I apologize if I come across as disjointed, I pushed my husband to start a post here and then chickened out on posting my own. I really, really hate talking about marriage difficulties to others.

We've been married 12 years and have 3 children, all boys. Ages are 10, 6 and 5 months. Our oldest has some pretty serious medical needs that don't affect his day to day life very much, other than his medications but does have a good chance that if something does go wrong it will happen suddenly and without warning. He sees several specialists for his health problems. Our middle son is very healthy thankfully. Our youngest has had some issues with colic which has been stressful(but seem to be done now thankfully) and he screams nonstop when anyone other than my dh and I, our other kids and occasionally my father and stepmother hold him. As long as we are with him he's a very happy baby however.

My husband and I have always disagreed on opposite sex friendships. My position has always been that once you're married you shouldn't have close friendships with the opposite sex. His position has been that there's nothing wrong with them. I've typically stayed quiet about my uncomfortableness about the subject for fear of being accused of just being jealous and unreasonable. To be fair to my husband however, it's never really been that big of an issue. We've always spent the majority of our free time together, even now. Before the last couple of years any close friendships either of us had was shared with the other(ie, a close friend of his was also a close friend of mine and we'd all spend time together).

My husband went back to school after he was laid off a few years ago into a very female dominated field and suddenly had a ton of female friends. Though he wouldn't go out after class with them he did go to lunches/dinners(some of the classes were night classes, with breaks for meals in-between) with them that made me uncomfortable. I didn't say anything however. Part of it is that he's a very outgoing person, to both men and women and quick to jump to someone's help. So if someone needs help he's quick to offer it, whether or not I'm comfortable with it. And if I express that I'm uncomfortable with it he gets annoyed and implies that I'm jealous or that I don't want him to be able to go out with his friends. I have no problem with him going out with his male friends, for the record. He went out with two male friends from church a while back to a motorcycle convention and I was very enthusiastic for him and admired the pics and purchases when they came back later that evening.

I've become a lot more assertive the last few years and it's been better. He likes his job, we bought a house, had another baby. We talk a lot, I love hearing about his work day and I tell him about mine. But about 3 months or so back he started talking about this female coworker constantly, about how they hadn't been friendly at first but were becoming friends. This made me extremely uncomfortable, despite knowing that she was leaving soon for another job, and I asked him not to have lunches alone with other women. I told him I was fine with group lunches but not alone, and especially not planned. After that he stopped talking about her at all, which sent up big red flags in my mind. He wouldn't have stopped talking to her entirely like that so the only logical reason was that he was hiding it from me, so I went snooping.

He was still talking to her, via texts mainly. The texts were about once a week to every 2 weeks apart. I checked the phone records and that verifies the ones I saw.

Most of them were either work related, complaints about coworkers or plans to meet for lunch at the places they work(hospital settings so cafeterias in them, or a restaurant down the street). He takes the train in to work so doesn't have transportation there, I'm assuming when they went to the restaurant she drove him.

Some of the texts indicated that others were coming with him from his work, others didn't give an indication either way. He tells me that after I asked him not to have solo lunches with other women he always had at least one other person with him. I'm still not sure whether or not to believe that. After all, he lied to me about seeing her in the first place.

The most recent texts: She was very insistent that they have lunch together on her birthday.

One text said that she was meeting him on some corner and made a reference to "not wearing her hooker boots". His response was "Forget the boots, a tube top and mini skirt". These were the latest texts, made a week before I checked his phone.

I waited till the next day and then asked him while we were sitting on the couch watching TV if he was still in contact with her since she quit. He said not really, that he'd run into her a time or two but that was it. He then started playing with his phone. After he sat it back down I picked it back up and went to the text logs, he'd deleted all texts from the point she'd quit. I showed him what I was looking at and asked him why he was lying to me. He apologized for lying, said he knew it looked bad and he hadn't meant for me to think something was going on. We had a brief talk and that was it.

The next day I sent him an email(I deal better with emotional issues if I write them down) detailing what an emotional affair was, that I believed he was having one and asked him for the sake of our marriage to stop all contact with her. That I could no longer trust him having her as a friend after he'd lied to me so blatantly. He read it when he came home from work that night and became extremely angry. He insisted nothing had happened between them, that they weren't having an affair and that if I couldn't trust him maybe we needed to move the boys into one bedroom and he take the other one. He removed her from his address book in his phone, her email address from his email account and removed her as a friend from Facebook. He also gave me his log in info for his personal email account and work email account and insisted I look through them thoroughly to prove there were no private conversations between them. I didn't find anything. After a couple of days of alternating silence and arguing we finally started talking. We went through the basic concepts on the site here together and I asked him to post. He also agreed to meet with our Bishop, who told him the same thing he's been told here, stop all contact with her immediately and write a no contact letter telling her why. He sent that out earlier this week. We're going to be meeting with our Bishop weekly for awhile.

I don't believe he had a PA, though I'm sure you all hear that a lot. I believe him when he says he's sorry for hurting me, at least that he's sorry for lying to me. I don't believe that he feels the friendship was wrong in and of itself. And I'm worried that if we let things die down this is going to repeat and possibly go farther. He told me, after he read that email, that he lied to me because he didn't want to lose a close friend and that really hurt me. He was placing this friendship ahead of our marriage. He's so insistent that he would never cheat on me, and to his credit I do believe that he believes that. But belief isn't enough for me. I want to change this dynamic we have but I'm not entirely sure how. We filled out the EN questionnaire so far and our Bishop has asked us to do an exercise for him to bring to our next meeting so I guess that's a start.

And I meant to move this to the SA board before hitting submit and I forgot, sorry.

Welcome to MB and sorry for your pain.

Does he still work with her? Have you exposed this?
Exposure 101

Has you husband posted here? Do you know his name?

It's McNal and yes he has a thread already started.

She now works at a different place but the two are linked together. For example they had several employees about a year ago that had work related injuries and they asked for volunteers from my husband's workplace to go over there temporarily. They also have conferences a couple of times a month where those from her place of work may or may not come over to participate in. They also are down the street from each other so places to go for lunch are pretty much all the same for both sites.

I was reading that exposure 101 thread and I'm not sure, honestly. What do I tell people, that my husband was flirting with someone else? She's single so no boyfriend or spouse to disclose to. I could tell my husband's boss but it seems like a good way for me to come across as jealous and possessive rather than have any negative effect on my husband's EA.

Welcome to MB.

There is a link in my siggy that will help guide you throughout this site. Click on the link, and follow the links reading all of the info.



What you are describing here is boundaries. You wanted high boundaries around women of the opposite sex, and your WH had low boundaries. That was what you felt uncomfortable with, his weak boundaries. And being accused of being jealous and unreasonable is a form of gaslighting. The main reasons you would feel jealous is precisely because you instinctively knew that your WH had weak boundaries around women.


How much of this time was spent just the two of you, meeting the four most intimate ENs of RC, SF, Convo, and Affection? Not including watching TV, or movies together.


You had every right to feel uncomfortable about this. And you SHOULD have told him how you felt, in a non-LB way.

This is EXACTLY what happened in my sitch, and my WH left my children and I and has lived with OW for 2.5 years now. The affair could have been as long as 4.5 years. I am in Plan B.


I did this too, with the same response. I am so glad for you that you have found MB when you did. I wish I had found it earlier, it may have helped me save my marriage. It would have, at a minimum, saved me a lot of heartache.


Do you know anything about OW? Do you know her parent's names? How old is she?

What you tell people is that your WH was conducting an EA with OW. Then, you tell them that you want to work on your marriage, but that can't happen unless your WH has NC for LIFE with OW.

You need to expose at the workplace.

Please listen to this radio clip of Dr. Harley explaining why you must never see or talk to the affair partner again, including quitting their job if they worked together.
Radio clip of quitting your job if you wotk with OP