If you want to stay married, keep the issues very simple:

You were unfaithful.

Your wife was unfaithful. And emotional affairs (if that's what this is) are just as devastating to the marriage as physical affairs. Also, emotional affairs often lead to physical affairs, and then it only gets more entrenched as the addiction deepens.

For the marriage to survive, you will both have to agree to the following:

1.) No contact for life with the adultery partner, and the double affair doesn't negate this requirement. Your wife would have to agree never to see or talk to her "special friend" for life.

2.) Total transparency and integrated lifestyle: shared passwords, accounting for all time and money, extraordinary precautions to avoid future affairs.

3.) Rebuilding the romantic love in the marriage, using the Marriage Builder concepts.

If YOU want to do your part to save your marriage, you can put your own EPs in place and tell your wife this is what you are doing. Start doing all YOU know from MB as your Plan A.

Then expose the affair, asking for help in ending the affair. Do this without warning your spouse. Tell the OMW, but don't presume to tell her their marriage problems. The OM has poor boundaries with women and adulterers rewrite marital history and lie. Just tell her you have evidence and how to contact you. You are telling her so she can know the state of her marriage and to put pressure on the affair from her end.

Be wonderful during Plan A, meeting your spouse's emotional needs. Don't get drawn into her drama. Most men can hold up to this level of emotional stress for a few months, but if you find you can't, then get ready for Plan B.

You did a terrible thing by committing adultery in your anger, but if you want to save your marriage, don't be manipulated by your WS to let her keep this friend in her life.

WW as other WW have denied it was a PA, claiming only EA. Most likey it was a PA and if not will soon be.

WW must go NC on the OM.

You must expose this to OMW.

Your posts are breaking my heart. Your wife is totally manipulating you. She's already had sex with the OM. She is lying to you and trying to make you feel badly so that she can relieve her guilt and shame. PLEASE believe me when I tell you that she is lying to and manipulating you. I know because I was doing the same things. I am the WW and I can see in her actions that she is cheating.
In my opinion, you should tell the OM's wife. Why should you be the one suffering while the OM gets all his needs met by your wife AND his wife? Find out who she is and call her. Tell her who you are and that you have proof. Your wife is walking all over you! Stop her! My husband stopped me and it's the best thing he could have done. I would be with the OM if he had put up with my crap. Stop blaming yourself. I was suicidal too but it was because I was the offender. Yes, you cheated too, but that's not the way to handle things. Your wife saying your one night stand gives her permission to have a PA with the OM is disgusting. If my husband had done that to me, I would have thought I deserved it. Hang in there. You don't have kids. You will find someone who is better to you. I know it's easier said than done. Use the suicide hotline if you need it! Go see a psychiatrist about anti-depressants to get you through this.

Bingo!! And I will emphasize that you should call the OM's wife TODAYn and tell her all about the affair. [don't you DARE do this anonymously!] Give her the evidence you hold so she can protect herself from your wife and her husband. Don't be timid. DEMAND that your wife end the affair and cause as much conflict as possible until she does. Don't give up until she ends all contact FOR LIFE. And I mean ALL CONTACT.

I totally agree with TheRoad in this post.

that line of "We're just special friends" ... yeah rigghtttttt thats it....

Thanks to all for your encouraging words. I decided to use the recommendations but you know these past couple of days have been a real hell for me because of what I have done, that words don�t seem to come out of my mouth with enough voice.

For that matter I decided to write a letter and hand it over to my W. So I did, and this is what I wrote:
-------------------------------------------------
For my dear love,

I understand that the words I pronounce have little value to you right now.
I understand that you can�t trust in my actions or in my promises.
I understand that you�re very scared and confused.
I know that I have broken your heart, and each of the dreams and goals we had together.
There are no words that justify what I have done to you, not only recently, but since some years ago.
Tell me what should I do for you to see that what I did is a mistake that I don�t want to repeat again. What should I do for you to trust me again?
I think that we have always had very few rules and that�s why it�s hard for us to follow them. But that doesn�t justify anything. In any marriage the boundaries and the rules for both must be clear.
I would like to share with you my desired rules in order to recover our marriage:

1. Never again to contact OM. The mistake I did, doesn�t cancel what I asked you before. You must not talk to him or see him again. Since I know that the gym is so important to you, I am willing to subscribe you to another and a better gym.

2. I can call you any time I go on a business trip so that you know where I am and if you wish we can have a GPS tracking software installed on my cell phone that you can check anytime you wish.

3. Full transparency. As proof of my desire to always be transparent towards you here is the information for all my accounts: gmail, home computer, office laptop, cellphone code, banking information. I hope that you can share with me the same.

4. Try to rebuild the romantic love in our relationship, and for that we need to work together on a plan to first understand what our emotional needs are and define which ones are not being fulfilled by the other.

This whole situation made me realized how much I love you, but I also know it isn�t a matter of forgetting what has happened.

May God guide our steps and may we have the strength to move our feet on the right direction. I will pray for both of us.
Your loving husband: **
-----------------------------------------------------------

She took the letter and read it before me. She just kept saying �no� with her head, and then she said:

�I will continue to be friends with whoever I want�.

�You are in no position to make any demands�.

�Who do you think you are? You are the one that had SF with someone else, not me. I never did that.�

�Transparency!!! No way, that is very personal. You just want to control me, just like a police man or my mother�guess what: I never allowed anybody to control me, not even my mother and now I will not let you control me, never!!�

�Romantic love!!...how can you speak of romantic love? That is b***s***, romantic love doesn�t exist and you are no one to ask for it if you are not able to give it.�

�During 2 years you took me for granted. During 2 years I begged you for love, companionship and friendship and you never cared�you were only thinking about your work, or sleeping or using your computer�of course that I like to be around OM because he filled in all the spaces that you didn�t care to fill. I didn�t ask him to do it, but he did it. Now he is a very special and good friend and I will not leave his friendship. This entire problem is your fault.�

Once she said that last sentence, she started to curse and swear, but I also realized that she was right. If I would just have been a caring and loving husband, nothing of this would have happened.

I drove her to the gym while she continued to curse and swear, while I was not able to say a word.

Right now my mind is blank, but my eyes can�t stop crying. All I know is that on Saturday I will go to see a psychiatrist.

I really don�t know what to ask you guys�I feel like this is a lost battle�

If only the time-machine exists, I wonder if this world would be better and if people would be happier.

Dear comedytragedy, thanks for your words. I really appreciate them since you used to be in the shoes of my WW. Right now I am so confused, and I am so scared that she might be telling me the truth...
But then I start to realize that she has said so many different things:

• They are only good friends and what I saw in FB, Skype and her emails towards her best childhood friends was just a fantasy in her head.
• Later she admitted to having an EA type of connection with OM.
• Later she said that they both wanted to get physical but were not able to do it because they wanted to remain friends forever, and not ruin each others M.
• Later she said that OM is a very special friend but she wouldn�t consider him for SF because she could get SF with any man she wanted�.(what does that mean?)� for her, SF is only SF.
• She also said that OM is not spouse-material in her opinion.

I am so confused; I get all of these different messages every day. Do they make sense?

Is it me that I am confusing everything and seeing things that really doesn�t exist?

Am I giving my W a hell of a time for nothing that she has done?

1
Please stop crying. That is not going to help you be a better husband option. She is already massively irriated with you, her love bank below zero. Crying men are needy and not sexy.

2
Fill out the emotional needs questionaire for her if she is not in the mood to do it. Identifiy her most important emotional needs.

3.
Meet her emotional needs. Start doing nice things for her. Stop Do not expect her to fulfill your needs for the next couple of months. Fill her love bank as good as you can. (Maybe plan a little vacation? To somewhere far-off, where she cannot contact other man much? Schedule her a massage - not by you just yet)

4
Fill out the love busters questionaire. If she won't -probably- try to think of the things she might have complained about during the years, but did anyway. Be brutally honest with yourself. Stop those Love busters.

5
Forget the relationship talk for now, unless this is an urgent emotional need of her which will make her feel better.

6
Behave as if you are confident that you are going to save the marriage


Start right now by printing out those questionaires.

Good luck,

Happyheart

Dear Happyheart, thanks for the concrete list of actions. I will follow your recommendatios. My W sent me a SMS saying that she would like to go back to our home country, alone, for 3 weeks in order to think things. I know that over there she wouldn�t have access to the OM, except via phone. What do you think about this?
Thanks.

You can't work on your marriage if you are separated. If your wife needs time alone, clear her a space in your home or garage.

Any kind of contact will fuel the affair, not just physical contact. When my FWH committed adultery and returned home from deployment, he was going to stay with me. He was too addicted, though, and started emailing OW. The messages back and forth became more and more torrid and full of passion. After only a couple of weeks of this, he decided he wanted to leave me for OW after all. That's when I discovered the email and the adultery and my life as I knew it blew up. All due to continued contact with the OW.

There must be no contact. And you two must not separate. There have been many WWs wanting to separate and the BHs get the same advice from the MB forum. Stay together and work on your side of the fence. The time to separate is only after you have done Plan A and can't take the ongoing affair any more. Then you separate and go into Plan B.

If she insists on leaving, then don't assist with the finances or arrangements at all. Keep saying you want the marriage, not separation.

Unless OM goes with her, of course. When WWs try to finagle time away from their husband to 'think about things' they are typically planning time away from their H to be with OM.

Bad idea.