Hi all,
My wife and I have been together for almost 9 years. We relocated to Europe 3 years ago, and this process has been very difficult for her, specially learning the local language. Now I acknowledge that I drifted apart from her during those 3 years, and I also realize that I might even treat her bad (emotionally). I was always very focused on my job, and we barely had time together...let alone sex (which is one of my main emotional needs).
She got into a gym almost a year ago and since then she has made a lot of physical changes for better, now she is in great shape and looks so beautiful. Maybe 6 or 7 months ago, she began a friendship with the fitness trainer, and since 4 months ago, she would bring his name in many situations. For example after a concert she would say "Oh if OM would be here he would do this", or maybe during a movie she would say "I wonder if OM already saw this movie"...anyway I also saw that whenever she was around this guy, she would look at him the same way that she used to look at me when we were dating and we were so much in love. I also noticed that she was very physical with him, by always touching his arms, by grabbing his shoulders, etc...
This rang an alarm in my head so I decided to spy on her computer. After just one day of monitoring, I saw that she was telling her best friends in Facebook about how much in love she was with this guy, they even had plans to get married, and the sex with him was great. I also saw a picture that this guy took and posted it in his Skype profile...in this picture they appeared head to head, eyes closed and showing a deep emotional connections. I also saw that when she connected through Skype to talk to him, my wife would write him things as "my love", "my baby", "I love you", and many hearts.
I decided to confront her, and in summary she denied having an affair with him. She said that everything I saw was just a fantasy in her head, and she was shearing this fantasy with her friends in order to have something interesting to tell them.
Today I am really sure that my wife had (has?) an emotional affair with this guy. I have no way to prove if they got into SF or not.
We began couples therapy and things began to get better, we bang to spend more time together and she promised that she would keep this guy just as his fitness trainer and nothing else. We set some basic rules such as "No lies", "No name-calling", "Not spying on her computer", and eventually we tried to work on our sex life. Our sex life was almost non-existent and whenever we had sex, for me it was like doing it with a plastic-doll. My wife didn�t enjoy my kisses, didn�t enjoy my caresses and she would even say "do it already!!". If I took my time to do it, she would then use her hands to make me finish ASAP. That was our sex life. I always had to reach an agreement with her at least one week before hand in o! rder to have sex, since she was never on the mood to do it spontaneously. And she never had the will to be proactive.

Along with the counselor's guide, we agreed not to have sex or self satisfaction for one week, and she said during the therapy session that it was going to be very hard for her not to have self satisfaction, as that was something that she does almost daily. That was on a Saturday, and then a week later we were looking at a movie on her computer. The movie stopped so she handed over her laptop to me while she went to the kitchen. She said, please load the movie again to continue watching it. I took the chance and broke one of the rules (Not spying on her computer), and I saw that she had seen 10 x-rated movie last Thursday. Bear in mind that on Thursday or Friday I asked if she had seen adult movies and she said no. Once she returned from the kitchen, I asked her again "Have you seen adult movies this week", and she said "No, but why do you ask"...."Ha! ve you been checking my computer?"...and then I said yes.!
I was feeling really bad, really really bad, since she was still lying to me, and in my eyes she was not putting an effort to improve our sex life. Later that night I left the house and I made most likely the worst mistake in my life. I had sex with a sf worker. This was the first time that I was unfaithful to my wife in our 9 years of marriage. The worst thing is that the next morning I felt so bad about myself, that I told my wife what I did the night before.

She left our home around noon, and returned around midnight, in the car of the OM. Today I am going away from home for a week due to a job-related activity that can�t be postponed or otherwise I could easily lose my job. All she said to me last night when she came home was "You are worse than me. You had the balls to do something that I didn�t dare to do...I just thought about it, but you actually did it. Don�t say a word to me, and don�t even bother to call me this week".

I have sabotaged my own marriage, which was (most likely) on its way to get better. I have screwed up everything, and I still don�t understand why did I do that, and why did I tell her!?!? I think that maybe I have a double-personality disorder, or borderline disorder...all I know is that I feel really bad about the harm that I have caused my wife, and also because I have eliminated any chance for our marriage...The ironic thing is that I really love and care for my wife, but still I made this stupid thing. I must be crazy!

Why did I do that to her?? Why did I blew up everything, for one small mistake of my wife?? Is there any hope???

While the Marriage Builder's website cannot become involved in threats of this kind, please know that your pain is taken seriously. Please contact a suicide crisis center in your area, call 1-800-SUICIDE or call your family physician.

aguerocr,

Welcome to Marriage Builders. I'm sorry you have the need to be here but you have found a great group of very knowledgeable, compassionate people.

A couple of questions first..

Do you have kids?

Is the OM(other man) married?

Your & your W's approx ages?

There will be an equivalent phone number in the European country in which you are located.

Please come back and discuss the affair with us.

Hi Nerlycrzy,
We don�t have kids, since the first date we had, we realized that neither she nor I wanted kids, so instead we decided to travel, enjoy life and to have 3 dogs. They are our family, and certainly they will be a big issue during the most likely split up.

The OM as far as I know is married, but I can�t confirm it 100% since in some of the messages between my wife and her friends, she said that this guy was trying to win back his wife due to something he did. Also when I looked for the phone number of this guy (in internet), the info that comes up is about Mr and Ms OM.

My wife is 34 and I am 33.

You ask "is there hope?" YES!!

But you need a plan and Dr Harley has the best, most effective plan around.

Ok,, first thing you need to do--

[video:youtube][/video]

Infidelity: What every couple should know.

Watch this video-- A MUST!

Learn about infidelity--educate yourself--get a plan.

This upcoming trip-- ANY way possible you can get out of this? It's a super bad idea to leave right now. It gives her every opportunity to run to the OM and she's feeling very justified right now due to your affair. No, I am not ignoring your foolish decision, and we'll discuss that too.

aguerocr, your WW has done a REALLY good job of gas-lighting you. OF COURSE she is in an A with her trainer!

Unfortunately you have made matters worse by shagging a prostitute. Not only have you also broken your M vows, you've now handed your WW a stick that she will keep beating you over the head with while she happily continues her A.

The situation is salvageable, of course. If you want to save your M, get your hands on a copy of "Surviving An Affair". Read about Plan A and Plan B. Read up here on the forum about "Exposure". Start gathering evidence of her A. And when you have sufficient evidence, expose as per the guidelines given here.

I should tell you beforehand however that the odds of recovering an M when the WS is the W are quite low. With no kids and just 9 years invested in this (for how many of those years were you actually M'd?), walking away may be your best option.

Thanks for the willingness to listen and help. I feel so desperate and powerless.

As I said on my first post, I am sure about the emotional affair that my wife had or still has. The OM is quite a handsome person and really muscular. He and my wife began as simple friends, but over time they began to share their marital problems and soon they became intimate friends...that's when I began to suspect and install a spying software on her laptop. The captured information showed the messages between my wife and her best friends. The messages were always consistent: she was so in love with OM, they were discussing marriage plans, sex was great but it was getting stressful due to my constant questions and issues that he was having with his wife, she was very fed up with my careless attitude...
Looking back, I really don't blame my wife for this affair since I took her for granted for 3 years and just left her for her own, while I was busy with work and never really cared enough about her needs and pleas for love and companion...no wonder our sex life was almost null and very unfulfilling for both.
You know, I really think that we were doing good progress towards saving our marriage along with the guidance of the counselor, eventhough she kept saying that it was a waste of money and time. She also said that she didn't believe in the rules we were supposed to follow.
Once we reached this point where we were going to start working on our sex life, we defined a rule: no sex, no intercouse, no x-movies, no self satisfactions for a week. A week later we met with the counselor and we said that we had fulfilled the rule, we agreed to another one: we were allowed to have sex with no intercourse, onle once during the following week. It was during this day, that I broke one of our previous rules and saw her internet history when she gave me her laptop. Once I realized that she didn't say the truth, I took my car with the intention to have sex with another person (in this case a sf worker)...while I was driving I was so mad at my wife that I found a lot of stupid reasons to justify the most stupid mistake I was about to do. During and after the encounter with the sf worker I felt so bad, so empty that in the end it was anything but something that I enjoyed. Since I arrived home, I felt terrible about what I did that I was not able to sleep having my wife right next to me in bed. The next day I wasn't able to stop crying, so my wife came and said that it was stupid to be crying for something so small. She said that in the end she didn't masturbate with those videos. She just saw one and then left, saw another one and then left again without touching herself...she did this just like a smoker wanting to quit...would hold the cigar without smoking it....I believed her...but this remorse was so bad, so big that I just told her: "Last night I slept with another person, it was a sf worker".

I can't forget the face of my wife as she began to cry and I don't understand why I did this...I knew better than her, that this is the most painful experience for anyone. I wish I coud go back in time and avoid doing that...

She left our house for 12 hours. Didn't answer my phone calls and didn't reply to my SMSs. Once she returned home, she came in the car of the OM. When I asked her about where did she go, she just said "the same place you were last night"...don't talk to me, don't touch me and don't bother to call me during this week.

I really don't know what to expect once I return home, but the shame, the pain, the uncertainty is killing me. I know that I just blew up everything, and most likely have lost my wife forever...

Why? Why was I so stupid? Why did I sabotage my own recovering marriage...?

I wish there is a way to skip this business trip, but it is one of those things were the company has invested a lot of money for you to go and made you sign a lot of papers. I also just have 5 weeks on my current job, and expectations are big...to be honest these past weeks have been the worst in my life as this whole issue appeared while I was changing jobs and my mother had a pretty bad accident back home (thank god she is recovering very well) and my mother was also undergoing a very similar problem since my father is cheating on her after more than 45 years together. I guess that sometimes all the bad things in the world can happen at once to someone...
So unfortunately I can't skip this trip. Knowing my wife, if I would have been home, she would just go away and stay somewhere else, because I would then be taking care of our 3 dogs. Since I am gone she will need to stay home every night as she would need to take care of the dogs (our family) and I know that the OM hates dogS!!...of course they can still meet each other during day time and every time she goes to train to the gym.

While I agree that sometimes the best option is to walk away when there are no kids involved, I disagree that there are higher odds for recovery after an affair with a WW. The genders are about the same in my estimation. We have just as many recovered marriages with WW's, in my best estimate.

No kids?

Walk away. You royally messed up and did something stupid and she is having sex with her trainer, despite the lies on her end.

What's there to save that you can't get with someone else?

Sorry I'm the contrarian here. I just see no sense in saving a marriage with no kids where there is adultery on both ends.

That�s a good point. Right now I feel so bad about what I did, that I don�t know if I will ever forgive myself for betraying my wife. I don�t know if I can trust myself again in a relationship...I am just terrified of thinking that I might do the same mistake with another person if we ever have problems...I am really scared. This has been my wife for almost 9 years and we have been through up and downs and we did enjoy a lot of nice experiences and shared a lot of plans for the future. I really can�t see myself with someone else. But I can�t imagine if she would ever forgive me. That would also raise a lot of questions as to where would she be with the OM. I am so scared and so confused.

Apologies for asking, but you are saying that only kids would make the difference? If so why? Why having a better and stronger relationship with my wife isn�t worth trying to fight for? Is this really a lost battle already? Is this mess so big that I better give up and walk away?

Ok. I just want to add in, we will help out your situation, but please remember this is a family site and we don't really need the visuals of what's happenin' in your bedroom dude.

The facts are your ww is having an affair with the trainer and you are also now guilty of cheating too on her.

Hint...call it "sf". It covers pretty much everything without being graphic.

I am going to add this in. Are either of you a sf addict? Are you? Because that addictive behavior needs to be addressed too by a professional.

I believe that my wife might be a sf addict, since she would see sf websites every single day, and would also use tools to get it. She told me that when she was a little girl, she was abussed, and that�s the reason why, now she thinks and sees everything with those eyes...maybe she does need to be treated by a professional, but she is so proud of what/how she is that she wouldn�t take this recommendation seriously arguing that she doesn�t want to be like the others and she will never be a normal woman...she likes to be "crazy" and "emotional".

BTW, since we were dating she always told me that her friends are mostly males, because she grew up in a house full of men. For that reason she gets along only with men, and she can�t get along with women, because women will stab you in the back the first moment they can, and they are never able to tell you things in your face compared to men. I must say that there were plenty of times when I felt jealous about her male friends. Specially when she told me that she was going out all night to the disco while I stayed back home (I don�t know for sure if she went alone or with somebody else)

In my case, this is the first time that I became a WH...I have never done such a thing in my married life, and to be honest it felt so bad and so empty.

Btw thank you for using teeny bit less colorful terms!!!

She may find that manipulating men is the only way she can feel power. Which might fuel if there is an addiction to sf. Make her feel powerful in situations she feels out of control in.

But do know this. MB is a plan to heal marriages from affairs. Here we have both sides. Granted, it's complicated. But it can be done, you just have to decide if that is what you wish to do. Because as of now there are no custody agreements, kids hearts' breaking, etc that you could have in the future. So think of that.

But we can help you both. And there must be a plan in place. Have you learned of plan A and B? I say start there first.

It doesn't matter however, if she was abused as a child or if she was given a totally golden childhood. The affair itself is what we need to focus on and focus on DESTROYING. We can psychoanalyze her to the ends of the earth, but in the end, we've learned that many affairs are really alike. They begin from either a lack of an emotional need being met over time (can be from either the bs or the ws or both), or else there is a serious deficiency of boundaries and a sense of entitlement in the wayward spouse.

What plan are you going to take? Are you going to learn as much as you can about the MB plan and give it a try?

Everybody IN an affair says it is unique. That they are special, their situation is totally unlike anything else. But we kinda know the secret on that. Affairs AREN'T unique. They begin kinda the same and many of them run the same course. In fact the affairees even whip out stunts from what could be called the same playbook too.

So MB is the plan b/c it can help you end the affair(s) and save your M.

I have read quite a lot of information about plan A and plan B, and they make a lot of sense. Before I did my mistake and blew up all of my chances, I have already read a lot of the Q&As on this site. I tried to negotiate with my wife (using a very kind and caring attitude) that she needed to stop meeting or "running into" her trainer. I told her that we might need to change home and for sure she would have to change gym. She had a very bad reaction, saying that I was very selfish, I just wanted her to be fat again (BTW in my eyes she was always beautiful), and that no way in the world she would be able to make physical progress without the aid of the OM. She went to extremes saying than then she would never go to a gym again, she would stay home every single day, and I would be responsible for her bad mood....to make it short, I tried several ways to negotiate this with her, but the outcome was always very bad.
The big issue that I see right now, is that I cheated on her, so I have lost all ground for negotiation. There is no way that she will negotiate something that even I failed to do (in a way).

Also when we were going to the counseling sessions, I noticed that the counselor tried to implement rules in order to have common agreements. This was also useless as she fights to keep her independence, her secrets and do the things that are better for her. I even noticed that after I became aware of the affair, she put a password on her cell phone, has created new email accounts and changed the passwords of her social sites.

The more I think about it, I just don�t see many options. I am really considering to file for D, since if I follow plan B. For sure the last memory in her mind about me, would be the time when I told her that I had cheated on her with a sf worker...not an encouraging or caring image.

I guess that the odds are really bad?

you know guys, I feel so terrible, so sad, it�s just a pain so deep that I will not be able to forgive myself, ever...I am so ashamed of what I have done to my W...the person I was supposed to protect and care for ever.

Why throw in the towel just yet? You can still try to plan A her. Yes, it was stupid. You learned some expensive lessons:
1) This did not work for you
2) trying to get even doesn't make things better
3) You gave her leverage
4) You will never do this again

Now, is she really hurt to the core of her soul? Or is she glad you finally gave her a reason, or both? You do not know for sure.

If it was an eye-opener for her that she doesn't want to lose you, maybe the two of you should talk.
Probably she will be so deep in the fog though, that this isn't the case.

Yes you should take action to clean up the mess you made.
By all means plan A her, if you want your marriage to have a chance. But do not let her of the hook out of guilt.

Take care,

Happyheart.

Dear Happyheart,

I have talked to my wife and she is very hurt to the core of her soul and she also says that in a way I have given her a green light to sleep with the OM.

She keeps telling me that she never had PA with OM, it was just a person that came and filled in some emotional needs that I was not able to cover, and keeps telling me that I can`t cover all of her needs. She keeps telling me that they agreed not to get physical in order not to mess their friendship and their spouses, and that is all they have...a very special friendship.
She said that the OMW has taken him for granted, just like I did to my W, and for that reason they became so close, but only as good friends.

She is very confussed right now, and doesn`t know what to do. A possible way she mentioned is that I would have to allow her having this OM as a friend and that way she might trust me again everytime I need to do a business trip. This is because now she believes that everytime I go on a business trip I will get SF with someone I pay.

I have lost all my leverage for negotiation, she wants to keep this OM as a very close friend and trust in her that there will not be anything but a friendship between them, since now that she knows him a little better she wouldn`t want to have a relationship with him...

Dr. Harley is very strict about not having friends of the opposite sex when this person triggered special feelings.

Right now I am so confussed and don`t know what to do.
Should I allow her to keep her friendship with OM while I try to be the most affectionate and caring husband that she deserves?...this is no guarantee that she will stop her friendship with him.

Should I stick to my original request to avoid contact with OM at all cost?...eventhough they would see each other when she goes to the gym.

Should I just walk away?

Any advice is highly appreciated. I am lost.

I was thinking about writing a letter to the OMW telling her all the things that I know, but in a way for her to understand that maybe his spouse has emotional needs that are not being fulfilled by her. I don`t know if this is a good idea, since no body likes to be told what to do, specially by a stranger.
How can I expose this EA or PA to the OMW?
Should I tell her who am I? who is the person with whom her H is having the EA? should I send her the "evidence" I have collected?