I am married for 14 years with 2 kids. My husband and I have had issues over the last 10 years since we moved to our new house where my husband grew up. Basically he abandoned me and the kids to have his own playful life, and then he started emotionally abusing me. The first 4 years of our marriage and the year we lived together prior, were amazing. He was the most amazing person I ever met and I had turned down several marriage proposals before I met him. he was the ONE.

Over the last 6 months my husband had been glued to his computer and started sleeping on the sofa when we had a wood burning stove put in. He said he was afraid something would go wrong and wanted to be close to it. I woke up a few times during the wee hours of the morning and he was on the computer. He then started hanging around with his younger brother and going out to bars, clubs and was coming home drunk and at all hours of the day. My husband is 36 and his brother is 21. I started catching my husband in lies but they were silly lies. Things that would never bother me but because they involved a girl his brother was dating or another female, he kept it from me. In March, he became vicious. There was no talking to him, no relief from the misery and I couldn't seem to do anything right even though I was not eating, not sleeping and doing everything humanly possible to make this man happy for one single moment.

I asked him if he was having an affair and he denied it. I asked him about who he talks to online and why all of his accounts were password protected (we have never shut each other out of our accounts before). He started an argument and left.

At the end of March my husband planned a trip to a city 4 hours away from home with his brother and said they were going for "something they had to do." I questioned it and he became furious. He had me pack his bag and they left for an overnight trip.

A month later, my husband was still on this chat messenger program all the time and every time I walked in, he would close it. It became almost a joke to him as I would see it, hit him as I walked by and he would laugh and deny doing anything wrong.

At the end of April, I found a hidden file on the computer with several audio files. They were recorded telephone conversations with him and the other woman. They were saying things like "my love" I fell in love with you and they talked about planning a meeting in the city at the end of March. They even discussed a particular hotel where our family had stayed once and since I work in the travel industry, I called the hotel and found that Mr. & Mrs. had stayed that night together. She lives 15 hours away from our house.

I confronted my husband. His first reaction was "we are getting a divorce." His second reaction was "I am leaving." We live in a house that his parents built for our children, it is in trust to them. His parents live next door.

We talked it through and I realized that I really love him, despite the years of emotional abuse and that I did not want to destroy our lives and most importantly the lives of our children who are twins and about to become teenagers.

The first 3 weeks were wonderful. I was almost thankful that he had an affair. I was in pain but for the first time in more than 8 years, my husband was paying attention to me, talking to me about important things, making decisions with me, showing me affection and attention. We decided to go on dates each weekend and to have one important family "date" each week. He has no interest in spending any time with our children and one of them hates him.

I had stopped searching for about a week and I was feeling pretty good about everything until I remembered seeing an email account somewhere and realized that I never checked it. His demeanor had changed a bit and I thought he might still be in contact with her so I checked. Sure enough I found that they were corresponding through Youtube and she was sending him sappy love songs. I could not see his messages to her but I could see her replies and in one of them she mentioned their phone conversation "last night." He was cheating on me AGAIN!

The second blow was harder to deal with than the first. I knew he was doing something wrong before, but this time we had promised to be open and honest and he had promised that it was over, that he had said goodbye and if she contacted him, he would tell me. He lied, deceived and cheated again. This time he had been home and waiting for me to leave the room so he could answer her. VERY SNEAKY

I confronted him AGAIN. We talked again and I explained that he needed to cut her off completely or the alternative would be a marriage of convenience until the children were old enough. I told him he could have her, talk to her, go on trips to see her and I would just be his friend/roommate. He did not want that. He swore it was over and vowed to make this work with me.

Our sex life has always been excellent. Even after I found out about the affair, I had sex with him the next day and found myself lost in the passion. It wasn't an issue and I felt lucky. I used techniques I had found online to block out the images of him with her and eventually they faded and are not an issue anymore.

This past weekend during sex he became flaccid. First time in 15 years! We managed to get going again and finish the job but with some strange and awkward feelings about it. We did not discuss it.

Since then, he has not wanted to touch me and I have left him alone about it. I tried to talk to him the following evening about some things that had happened in our past. I want to discuss the root of our marital problems but he flipped out and refused to talk about the past anymore. I realized that we were going nowhere with the conversation and asked him if he would be willing to talk about it another time. The answer was NO.

I brought up another subject the next day. We need to discuss our financials, and I want to talk about our relationship. He has completely closed me off to all discussions and constantly tells me he can't stand to hear me anymore.

We had sex last night because I basically had to seduce him. This was the first time we had sex and it was without a connection. I wanted to be intimate with him more often since the affair because in truth, it was the only time I felt safe and secure in our relationship. Last night disproved that completely. Today he is broody and miserable and barely spoke a word to me. Am I doing something wrong? Is he still in love with her or even worse, is he still talking to her? Does he want me to be the bad guy and initiate a divorce?

He is a very technologically savvy guy. He has the latest computer and the latest cell phone and all these apps and gadgets, etc. I tried to monitor every single account he has online but in truth, he can easily open another one and I would never find it now. I am exhausted from the constant searching and worry. I have dropped 20lb in 3 weeks, I have not slept through a night since I found out because I am afraid he will get out of bed to go on the computer. I am not giving my kids, house and job the attention they need and I simply can't function. Please help!

Welcome and sorry for what has brought you here.

Who is this OW? Is she married?

You need to blow up his affair and expose. Exposure 101

Please read this. How To Survive An Affair

And this Carrot and Stick of Plan A

I am sorry you are here.
Your first post mentioned nothing about the MB plans. Am I correct to assume you know nothing about MB?

Start reading the link found on the right of this page. There is something that reads " Most popular links". Click on "How to survive infidelity". Then, after reading everything there, come back here to your thread and click on the link in my sig line that says "carrot/stick of plan A". It's an outline of my understanding of Plan A. Just to get you started. Meanwhile, BUY the Dr Harley book Surviving An Affair.

Tell us if your WH has addiction/porn/violence problems. How is he with the kids? Is he patient, loving and kind towards them?

Any previous affairs?

Part of Plan A never to be overlooked is self care.
You will need STD testing, as will WH. You need to refuse sex until he shows you proof he is free from disease.

Meanwhile, put a VAR ( voice activated recorder) in the car he drives. As a matter of fact, go read all the relevant topics in the Operation Investigate forum.

Post often.
Ask MB plan questions.
Take excellent care of yourself.
You cannot Plan A if you are falling apart and neglecting your self care.

Thank you for the replies and information. I will read everything I can get my hands on but buying books is difficult because I am in another country. I'll see what I can get online.
In answer to your questions "BrainHurts" the OW is 6years younger than he, she is married with 2 small children. They met on facebook back in Oct. He had added her as a friend for a game he was playing. He started sleeping on the sofa at the end of Nov, so I think the affair lasted about 5 months.

To "Pepperband" my husband smokes pot every day and when he doesn't, he gets nasty. He never has more than a joint around the house so trying to get him arrested is a waste of time. He has been violent with me (choking, pushing, slapping) 5-6 times in our marriage and the last time was in 2008 when I was getting ready for my first trip home to the USA after 7 years. He is very insecure and always blames me or accuses me of things I haven't even thought about doing. He thought I was leaving and never coming back. I should have. The argument turned into violence and I picked up a pair of scissors and hid them in my sleeve because he was really on a rampage and started going after the kids who were locked in their room. He saw the scissors in my hand and grabbed them. My mother in law ended up breaking into our house to save me as he had me pinned with the scissors open at my throat and I was screaming for my life. She later turned to my children who were in total shock and told them to remember that I was the one who picked up the scissors and that my husband was acting in self defense- no help there!

As for other affairs, back in 2003 I surprised him with a gift one afternoon unexpectedly and when I walked into our office he was standing up in front of the webcam with his pants down. In checking all of the accounts I could find, he had 2 different messenger programs, one from 2003 and one from 2011 where there were different women's names on his contact list but only one name on each messenger.

With the children he is completely indifferent. If they were ghosts in our house, he would notice them more. Basically they say hello to him when he walks in the door and good night when they go to bed. He is a horse buff and my daughter is gifted with horses. He has taken her to the stables about 8 times in the past 5 years. He resents my son because he is a little overweight and because he is not a smart mouthed little [censored] like the other neighborhood kids. My son has been told he is fat and will grow up to be gay. My husband once took the kids to a soccer field where all the older neighborhood kids were playing and kicked the ball into my son's chest. My son came home alone in tears because he was hurt and embarrassed. My son will not give my husband the time of day but respects him because he is afraid of him. My husband spent many years berating us at the dinner table. Asking my kids questions about history that they had not yet learned in school and then instead of teaching them, getting mad at them for not knowing. I have tried to address these issues with my husband but I always get the same answer "I am crazy." I was crazy when I told him I knew he was having an affair and he convinced my best friend that I was crazy too. Now we know I wasn't crazy...

Not sure if I can get a VAR here but will try. I am trapped in my house as I work from home 8 hours per day and we only have one car that he uses for work. It is very difficult to get out and buy things or do anything. This is a huge part of the problem. He never helped me when we came here, I learned the language on my own, learned how to get around, etc. without any help from him and now he resents me because I have been here for 10 years and I have not become one of them.
As much as I love him and want to be with the man I married, I know deep down inside I need to leave him. The problem is that I can't leave the country with the kids unless I have his permission or else I will be put in jail for kidnapping and that will solve nothing for anyone. I can't afford a lawyer yet as I just started a new job and haven't been paid yet. I am also still in shock and finding it hard to do anything. Getting through the day without taking a handful of pills is my main goal each morning. I keep a photo of my kids near the computer to remind me how much I have to live for. They are so awesome... I am off to do some reading. THANK YOU!

Wow I'm so sorry for all the abuse you've had to endure.

In your country are there women's shelters? When was the last time he abused you? Do you have all this documented in safe keeping?

I'm so concerned for your safety and your children.

Are your kids his? How old are they?

My kids are his and they are 12 years old. There are shelters but the closest is a 5 hour drive from home and I have no money or way to get there.

Nothing has been documented because the in laws always swept in and saved the day. I live in a community of less than 200 people and what the neighbors think is of the utmost importance to my husband and his immediate family. His brother has just endured a year of total pain and heartache as his wife threw him out and has not let him see the kids. My in laws are stacked with money, divorce lawyers and lots of pain and suffering. Taking me down would be easy for them and since my husband never allowed me to get citizenship here (I have only a work/living permit), my rights are less than the average wife/mother here. I can't risk losing my kids because I am their world, their only parent and without me they would be raised by my in laws who raised my husband!

Honestly the ideal situation would be either for someone to come and scoop us up or for my husband to just get over this and be normal. If he were himself again or something close to it, I would be happy living here. I am starting to think that is just a fairy tale.

I am so stuck you can't imagine. And of course I wish I had the finances to just move to the nearby city but my husband has always been worried that I would leave him and I have not had a bank account in my name for 10 years. I opened one now but we are in such dire straits for money that I spent half of it getting shoes and clothes for the kids and food for the house. My husband was out of work during the affair and stopped paying all of our bills. My mother sent me money to pay the phone and electric while my husband hid the fact that he got a severance pay of 3,000 euro and spent it talking to her on the phone and going to see her.

My children do not know about the affair and honestly I don't want them to know and hate their father even more if we can find a way to work this out.

I also have no way of contacting the OW's husband as I do not know her last name. I only know the municipality where she lives and her screen names.

I am lost and desperate for a "what to do." I am usually so resourceful but this grave is too deep to get out of until my children are of age. I don't want that though, I don't want to lose my husband, I just want him back. Some days it seems like I have him and then sometimes he is just lost. I think he is going through withdrawal and he is clearly depressed and hardening. Do I ride it out?

When was the last time he physically abused you?

Are you safe? I'm very concerned for your safety.

So you can't take the kids out of the country and go to your moms? Will she send you money to get you out? Will he get help for his violence?

Have you read this?
When to cal it quits Part 2

Dear zouzouni,

Your H is not going through withdrawal; he is deep in the affair and has no intention of stopping it for you.

If you were reading this story and it were about someone else, you would tell them immediately to get out of that situation. You would not advise your sister to tolerate this level of abuse-coupled-with-a-never-ending affair - even if you and your sister suffered from terminal sibling rivalry.

You need to get him away from you, but you must not take your kids out of the country without H's permission. You mention the euro currency, so you are in Europe. I can tell already that your H will never agree to your taking the children to the USA. If you try to get them out without his permission, you will probably be committing an offence. You will certainly be committing one when you don't take them back on request, so don't even try to do this under the guise of taking them on holiday.

I don't know what to say just yet about your apparent entrapment in that community with no money and unsupportive in-laws. Others will be able to make suggestion on this. I'll give this more thought today.

But the very most importantly urgent thing that you must do RIGHT NOW is tell your children AND your in-laws (and your mother) about this affair. I don't have the time to go into all the reasons why just now, but again, others will help you here.

This exposure needs to be done immediately and without warning. It does not look as if you need Facebook exposure to accomplish exposure to family, so do it now .

I'm sure you can use Facebook to track down the skanky OW's H and friends. Again, others will help with this.

Stop trying to Plan A NOW, zouzouni. Plan A is a lost cause for you. You have been doing it for far too long and you have also suffered various kinds of abuse. You need immediate relief and protection. Expose the affair and put pressure on H to leave. Then you can go to Plan B until the affair ends.

I am too weak and afraid to ask him to leave.
His parents know, I told them the moment I found out and offered to let them hear the phone conversations. They refused and told me I was a liar. His friends know and not one of them is speaking to him. One of them started yelling at him infront of me saying that he made everyone lie for him just so he could destroy his family. He has lost everything and still today he is posting sappy love songs about not being able to live without her on his facebook because he is sure she is seeing them. I just had a fight with him about that 2 minutes ago.
I am such a basket case right now.
She deleted her facebook account the moment she heard from him that I found out. I can't find her. I try every day.
My kids... I can't tell them. It will kill them and I don't want them to suffer this pain too. Not unless something is going to change, then I would tell them and warn them about what to expect.

Can the US embassy help? The only documentation I have are the recorded phone calls and they discuss planning the trip to meet.

Anther thought... I can contact OW on one specific messenger program. When I caught him talking to her the second time, I sent her a message asking her to leave him alone and saying she was killing him, our family and his kids. She wrote back "he is yours, I will not bother him ever again."

I can contact her and tell her that I want to leave but I need to know for sure if they are still in love and still in contact. I would think that she would answer truthfully because she wants him so badly. Bad idea?

The US embassy might be able to help with advice on your rights within that country, but I am pretty sure they won't be able to help you leave with the children. There will be international law in place that governs that issue for the country that you are in, and I highly doubt that it will allow you take the children without H's permission. The US embassy won't be able to override the law.

I know that, as a British national, if I were married to foreign national and we visited his country, the British embassy would treat me and the children as "foreign" if we got into trouble in that foreign national's country. (So if I married a US citizen and visited the USA, I and the dependent children become US nationals while we are there, and the British government would not help us if we got into trouble.)

If the same is true of the USA and the country you are in, then I'm sorry.

You need to find out a lot more about your rights. See how much you can find out online - usually quite a lot.

Someone PLEASE gently beat some sense into zouzouni on this one.

Two days ago he threatened to kill me if I told the children. Last night I became so upset that I was throwing up - water as there is nothing else in my system. He came into the bathroom in a rage because he was afraid the children would hear me. I said "hear me what? Getting sick! We all get sick sometimes." I am treading on thin ice here.

Then you need to report the death threat to the police, get a protective order, and contact a DV shelter.

You cannot fix a violent abuser, if not for your own sake, then your children's sake, you need to get out before you are dead and cannot protect them anymore.

Not necessarily a bad idea, but you might not get the truth.

I did this to OW in my H's international (UK/Belgium) affair. I phoned asking for the truth, because if he really wanted her he could have her, but he was lying to me.

OW at first refused to speak to me, but when she finally did, she told me that she accepted that the affair was over, that my H loved me, and that she did not want to break up my marriage. She knew that if she interfered enough to make me leave my H for not getting rid of her, she wouldn't win him anyway, because my H would resent her so much for breaking up his marriage that he would not go to her. She knew that if he wanted to leave he would have left by then (about 3.5 years into the PA, after several D Days) so the fact that he hadn't left told her that he did not want to go. So she would leave us alone.

She put the phone down to me, picked it up and dialled H, and told him that it was okay, she had reassured me that she would be out of the picture, so it was okay for them to try and see each other again. They never saw each other again, but the EA continued by phone for nearly 5 years after that phone call. She would phone him at work - never at home - and he simply would not tell me. This all came to light when he about to retire last year, and finally sent his first-ever email from our PC to her - and I trapped it on the keylogger.

From much puzzling it out with my H and her H, I realised that she felt she had much to gain by NOT telling me 'I want him and I won't give him up" - in fact telling me the opposite. If she had told me that they were in love and she was fighting to keep him, my H would have been furious and possibly stopped speaking to her. He was a cake-eating champion and never wanted to end his marriage, so the more she pushed for him to end the marriage, the more she drove him away. Only by giving the impression that she was happy being his whore on the side was she able to keep him.

She was married with two late teenagers and a full-time, well-paid job working for the EU. She was even living in another country to do this job (Luxembourg, Monday to Friday, returning to her marital home in Belgium at the weekends.) In theory, it was easy for her to leave her H and demand that my H leave me, but in practice, she was too insecure to go it alone if my H did not follow. She wanted the security of her marriage, even though she could not stand her H and had moved out of the home (without giving him any clue about the affair). So, lying about the affair being over was a good strategy on her part.

I don't think you can count on OW telling you the truth - but you can try. Contacting OW is sometimes a good idea - but you need a thick skin because she might well tell you he never loved you, you grew fat and dull after you had kids, you don't make him feel loved and she does, you're rubbish at sex, and you are pathetic. My H's didn't do this, but some do.

Thank you for sharing. It helps tremendously. I am feeling so alone and "unique" these days... I need to give it some thought. Tomorrow is Friday and I will call the embassy. I will think about contacting her and asking her if we can talk. I am pretty sure I can handle any negativity from her but some of your points make a lot of sense. She is married with 2 small kids, I heard my husband refer to one of them as "the baby" in their conversations. I am doubtful she would leave the security of home and her children so telling me lies might be the best way for her to handle this. The thing that bothers me the most is that the songs they are sending each other always talk about "waiting and being patient to be together again." I am sure they talked about divorce and perhaps ended it with the fact that they can only chat and talk while he is at work and they will someday be together again. Won't this fizzle eventually since they can't see each other and the sneaking around is at a minimum?

the police here would laugh at me and tell the family what I did. I saw it happen with another woman not too long ago. Her husband used it against her and got the kids and threw her out. We are talking stuck like crazy glue stuck...

This sounds like someplace that Sacha Baron Cohen made a film about - but I didn't think we had such places in the EU.

lol... You mean Borat! First time I have laughed in a month! Not that bad but CLOSE. I live in farm country, half of the population of my village is illiterate and most do not have many teeth. I am an educated New Yorker... Imagine how hard my transition was and I did it alone.