Thankyou all for the responses so far, I've deleted the post as I need more time to think about the situation.

Hi Lancelot, welcome to Marriage Builders. You will get a lot more help if you can cut that down to about 3-4 paragraphs. That is way more information than we need to understand your situation and you will get a alot more help if you make it short, concise and simple to understand. The other posters have families and careers of their own and as such, don't have a great deal of time to read extremely long posts.

You can safely cut out anything to do with your childhood or the history of your marriage. [except other affairs, if any] Just basic information, including your marital status, years of marriage, # of children and a brief description of the CURRENT problem will get the message across. Thanks!

Done, thanks for the advice.

Lance, let me see if I understand this. I have tried to weed through all the superfluous information but I want to see if I understand this.

Your wife is having an affair with a man named James. You endorsed and condoned her affair with James and said nothing when she ran off to be with him.

She then asked you to move out to get some "space," so she could replace you with James and you moved out, leaving your children there.

Do I have it right?

Here is what is happening, Lance. When a spouse makes destructive, marriage wrecking decisions the worst thing her spouse can do is to appease her and go along with those destructive decisions. Going along with that reflects a lack of caring, because it will obviously lead to a destroyed marriage.

This is what Dr Harley, the founder of Marriage Builders, calls enabling. As he has said "it is very hard to save a marriage when you become an enabler." And that is what I see here. HEre is one radio clip where he tells a husband to stop being an enabler: http://www.marriagebuilders.com/radio_program/play_segment.cfm?sid=2815

Your wife has absolutely no business going out with men. And you have no business, as a caring husband, going along with it. She is a married woman and her affair with this man is absolutely inappropriate. But what is most concerning about this is your complacence about it. You are her husband and, oddly, did nothing to stop her and protect your marriage. That kind of complacence tells her you don't care very much.

So, if you want to save your marriage, you are going to have to put the questionaires aside for now and start working on killing the affair. You won't' have a marriage TO recover if you don't end this affair once and for all.

And in order to have a better chance to kill her affair, you need to go home. I don't know if you are in the US, but in my country many judges FROWN on abandoning your family. You have abandoned your family in their time of greatest need by moving out.

If your wife wants some "space" she can go in the bathroom or the garage, but under no circumstances should you abandon your family to another man. You have children, SIR. Your children NEED YOU, their father, to protect them and start standing up for their family. Running at the first sign of trouble is not standing up for your marriage.

Hi, Lance, welcome to Marriage Buiders, but if I'm reading right, sorry that you have to be here.

MelodyLane is right that you need to get this affair destroyed in order to put your marriage back together.

I encourage you to get your posts moved over to the "Surviving an Affair" section, because you will get more people looking at it who can help you. To do that, click "notify," and the moderators will move it for you.

That said, MelodyLane is literally the best, but even she can't be on here 24x7.

Lance, decades ago my mother asked my father to leave. I would give anything to change history and have him tell her he was staying.

Lancelot, your wife is having an affair. You'll get more help over on the Surviving an Affair forum. Click the 'notify' button and ask the moderators to move you to SAA.

Ok just to be clear,(my fault for putting too much information) my wife is not having a sexual affair, she may be having a Emotional Affair or she could really just be friends with 'James'and it does sound more like genuine friends rather than anything else. We both needed the space as we needed to do something to ease the tension. As far as the kids are concerned, I see them everyday due to domestic responsibilities and on my days off work I see them for a lot longer, all thats really changed from our normal routine is that I'm sleeping elsewhere in a different bed to avoid the time when the kids are asleep. This has always been and is still planned to be a temporary measure for just a couple of weeks.
Thanks for your replies so far.

Hi Lancelot, have you notified the mods to send you to SAA, you need the help of those of us who have been through what you are experiencing.



Why would that be a reason to do nothing? Emotional affairs are extremely damaging to marriages. They make people want their spouse out of the house for a start, as you have discovered. It has a toxic effect and your marriage will be destroyed if you do nothing. Your wife has no business talking of love to another man. He has no business persuading a married woman to love him over you. Having that conversation ABOUT YOU, in full knowledge of what it would do to you is just as cruel and immoral as having sex. You do have a right to be upset, to act, to refuse to leave your home.

Are you really ok with this man hitting on your wife? If you are, you send a loud and clear message to her that you just dont care. Your wife is wayward. It is similar to being addicted. She will throw away everything to pursue her addiction to this man

Besides which, if she wants you out of the house, it is likely physical already.


She is actively looking for reasons why he is best and you are worst. Any faults or flaws on your part will be magnified. You will be blamed. If you move out, she will tell everyone you abandoned her or that you �grew apart�. She will also tell herself you do not care. Though the duration may be temporary, the gesture will not be a temporary thing to her. She will use it as a permanent excuse to blame you.




Genuine friends do not break up their friends marriages. And 'sounds like?' where is your information coming from - your wife? Denial will not help you solve this.



The source of the tension comes from the affair. To remove the tension you must kill the affair, not give her 'space' to conduct one in and reasons to excuse it to herself.



I know you want hope and you DO have hope. This affair could well be killed with strong action.

Show her you love her,
Find evidence of the A
Go nowhere
Stay calm and above it all

But the clock is ticking. The longer she prioritises him over you, the longer the affair remains a romantic secret, the more entrenched the affair becomes.

You didn't need to delete your post in order to think about the situation. Are you afraid of what your wife may do if you act, Lancelot?

You're certainly within your rights to bow out and never return here if the thought of standing up for your marrige is unsavory to you. But please, if you do decide to post, start a thread on the Surviving an Affair forum. There will be lots of help there for you.

Lancelot, there is no difference. If your wife is "good friends" with a man who is not you, then that is an emotional affair, even if you don't use that term for it. It will have all the same damage to your relationship. And doubly so, since she is a woman, that emotional connection is probably more serious to her than it is to you. Women are different from men that way.

My wife does not have any "good friend" men. As a couple we are friends with some couples, but she doesn't spend one-on-one time with any man but me.

You need to get on the Surviving Affair forum and learn how to use the plans here to win your wife's heart back.


Please provide all the information you can, it helps people understand your situation better. Some of the experts here have been doing this for a decade! They know how to tell what is important and how to help you figure out what to do. Trust their judgment. Your marriage is in danger, probably in more danger than you think.