I am a 24 male married for 5 years this March. 2 months ago my wife told me that she has been having an affair for 6 months. We have been going to counseling and trying to go through books together. When she told that she had been having an affair she also told me that she didn't love me and wanted to be with him.

In the end she chose to stay with me. Probably partly because she is dependent on me financially and her lover wasn't dependable.

Things haven't been improving very quickly and I am growing more and more unhappy being with the marriage. The pain that I have each day drives me away from her even though I am understanding the reasons for the affair. We were married very young and she has always regretted marrying me and says she was pressured into it by her family, friends and what she thought was right, which I of course didn't know at the time we were married. We have a lot of compatibility issues. I know that I can leave her if I like and I feel like it would be nice to start over with someone who can say that they chose to marry me because they loved me (I thought this was the case).

We are planning on doing a 3 month separation soon. We both feel like it is necessary to move forward. We will still be working on our relationship during this time.

Any advice from others that have tried this? Did it drive you apart, or bring you back together?

Any advice from men whose wife had an affair, you left her, and you are happier now?

Being that this is a Marriage Builders web site, it will be your decision if you stay with your W or not. What she has said to you is what we call wayward talk. It is possible to recover your marriage, but not through separation. That will make things worse. How do you know she's not in contact with OM? Have you read Surviving an Affair? Have you read through the Basic Concepts? You will need to go through the site to learn more about what you want from your marriage and what you can expect from your wife's affair. Most of us are here fighting for our marriages. If you want a divorce, there's a forum for that.

Bluntly, separation is only an invitation for her to continue/reignite her former affair, or to start a new one. Or for you to begin an affair.


I suggest you do a 3 month trial of reconciliation instead. Cancel your Marriage Counseling sessions, and call the Harleys, who specialize in saving marriages.

A cheaper start; go on amazon and order a copy of Surviving an Affair.

Yes, we have read through the basic concepts as well as gone through books and work books together and counseling.

She is not in contact with OM. We are currently traveling overseas and her email is monitored.

I have read that sometimes a time of separation can be helpful in dealing with issues and helping the marriage. I guess I will have to wait and see if anyone has first hand experience with this good or bad.

This is the article I read ***EDIT***

It will be near impossible for you to recover your marriage if you separate. You cannot WORK on your marriage unless you are together.
A lot of couples who separate do not reconcile.
You are inviting temptation for her to continue her affair. Or have a new one.
You are inviting the temptation for YOU to have an affair.

If you really do want to recover your marriage, then the answer is to stay together and enter into a program of recovery. Dr. Harley's program has helped many, many couples in a similar situation turn their marriages around. I suggest you go that route.

I read through the article you posted.
This quote alone is alarming:


For a marriage to recover, you need to be spending 20-30 hours of undivided attention together every week, concentrating on meeting the four intimate emotional needs -- conversation, affection, sexual fulfillment and recreational companionship.

Three phone calls a week, emails and a date won't cut it. That plan will fail.

All I can say is don't separate. Worst mistake of my life. The grass is not greener on the other side. If there's no abuse, there's no reason to separate.

Well, you said you (together?) have been reading through this site. I don't have a lot of time to type right now, but let me give you a few topics to research:

• Exposure (Yes, even now)
• Extraordinary Precautions
• Just Compensation
• Undivided Attention

These are the tools/techniques that will provide the healing that will replace your current ambivalence. Start reading with purpose, and I'll be back to check on your progress tomorrow!

It will probably destroy your marriage. Separation is a trial for divorce, not marriage. For example, if your car is broken down in the garage, do you go to the garage to fix it or do you drive to Cleveland, Ohio, far away from the car? My point is that you have to BE THERE in order to work on your relationship. You can't work on it if you are separated.

Your best chance is to stay together and focus on killing the affair. Run the OM off. Counseling is a complete waste of time while one spouse is in an affair. Marriage counseling is destructive to marriage.

My advice, as young as you are, is to leave her if you have no children with her. You got married very young and may indeed be very incompatible with your spouse.

That being said:

If you want to save your marriage you can't separate. You don't save a relationship through separation.

But as yourself some tough questions. Is she good mom material? Will she stray again when things get tough? How do you get along with each other's family?

Answer these honestly.

Dr. Harley says that getting married young is a GOOD thing, because you can more easily grow together. Marriages that take place later in life are more difficult.

Incompatibility is created. So is compatibility. There is no reason they cannot become compatible.

Prisca is right. Marrying young is a plus, not a minus. Compatibility is CREATED, it does not happen by magic. Most couples who arrive here are incompatible. That is what the program resolves.

Thank you everyone for your input, I am taking it all to heart. I have read the articles about just compensation, undivided attention, exposure (already done), and precautions.

Here is the reason why we were thinking to do the trail separation:

Like I mentioned my wife and I are very young. We were engaged when I was 19 and she was 21. Engagement time - 6 months. We had both expressed love for each other and that we wanted to get married, but my wife had a lot of doubts about marriage that she didn't express. She was very dishonest with me about a lot of things (sexual history one of them) because she didn't want to disappoint. Like I said, she felt a lot of pressures from family, friends, and spiritual community. She went straight from her parents house to being married with me. She resents the fact that she never was able to be out on her own, and I agree that she never learned valuable adult skills (baby in the family). She is very fun loving, doesn't like to work, takes very little part in planning, doesn't care about our finances. I try to do a lot for her but she rarely receives it. Usually if I try to do something special she will critique me about how it could be better. It seems like she insults me often. We have a child parent pattern in our marriage coupled with the good/bad mentality.

We thought that being separated might give her a chance to "be out on her own" for a short period of time. She can see what it is like without me there and start to see how much I try to love her instead of seeing how I am not good enough. She has never been able to appreciate me and we both feel like this might help that to happen. I am not worried about the her partner of the affair. She has had no contact with him for 2 months. If she does choose to contact him:

Is anyone else tired of monitoring your spouse like a little child? I am. I am at the point right now that I don't want to feel like I am forcing her to stay with me. If she loves this other man so much that she can't keep away from him then that is her choice. We both feel like I have always been making choices for her and speaking for her, and now I want her to start acting like an adult and make her own decisions.

Given all of that information, I agree that it may be a bad idea to do a trial separation. I like to try and think about things outside the box. We are just trying to figure out a way to get past the circumstances of our marriage and the patterns that they caused.

Good marriage is about interdependance not independance. If you want your marriage to work then you won't let her go at the first place and then start with the plan for recovery.

If you don't want this marriage then you divorce her, she can then go wherever she wishes to.

You are describing a freeloader. I don't think that this 3 months time of letting a freeloader do whatever she wants gives you back a responsible wife.

Hello all, thank you for your advice and support. This is Zaismi's wife, the free loader who had an affair.

I just wanted to add my perception of my experience with Z, and a little more information. Which turned out to be really LOOOOOONG sorry.

As Z mentioned we got married young. I had somewhat recently become a christian, I grew up in a religious cult -no joke (you can look it up if your curious, search for information on the Lastadian church). I didn't realize until our marriage counseling (after the disclosure of the affair) that I grew up with Spiritual abuse. I didn't know that that was something I needed to address and heal from.

Z and I began our courtship when I had just returned from a DTS in YWAM Argentina. I returned with the mentality that having a spiritual authority was necessary. At the time my father was still recovering from PTSD from Vietnam and was young in his faith having recently left the cult. Also there was no church in close distance that I felt in accordance with, and I felt like this made me vulnerable like I, being a woman, needed to find a spiritual covering and my father couldn't be it for me. It was culturally normal to marry after high-school, both my mother and sister were, so I felt that at 21 I should consider that option.

I had met Z two years before after I just broke up with a serious boyfriend, and become a christian. He spent a lot of time at my house, and stayed over at times because his house was far from the town we lived. I thought we had good conversations and he had so many interesting thoughts, and we were good friends until I told him that I didn't want to hang out with him any more, because felt like I wanted to think my own thoughts, which I felt like couldn't do with him always around and always talking. I was not interested in having more then a friendship with him and told him that often (because my mother always was insistant that he wanted more with me). After a few months we started hanging out again, and then he left for Europe for a year. During this time he confessed his feelings for me, and I was flattered. After returning home from the DTS in YWAM Argentina, a good friend of ours convinced me to contact him and we began to talk. Not long after he came home suddenly with the onset of a chronic back disease that affects the spine like arthritis, this was shortly after I had returned home. He stayed at my house so that we could spend time together and I could help him, I felt very sorry for him with his back. I also had a return ticket back to YWAM AR and was very unsure that I wanted to go back there. I think in my mind Z was an acceptable reason to God to not return for more mission work through ywam. He stayed at my house for two months then left for Thailand for two months, while he was gone I tried to tell him I had changed my mind, but he convinced me it was normal, just cold feet. Although he was renting a room in town he always stayed at my house durring the 4 months of our engagement that he was home for. I held a lot of resentment towards him for this. I didn't know that it was right for me to want some space. He also unintentionally made me feel wrong for wanting to spend time away from him, with friends, as if I was being selfish and ignoring him. We spent 2.5 months traveling around Europe directly after we were wed for a honey moon and I was very regretful of marrying him and felt very sad most of the time. I felt like if we would have traveled before we were married that I wouldn't have made this huge commitment to him. The first year of our marriage was very difficult for me, I think I was depressed, we moved often and I felt like I gave up a whole world of friends and family for this one person who wanted me to do hard things. I tried to leave him directly after we returned home from our honeymoon and then again later that first year of marriage both times I was told that there was no back door, I married him and made a covenant before God and there was no going back on it.

Z mentioned that I felt pressured into this situation, I was told by someone that I trusted very much that I would be disobeying God if I didn't marry him. I understand that it was my own interpretation of peoples encouragement of Z and I being together that I took as pressure to go through with my word.

I feel cruel posting how I felt, Z already knows this all we've talked about it with our councilor. I asked him if I could post this on here as well, it is important to me to be receiving advice as well and I wanted it from people that heard his side.

Poor Z was confused and thought how could I be so horrible to say that I loved him, wanted to love him forever and then say that now I don't, how could I go back on it? He thought I was a horrible person and I believed him that I was.

He told me often to control my thoughts when I would express to him my emotions or how I was feeling. I understand that he didn't know that he was suppressing me he thought he was helping me to be stronger. We developed a big pattern of him being the good one and me the bad one, always the offender, always needing to be forgiven, always needing to be told how to be and what to do (this is the mentality the cult encouraged in their followers). Which is also a repeat of my parents pattern as I see it now.

The love buster on disrespectful judgements has a quiz attached and going through it we both agree on 6s and 7s for all of them. This is something we are trying to understand and work through. It was shocking to me to realize that his disrespectful judgements were at the level of abuse, I didn't even know was a disrespectful judgement was exactly. I do think that I encouraged this pattern to start and continue, and that given our circumstances that it was natural to Z's thought pattern to fall into it as well.


Z is kind, and he is good, and I know that I have been lucky with him. But there always was something fundamentally repelling about him, not in a disgusting way at all, just like the wrong side of magnets. Z has always been kind to me, and I know that he never intentionally did anything to put me down. I couldn't understand why I was so drawn to the man I had an affair with until learning about the love bank and emotional needs. I could never understand it, but I feel like I am beginning to now.

So the question of a trial separation is 1. for Z to make the choice to be with me. He has suffered a lot of rejection from me, I have been cruel to him, and not accepting, or affirming of him very much throughout the near 5 years of our marriage. He tells me he's not in love with me, and that it is painful for him to be with me. I understand that this is a result of my choice to have an affair. Also that he doesn't feel trapped within our marriage he is free, he's under no obligation to God to stay with me. Its no sin of his to choose to leave me.

2. to give me space to feel like I am making a free choice to be with Z, not choosing to stay with him out of fear that I could not make it on my own. Because of the lifestyle we chose I do not have any college degree, although I wanted one I made the choice with Z to not pursue it. I will be getting a job and working to pay my own way during this time.

We are currently doing a three month period of reconciliation, where we are focused on reading books and articles on this website to help us. We are away from home, friends, family, distractions-- just to spend undivided attention together.

If you chose to read such a long post from me thank you for your time and interest in advising us in our difficult situation.

You are correct that it is a bad idea to separate. A separation is not "thinking outside of the box" unless you want a divorce. If you want a divorce, that is the way to go. If you want to transform your marriage into a happy, romantic, safe marriage, you will stay together and learn the SKILLS to create compatibility. We can help you do that. But it won't work if you are "separated." Like I said earlier, you can't fix the car in the garage if you go to Cleveland; you have to go in the garage and.....fix the car.

Being married young is a good thing, not a bad thing. You learn "adult skills" by living up to your vows and taking responsibility. You don't learn "adult skills" by shirking your responsibilities and abandonding your family. That is NOT how an adult behaves.