my life and the mother of my children. I want to put things right.


Sooooo: I've told her that I want to do 1 month of no contact. She asked for this in the past, but says it won't make a difference now because she's made up her mind. I think if I straighten out my life a little and put our bank account back in order, we'll have a better chance.

On the other hand, maybe she'll resent me for leaving the burden of the kids all on her.

Does anyone have an opinion?

Why on EARTH would you plan to ignore your children who are confused and hurting at this time?? That's the opposite of what you should be doing. You should be spending as much time as possible with your kids.

Also, if the divorce goes through, you are putting yourself into the position of having to pay the maximum amount of child support and getting the least possible amount of parenting time.

It sounds to me like she's having an affair and you've played right into her hands by moving out.

Frankly, if she wants separation, then SHE should be the one moving out.

I'm sorry, you've totally yanked my chain with this one. My ex-husband went an entire year seeing our kids less often than once a month even though he lives 5 miles away. Now that he's over his affair and is lonely and bored, he wants a relationship with them. They are totally done with him and aren't willing to spend time with him. Is that what you want?

I want to spend *every* day with my kids.

My parents are such bad examples that I'm pretty much obsessed with it. Being a father was the most important thing to me in the world. I love my kids. I'm baffled my wife is so willing to mess up their lives with this divorce when we are... just not that far apart.

I asked my wife if I did this 30-day no-contact thing, if she would consider holding off on the divorce for now. She considered it for two days before saying no.

I'm coming back after four weeks to go back to our current pattern, which is that I pick them up from school Tuesday and Thursday, have dinner and bed time (at our house - their only home), and also all day Saturday.

Seeing them 3 days a week is a really terribly poor substitute for the family they had.

The whole situation makes me very angry.



I have not given my wife space largely because I don't want to short-change the kids. (well that, and also because it kills me...)

I'm calling this a 180. I won't care about whether "space" is hurting the kids for one month, in the hope that maybe they don't have to make decisions like which parent they want to live with when they are teenagers.

Divorce sucks. I would do anything to stop it. My marriage is not beyond repair, but my wife is too far convinced otherwise to see it right now.

Welcome, mgm.
Could you explain specifically what the problem was with how you were handling your depression?

You need to work harder on hiding your snooping. How did you get caught? What did you find?


I don't get this. What in the world did you think you would accomplish by separating to work on your problems? Doesn't common sense tell you that it's better to work on your problems together?

mgm, you can't rebuild a marriage by choosing to live apart. Does your wife want to remain married? I know she filed for D, but is she willing to work on the marriage?

Do you have any reason to believe that she is having an affair? Think: is there anyone at her job that she's been talking about? Have you checked her cell phone records? Are there any numbers she's frequently calling/texting that you don't recognize?

OH.MY.

I am speechless. My good friend. You are so lost and are making such strategic mistakes that I barely know where to begin. Are you able to follow a plan if we give you one? Moving out and "giving her space" is about the worst thing you could have done. But I think the mistake has gone so far that there is no turning back now.

See, when a spouse wants "space" it really means she is having an affair and wants you out of the way. The worst thing a betrayed spouse can do is move out because that only facilitates the affair. And that is what has happened here. This is all about your wife's affair. And since you have acted so badly she has been able to keep the focus on YOUR bad behavior so everyone is distracted from her affair.

Who is she having the affair with? Is he married?

You have to believe that walking away is the last thing that I want. The thing that would most likely have helped during this time is if I could have been 100% effective at work.

Instead, I've really been mostly unable to function.

I couldn't be happier than to be talked out of this.


If someone has a plan, I will follow it. Sorry I can't be more specific at the moment. I will reply to specific questions in an hour or two.

Who is she having the affair with?

"There is no affair".

Hacking into her parenting support board where she posted the thread, "I think my marriage could have been a colossal mistake" revealed no evidence of affair.

Her email - no evidence.

She has insisted all this time.


The only thing is that she sends about 2500 texts back and forth with an old male friend from NY. He was in my wedding party. I trusted him.

I told her I thought she was having an "emotional affair". She denied it.

That is probably who the affair is with. Do you have a way of getting the evidence? I assure you she is having an affair with someone and that is the root of your problem. All this time you have been distracted with other things and have not been aware of the real problem.

You have been seriously gaslighted for a long time.

Which is a CLASSIC statement of someone who is trying to justify an affair. CLASSIC. All the markers of an affair are here, wanting "space;" kicking you out, "I love you but am not in love with you." <------all classic markers of an affair.


This is evidence of an affair. Is this guy married?

Dr Bill Harley, founder of Marriage Builders and clinical psychologist with 40 years experience specializing in infidelity:

There is *something* going on between HighSchooBuddy and my wife, but he is just not... Relationships are not his thing. He doesn't date often, and he seems to be largely asexual most of the time.

The three of us are all nerds, so to speak. But I don't have much social anxiety. I can deal with new people, even normal ones. HSB is the opposite - he's got hermit tendencies. It's weird to think of him as having an affair with my wife. Of seven freaking years. Grrr.


Even if it is an affair, affairs have root causes.


Here is my back story:
I have bipolar disorder. I'm not crazy, just different enough for people to notice. I have a friend who assumes I'm ADHD and just considers me an iconoclast.

Bipolar disorder is a frightening thing. I think something like 1 in 3 people with bipolar attempt (or succeed) in suicide in their lifetime. I'm not one of those people. I've never been psychotic, never done anything really crazy. There have been times where I've felt compelled to work tree days straight with barely any sleep or time for food, but those are rare and my mania is pretty tame.

I just do things differently. I'm smart and I make that work for me professionally.

The problem is that when I'm taxed from not enough sleep or too much on my plate or too much emotional stress, I get depressed. When I'm depressed, I stop billing clients. I forgot how much work I actually got done. I start missing deadlines. My todo list gets longer and longer until I just stop looking at it. I don't pay bills. etc, etc, etc.


So instability is an issue. In 2005, I lost a client and they refused to pay me $7,000 or so that they owed me. I had been working around the clock for the last two weeks of the contract, gave them what they wanted, lost my leverage, and didn't have the will any more to extract it from them.

That led to a bankruptcy. And to the diagnosis of my bipolar disorder. The other thing that happened in 2005 is that my son was born - the one who never slept during the first 18 months of his life. That was too much for me, and that's when I lost control of my undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

Things were never quite the same. Treatment of bipolar disorder usually makes you stupid. I'm a computer programmer. Stupid means I can't do my job.

I tried to work with my psychiatrist on getting me off of drugs, because I thought that I could do it. I didn't tell my wife because I didn't believe she could understand what I was going through or support me.

For about 4 years, I tried to lessen my dependency on drugs, but just couldn't do it.

I lost a few jobs and a few clients during this period. I made between 50 and 70 thousand per year, but my wife was always freaking out about money.

Anyway, I got to a point where I realized I was never going to be OK without more drugs and therapy, and started down that path. This was during a two-month period of being quite depressed, and not billing clients, and making my wife worry.

I had made the decisions to get my life back in order, but she felt she couldn't trust me any more and thought we needed a 6 to 12 month separation so she could see that I had my [censored] together before re-committing to me.

I'm sure I could condense that down, but there it is.

The other boy - HSB, he makes more like a solid 6 figures, has basically no expenses (lives in his dad's loft in Manhattan) and is nice and boring and predictable.

Also, "There is no affair".

There is nothing we can do for you if you won't listen. It is very rare to see someone who has such poor instincts and we can't help you unless you put aside your own thinking and allow us to help. You, Sir, have made strategic mistakes every step of the way in this dilemma. You have wrecked your marriage and lost your family and you are on here arguing with people who have saved their marriages? Holy moly....

It is rare to see such mis-steps, and I don't say this to be mean, but to emphasize that you have extremely poor judgment and even worse instincts.

There is nothing we can do if you won't listen. And even then, this has been so poorly managed that I doubt it can be saved. I can only hope you have good legal representation because most judges highly frown on men who abandon their families. And that is what you have done, you have abandoned your family in their time of greatest need.

You need help, Sir, to compensate for your poor judgement. But you first have to realize that you can't be helped if you won't listen.

If someone has a plan, fire away.

I'm not trying to argue with anyone. I have stated facts and tried to explain my situation. I am quite able to listen.

Please consider for a moment that some times when a person asks for space, there might not be an affair. Maybe that's only 2 percent of the time. I'm not even saying there isn't an affair. "There is no affair" is a quote from my wife.

I will say that I've had the feeling that my wife is trying to pull away for a long time now, and that is regardless of what she might have going on with another person.

Yes, my judgement has been terrible. I'm fairly certain I should have given her space in the first place. But I'm hearing that moving out was never a good idea?

So many people recommend this no-contact thing, I thought it was worth a try. Then there is the 180 thing. This is definitely a 180. But maybe it's also a terrible mistake.

I want to know what the right thing is to do right now, and then do that. I just have no idea.

To avoid side effects of medication, I tried using changes in routine and behavior to avoid spells of depression. This *mostly* worked. I came to the realization about 3 months ago that it just wasn't enough, though, and scheduled an appointment with my doc to get on whatever drugs she thought might help.

My depression was never that bad. I wasn't upset about life, or anything, I just went through bouts of low motivation and distractability. My doc prescribed Ritalin a few months before this to knock out those symptoms. It worked at first, but made things much worse over the long haul. When the Ritalin failed, that's when I was ready to take any drug she had, regardless of whether it made me stupid and change careers if I needed to.

At about this same time, my marriage melted down fast. My wife felt like she didn't understand what was going on with me and was hurt that she was excluded.


I logged into her gmail account, and one of her friends saw that she was online when she was at work. So dumb. I found very little, other than her talking to her friends online about what she should do about us.

Her thoughts were all about how she felt deceived by me.


I want to work on things together, but she wants me out of the house and away from her as much as possible. She says that whenever she sees me she gets so angry, she needs time. She needs time to feel her feelings and not pretend they don't exist. She says she knew that there was something wrong with me, and when I said I was fine, she second guessed herself and she hates me for that.

Those aren't her words. She'll never say she hates me. She doesn't hate me. Anger and hate seemed a lot better than indifference.


She is willing to work on our relationship to make sure the kids get what they need. She still has IC with our therapist that we've been seeing for about 4 months now, and we're still scheduled to see her together.

Last time in therapy, though, she said that "reconciliation is not my goal." I said that I understand that it's not your goal any more, and we can continue to process the divorce, but maybe we can spend some time to work things out.

It is very hard to tell what she feels. I want so badly to look at her message board again and find the clues to figure out what I'm supposed to do. I want to know what all the other moms are telling her to do.


She acts like a person having an affair, but won't consider that that is what she is doing. I honestly believe that she doesn't believe that she is having an affair.

She is extremely distracted from our relationship, and I feel that she is getting all kinds of pushing from the people that she does talk to to walk away form this marriage.


I sent her this:
http://www.divorcebusting.com/blog/the-walk-away-wife-is-your-wife-leaving-your-marriage-video/

That is us to a "T".

The things I did wrong - resisting full-on treatment, not letting her in on it, not being clear about my work and ability to work and finances - that stuff is gone.

I'd do anything to get this marriage and family back on track now.


I just want a chance.

HighSchoolBuddy is not married. We're all in our mid-thirties now, and he's never had a long-term relationship, as far as I know. He just doesn't go this way.

Is this a way of having a no-teeth, perfectly safe affair on her part? He's also 450 miles away.


I haven't seen the texts sent between them. My wife keeps her phone very close. She deletes messages. I've seen the phone records, and it infuriates her that I've looked. She feels spied upon. It's a big wedge issue now. She changed the password on our cell phone account so I can't look at the records any more.

I had also once previously used the phone records to ask her why she had called a lawyer when she denied she was going to do that.


I have the software to download the entire contents of her phone to my laptop in about one minute. I could grab the phone, do that, maybe find something incriminating.

But what is the point? If I have evidence of her affair, does that matter in any way? All I accomplish is proving that she can't trust me not to snoop on her.

If he has a high income and few expenses, he could be flying out to see your wife regularly. Or this could be only an emotional affair so far. You said that your wife keeps saying, "There is no affair." People who are in love with someone they are not married to, get really good at lying. She is having an affair with your friend.



Everything your wife is doing says that she is having an affair.

There are people who on the forums here who have saved their marriages after an affair. You have children with your wife and there is a chance the affair has not yet become physical. Your marriage might be salvageable.

If you want to learn how, you need to ask a moderator to move your thread to the Surviving An Affair forum. At the bottom of your post there is a button that says "Notify." Please click that and make your request.

In these forums, the "culture" is to keep all your posts about your situation in a single long thread, so it would be helpful if you refrain from starting a new thread.

I have requested that the thread be moved. Does it make that much difference to consider it an affair? She's not having sex with another person. She's an extremely honest person. She would not directly lie if she's been having sex.

She did show some doubt on her face when I asked her if she was having an emotional affair with this guy. I don't think she had consciously recognized it as such. I'm going to ask her again today.

I've told her I'm holding off on moving out until we get a chance to think it through. Our weekend is rushed, too much going on, this isn't really the time to sit down with the kids and talk.


She said that she doesn't want to be around me because I reach into her brain and make her feel the way I want her to feel. I think she may wonder if her love for me (12 years long) is the product of my manipulating her mind.

She also said that she feels like my soul is cracked and that I need to hold on to hers to survive and that I squeeze it too tightly.


Does my road to reconciliation look that different if we assume that she is having an affair?

ok, I am not going to waste much more time here because I have no reason to believe you will listen, but I will try one last time. If you don't listen this time, I am going to move on for good. Yes, you should download the entire contents of her phone and read her communications. You have a right to know everything she utters and does. YOU ARE HER HUSBAND.

And the point is to find out what she is doing and use that intel strategically to save your marriage. There is nothing "untrustworthy" about doing so, since you have a right to know everything. She, as your wife, does not have a "right" to secrecy. Of course you should not be "trusted" to not snoop on her. That is silly. If she is hiding something - AND SHE IS - she had better expect you to snoop. People who have nothing to hide, don't hide.

I want you to consider something when you read our posts. You are the least objective person on this thread. Not only that, but you have made a collosal mess of your marriage and your life through your poor judgement and even worse instincts. Many of we posters have saved our marriages, on the other hand.

Again, not trying to be mean, but pointing out the need for you to take the cotton out of your ears, put it in your mouth and LISTEN. LISTEN. Can you do that?

Of course. Knowing the truth about the source of the problem makes ALL the difference. You can't solve a problem IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS. If you are treating someone for heart disease and the real problem is cancer, the patient dies.


You have no way of knowing because by your own admission you oddly think its bad to snoop.


More nonsense. She lied to you about getting the lawyer and hides her phone. sorry, that ain't "honest."