I just want to thank everyone for their thoughts, even though of course they weren't quite what I wanted to hear. But-- You are all correct. I am not sending the letter for sure; that would still be cheating. Now I need to really need to think about what everyone has said about manning up. Get councel, something. Because you have given me the cold hard truth and as much as it hurts to read I know deep down it is the truth. Thank you....

Just after one day here on MB and you are now half way to being a man. Keep progressing.

Threshold,

Please read and re-read what Glove Oil has written. He has walked in your shoes. He and his wife are in a fully recovered marriage and are in love. Isn't that the best possible outcome for you and your family?

MB offers that possibility. However, it is not a program that can be "cherry-picked" for the things you like and discarding the parts that are difficult. The program has to be applied in its entirety. You need to tell your wife about this affair. She probably knows something is not right in your marriage, but doesn't know what.

Also, get and read Dr. Harley's book, "Surviving an Affair". And never, never, never contact this OW again for any reason.

AM

The first step is reading the book Surviving an Affair by Dr Bill Harley.

You also need to confess your affair to your wife, family and close friends.
The friends that helped you conceal the affair are poison to you personally.

Threshold,
I'm so glad you are back. We all want to help you, and sometimes the things we write will make you bristle.

Be a man of courage.

You might be thinking something along this line, " I won't tell my wife because it would hurt her so much. I'll just keep this to myself and suffer in silence with the guilt. That is what I deserve". (feigned goodness)

However, that is wayward babble which is interpreted for its true meaning :" Life will get a whole lot harder for ME if I fess up. I'll just keep this to myself and things will blow over soon enough." (cowardly, selfish)

I'll say it again: Be a man of courage.

Threshhold, we have given you sound counsel and that is to do the right thing and tell your wife. The solution to infidelity is honesty, not more deceit. The only way to heal yourself is to make amends to your wife. That is the only way. She will find out eventually, and the best way to find out is from you.

Go do the right thing. Tell your wife TODAY.

You already did get counsel here, right? Don't use counseling as a substitute for manning up. Just do it.

It is the lying and deceit that hurts the most. Your wife can forgive honesty and remorse... but continued deceit is much harder to reconcile. It will be your road to ruin.


I agree that your wife will likely find out at some point. Many people know about your affair and one of these people will eventually stand up for what is right and inform your wife. It may even be the OW who decides to make amends and inform her victim.

We have seen both betrayed spouses and wayward spouses expose years after the affair. Do you want to spend the rest the of your life looking over your shoulder? It is best for your wife to hear the truth from YOU...today.

You do not need counseling...all you need is to decide to be a real man by telling your wife the truth and beginning to live your life in a respectable and honorable way.

Here's a good clip of Dr. Harley telling what needs to be done for a WH to get through withdrawal from his OW. It's the last letter in the segment.

1. Follow the plan. For you it would be telling your BW.
2. Stay the course.
Radio Clip

Here is your "closure".

With your wife at your side, print and sign this letter, and send it via Registered Mail to the other woman and the other woman's husband (separate copies, each addressed to them individually). You may e-mail it to the other woman and Cc: your wife and the other woman's husband as well.

If your wife wants to add anything, then by all means add it.

That's your closure, and it's all you should even think of demanding.

--
OW,

I want you to know that out of respect and love for my wife, I have come to realize that I must never see or talk to you again. My relationship with you was a cruel indulgence that my wife did not deserve. While I cannot completely repay my wife for the pain I caused her, I will do my best to become the wife she has been missing. I care a great deal for my wife and I would not want to do anything to risk her happiness. I will not make any further contact with you and I do not want you to make any contact with me. Please respect my desire to end our relationship.

Sincerely,
Threshold

Threshold,

Kudos for coming back after the responses to your first post. I thought for sure you were a goner!

And for taking the time to read the posts, and let them affect you.

I found out about my H's A a decade after it happened. There was a poster on here recently who was devastated to find out right after HER H DIED, that he had hid affairs during their M. She was mourning his loss and then finding out that their whole M was a lie, at the same time. I know my H said he always thought "I will take it to my grave..." but as time went on he thought, what exactly does that mean??? I will lie to myself, my wife, everyone in my life UNTIL I DIE. I will face God knowing that I have lied MY WHOLE LIFE about this. The truth will find a way to come out, and if you think you can 'take it to the grave,' ponder that for a moment too.

For me, it was a whole decade of my H not being able to look me in the eye out of guilt and shame, and me knowing something was keeping a wedge in between us but not ever knowing what that was. It was the beginning to further destruction to our M, further affairs. This is the future you will have with your wife if you keep deceiving her.

The MB program can help you become a better man, and possibly recover your marriage from the most devastating thing that could ever happen to it. Taking the first step of telling your wife can at the very least help you live the rest of your life in TRUTH, rather than in lies and deceit.

Welcome back. Stick around.

"RE: You might be thinking something along this line, " I won't tell my wife because it would hurt her so much. I'll just keep this to myself and suffer in silence with the guilt. That is what I deserve". (feigned goodness)

However, that is wayward babble which is interpreted for its true meaning :" Life will get a whole lot harder for ME if I fess up. I'll just keep this to myself and things will blow over soon enough." (cowardly, selfish) "




Thanks. That is exactly what I am thinking (feigned goodness)and I'm only kidding myself---I'm afraid to tell her, I'm terrified of the repercussions (cowardly). Not just for me though but also my small children. I don't want to end up divorced and them without a father to be there for them 24/7 until they are adults. I know if divorced I can visit and whatever but it's not the same.

I have been married 15 years, and with dating 19 years with my wife. Have never done anything wrong until now. In that 19 years time she has always let me know if I ever did something stupid (like this) she would leave me, no questions asked. I'm so afraid to take the risk to tell her and end up alone and ruined (but with a clean conscience).

But I've totally betrayed her. I was doing ok (or at least I thought) until I posted here and got all of these responses telling me to do the right thing(s). Each reply I read here now just makes me cry. Because you are all on the money. And I have been trying to isolate myself from the truth. I've been lying to myself to make me feel better. I now just feel like I am the scum of the earth.

The first 3 weeks after the affair I mourned the loss of the OW. It's like the death of someone close. I honestly had NO idea at the time I was going through with it just how attached I actually was to her until she is now gone. Someone mentioned drug addiction and yes that is what it was like (although I've never been a drug addict lol I can only imagine) Unbelievable really. But now I'm STARTING to put her behind me and come back to reality. Now I am now hurting so much for what I have done to my wife. She has been nothing but the best wife and mother anyone could ask for and I have totally screwed it up. I am entering the "WTF was I thinking? phase" regarding the affair and it's eating me up the last few days. At the very least you have all opened my eyes and I thank you. Will need to think some more...

I'm just curious but did you CATCH him after the 10 years or did he confess to you? If he confessed were you upset he waited that long to do it? Or were you less upset because he manned up eventually then not doing so at all?

You don't need to think....you need to act. You know what is right, now you need to do it.

Sit down with your W today and tell her the truth. She deserves that.

If you want to become a true man tell your wife today.

It's very likely your wife already suspects something is "up" with you. She may have felt your disconnectedness and wondered why. Spouses often have a sixth sense about this.

It will be terribly hard for your wife to hear the truth about her marriage. And she may well leave you, but you are better off telling her than her finding out. The continued deceit is likely to cause even more trouble, as she is probably going to find out anyway.

Although people often believe they will leave their spouse in the case of adultery, many do not, IF you can promise her and keep Extraordinary Precautions and build a romantic marriage that is better than the pre-affair marriage.

Telling your spouse will also keep you accountable to her. If she agrees to stay with you, then you will need to live a transparent life.

My FWH has never, not once, ever come clean about any of his dishonesties and infidelities. Instead, I have discovered each one, completely by accident. I knew something was up, but he was a coward (he admits this) and wanted to continue his independent behavior, so he thought it best to keep secrets. Each time I found out, I lost respect for him. To this day, although we are in a recovering marriage, and he is fully on board with MB principles and behavior and is completely in love with me, it will take years to earn back the destroyed respect. If he had told me the truth, it still would have hurt, but cowardice would not be piled on top of the adultery and deceit.

Excellent radio clip where Dr. H talks about what a WH should do for his wife to give him another try after his affairs. He explains it like an addict.

Radio Clip on a WH on what to do to get back with his wife 3:50 mark

After years of knowing that he wasn't being completely honest with me, starting to find out little things that indicated deceit, I started to go off the deep end. I like to call that my 'rebellion phase.' I challanged everything about his life, and in doing so he start to trickle truth me about things. Little tidbits of information about this girl or that, this incident or that. Eventually confessed to an EA, but I still felt there was more. At the end I told him I wanted him to take a polygraph. He fought me on it, of course. I told him he didn't have to like it, he just had to do it, if he wanted any shot in he77 of staying married. That is when he confessed to the PA.

I did go through with the polygraph, just to make sure I had all the information. It wasn't until I did that I was able to really invest in recovery.

One thing you will find if you read through some of these threads of betrayed spouses, that as deep and painful as the affair was, the deceit and lies were in some situations worse. The longer the lies went on, the more lies there were, the more insurmountable damage was done. When you have to 'catch' your spouse (or corner, in my case), when you are given trickle truth (little tidbits of truth, followed by more lies, time after time), when you look back to years of your life and realize you had NO CLUE what was really going on, who you really shared your bed with, that is HORRIBLE. It is worse, for some people, than the actual sex itself.

I urge you, to not put your wife through this life of deceit. She likely already knows something is deeply wrong in her marriage. All that time and mental energy you spent on your AP, was time you took away from your beautiful wife and family. You have to realize that she is not a dumb woman, and she has noticed the difference. Tell her what you have done. And whatever you do, do NOT trickle truth her!!! And do NOT tell her you have had an A and it is over, then secretly contact your nasty AP for another quick fix, then lie to your wife about it, and on and on (known as a 'false recovery' when you attempt to recover but are still in contact with your AP, just underground)... TELL HER EVERYTHING.

If you think for a second you are protecting her by NOT telling her something, that is absolutely not true. You will not find a single person on this forum who would say "I wish I just lived with my head in the sand, and never really had the truth about my life." As bad as it hurts to know, lifelong deception is worse. You married this woman and made her the mother of your children, you owe her more than that. Tell her, tell her everything. If she wants details you tell her. If it is hard to tell the details, remember that it is a hundred times harder to hear them. If you are ashamed, it is because what you did was horrible and you should be.

BTW, I also had an RA (revenge affair), and I confessed everything to my H without his prompting. I would confess it again in a heartbeat. I am responsible for what I did, and I took responsibility.

She has he right to live by her standards. If she does not want to be married to a man who is unfaithful, then she should not be deceived into living by standards that are abhorrent to her.

You do not have the right to deceive her into living with someone that she would rather not live with. The effect on you of telling the truth is irrelevant. It does not matter that you'd be alone and ruined, and it is cowardly for you to shield behind the excuse of your children's need to have their family intact. You did not care about the risk to their family when you were shagging this woman, so don't pretend to care about them now, having taken the very action most likely to destroy their lives.

Your wife is perfectly capable of making the best decision for the children - she is their mother, and not stupid. She is clearly more capable of putting their interests first than you are, since she's not the one who behaved so recklessly. If she feels that they are better off living with both of you despite this affair, then she will do her best to keep the marriage together, as most of the betrayed spouses here have done. If she wants to part from you, she will move heaven and earth to compensate the children for your harm to them.

She is not your pet to manipulate so that YOU can have the life you want, now that your affair has fallen apart. You would have left her for this OW if you'd had the chance - there wasn't much love in the room when you were hoping to get the chance to do that. Respect the woman's dignity, and her right to decide on her marriage in the full knowledge of what you have done.

One "right" that she has, of course, is to have an STD test. She doesn't yet know that she needs one.