I made the same mistake. Delayed full exposure. Because he "defriended her".
As an experienced outsider, I will tell you that your lack of actions are foolish.
How is "exposing " te same thing as "provoking him to revenge?"

You are not following MB program. You are doing your own

Okay, Falcon. Have it your way. The one thing you just don't seem to get through that thick skull of yours is that they know what avenues you can monitor, so of course they'll avoid that. So what do they do? They'll open channels of com that you aren't privy to. Pretty damned easy to do as well.

Well, I see I have no chance of convincing you of doing what I feel is the best way to kill this affair.

Good luck!

Falcon,
You can't start marital recovery until the affair is dead.
We've all been in similar cases and they are all the same.
You have to follow the program step by step

If the affair is truly over then exposing the OM won't bother your wife.
But you know it will
You are afraid of her response.

How far will you go, how much will you give up to "keep" her?

Quoted and bolded for truth.

My best guess is that it would bother her.

Immensely!

Falcon, the biggest mistake you're making right now is assuming your sitch is different than all others around here. It's not. It's TEXTBOOK!!

Until you pull your head out of your [censored], or the clouds, you are in for one helluva rude awakening. We don't want to see that. We really don't.

You think you have a grasp on things? You don't.

You think you know you're wife as she is right now? You don't.

I hope you start listening to people that DO have a grasp on things. Otherwise.......

Falcon,

Why wait and see if your WW has contact with OM? Why not put the final nail in the coffin and expose OM? OM are weenies and do not like to be put out there.

I hate to tell you, but she is hoping he is figuring out a way to contact her. You need to close that door before it goes under ground. Please listen to all these Men telling you.

OK...talk about some thick skulls...I don't care about what it would and would not do to my wife. I'm not worried she would be upset.

How many times do I need to say this...HE WAS ALREADY BACKING OFF! The guy had been pulling out and didn't try to get physical with her when the opportunity was there! And again, she's admitted in communications, that she doesn't know I have seen, that no communication has occurred.

Good grief. I had "experienced" folks tell me he wouldn't cut and when I exposed...I said he would....and he did. The guy is 1000 miles away. The only thing they've had going is texting and emails. This isn't rocket science here...they guy didn't seal the deal and was backing off before anyways. All signs he WANTED OUT. If he didn't do those things, then I would agree wholeheartedly with what you guys are saying.

Let me put it another way. They met up in May. After that he basically communicated very little. She had to coax him....again...to respond to her. As she had to do several times before they met. He even expressed his concerns about doing this with her because of what happened to him. I saw this dynamic continue to play out for the 9 months before she said ILYBNILWY. He wa apparently quite adamant with the FIL that he was out of the picture. I have tons of information I am not sharing here, and it all says the same thing...there's been no contact and he was really backing off long before I even knew.

To further that, my wife isn't acting like someone who's pulling then wool over my eyes and getting what they want. She's acting like someone who had the crack pipe taken away. I can't emphasize enough that I am looking for the smallest shreds of evidence that there is any communication going on and finding none. I can't do anything about my wife's desire to pull the plug on the marriage anyways, other than doing Plan A on her until it's Plan B time. Monday she was looking at me like she did when she was in love with me. But hasn't since. She's clearly rolling through the emotions right now. One minute she's ultra nice, then she's in b***h mode, then she's all depressed. Sounds like someone going through addiction withdrawal to me.

FR,

"Backing off" is not exactly the ideal for your wife's last impression of POSOM. "Rejecting her utterly and cravenly and running for cover to protect his own interests" is a much more beneficial (for YOUR interests) scenario.

That is exactly what I got (by sheer, dumb, God-directed luck). The last contact between POSOM and my (then) WW was him CRYING on the phone, terrified that his infidelities would get back to his BW, worried that he would have been dragged into court as a co-respondent in a dissolution action. (Of course, having been informed by yours truly how desperately close his family had come to be planning a funeral that day was also part of his heartache, but not ALL my actions are to be recommended on this site - at least openly.)

The "contrast effect" that my bride then had the opportunity to analyze was between a man fighting (admittedly badly at times) for his marriage and family, and a skirt-chaser looking for an easy piece, but protecting his [censored] (and home-turf) from open involvement with her. Her BH was all-in; her OM was all gone.

Your WW's last memory of POSOM might well be a truly physically satisfying bell-ringing bout of SF, followed by a tender, affectionate parting. A WW's illicit $LB can exist a long time on that load.

You are passing up an opportunity to get OM (unknowingly) working FOR you, as opposed to AGAINST you. I truly wish you could see that.

I completely agree.
You seem to think you have it all figured out.

I dont know what's more alarming in your reasoning.
You say you aren't worried about your wife getting upset.
At the same time you seem to be defensive of her boyfriend.

Falconrap,

What I think is more likely given the way your WW is acting is that WW and OM had sex once, OM got what he wanted. OM didn't want the annoyance of someone elses WW in his life and moved on to other women.

All those declarations of decency OM has been making are his attempts to remove your WW from his life gently. Your WW however remains loyal to OM.

Get a polygraph for your WW.

God Bless
Gamma

If she showed up at his door he would probably have sex with her again.
A polygraph is needed.
But she hasn't agreed to No Contact letter yet.

The problem is that he is trying to plan A and B and forget about the affair.

Look. I know you all mean well, and I understand. You don't know what I know, and I can't elaborate further. Her own private conversations that she had before she even told me (i.e. When she felt I suspected absolutely nothing) indicate nothing happened. Until I saw these convos I believed that she had sex with him.

As to why I am not doing what some of you believe I should...any contact by the OM with her, at this time, simply resets the clock. I can see her going through depression and emotional swings right now, indicative of withdrawal. If I fire off that level of exposure on him now, I can almost guarantee you that she'll get a "what the heck is he doing?" email or text. Bam! Right back to day one. If she wasn't showing signs of withdrawal, then taking it up a notch would be prudent of me. When I first exposed, I ran into some issues getting a list of his FB friends. But I knew at the time, based on everything I saw, that he would bail on her. Now I have the list available to me and will use it if I sniff anything has changed.

I understand everyone's thoughts in this, and, for the most part I agree, but I have the wife going through withdrawal now, and I don't want to risk a restart. She had already resigned herself to hope that he would wait, but was being warned, and she agreed, that she may have to go it alone. Look, he was really pushing her buttons (in the wrong way) by not responding to her, something that she was clearly aggravated with him over. The fact he he refused every contact attempt by her and her cousin, and then the fact that he de-friended her on Monday, is an absolute clear signal to her that he's clocked out on her. I know from how she is, and what she wrote, that his failure to communicate to her is a massive LB for her. It's apparently the biggest LB I committed against her this past year. Believe me, I am worried about all the possibilities. But actions are what tells me what is going on.

Right now she is swinging through the moods. It tells me she's given up hope on the guy. If progress doesn't happen in few weeks, maybe I'll go nuclear on the guy just to provoke, but I've already gotten her through a month, and the biggest change in her came when he de-friended her on Monday. I think it was a small thing, but maybe that little bit to tip the iceberg over. I'll watch her and see.

Thanks to all of you. I am listening to you, just remember that everybody's situation has unique things about them. I know far more than I am saying here, and I am confident th OM is out of the picture.

You will be back here in 5, 10 years. There are currently posters like you that refused to follow the SAA Recovery plan and came back years later.

You think that you can plan A your way into a great marriage. Maybe plan B if she decides she wants to divorce you.

One thing women do respect is someone that will fight for their marriage.
Do you think John Wayne would be upset about offending her or her useless boyfriend?
We know what the Duke would have done.

Your pansy [censored] approach to this won't work. You need to man up and expose before more time passes

And by the way, waywards become liars.
They lie to everyone. Including the best friend you are watching communications with.

on Christmas eve, OM wife texted me to ask my ww to leave her husband alone.
I confronted ww, she swore that there was no contact. She said the lady was crazy. Ww sister told me they couldn't be in contact because ww told her they aren't.

Well they were.

Monitoring is good. But you still need to follow the program and really just assume everything she says is a lie.

I read SAA. The book doesn't even mention exposure. Plan B often requires allowing the to go be with the person they want so that they can see for themselves that they were living a fantasy. Plan A is to show them what they are missing. I manned up when I blew up her fantasy in front of the people she cared about the most. If I had gotten the FB friends list, I would have exposed at the time. I only recently was able to get that access, a full month after exposure.

The whole reason for exposure is to kill the affair and get the WS to to through withdrawal. That's what I have. YOU just want me to go all revenge like thinking it must be done. Maybe I will be back here in 5 or 10 years, but, right now, I am privy to knowledge that YOU are not. I don't need to do this. He caused her a ton of pain by refusing to respond to him. What part of that do you not understand? This is a guy that dumped her 20 years ago as well. He has pulled a major, on going LB on her, and added to it when he de-friended her. I can't stress just how big an LB the lack of communication is to her. It's massive, as I found out. It's probably why she decided to go forward when I pulled away from her and failed to communicate my feelings.

You are a fool Falcon for not using the advice you are given. Yes there are some differences,but 99.99% of them are underneath the same.
Said above: All waywards become professional liars to all.

Good Luck, you will need it.

I believe nothing she says. I just know who she trusts. I know what she is going through because I am seeing it. She is CLEARLY going through depression. I saw her come home with a prescription the other night that she didn't want me to see. I suspect, due to the late times she had come home a couple of weeknights back, that she may have gone to see a doctor and gotten something for her depression, but I'm not sure. She's hiding the prescription somewhere (probably work). She had mentioned that she had planned to go see someone about her issues to prove us all wrong. Maybe she went and they told her she was depressed. I don't know. Could be something else, but why hide it then?

if she wasn't going through the mood swings and the depression, I would be concerned about the EA still. But she is going through them. That doesn't happen the you think you are on you way to be with your lover once divorce hits. It happens when you think it is over and hopeless, and you are now wearing the scarlet letter for your close family to see.

Read SAA. Sue and John made it without exposure, and she was banging the guy regularly.

FWIW I did the FB exposure last night and I'm getting support from lots of folks. A few are already praying for me which is a HUGE benefit already. I was berated for not telling one person sooner. This is 5 mths after separation,. I admit I was angry and that's what pushed me over the edge because I was going to leave well enough alone.

Anyway you have the opportunity to do this BEFORE contact is reestablished. Besides I think OM's W and fam need to know what kind of person he is. I thought I would be ashamed but I'm not and I have no doubt that he will be angry. My hope is that his friends will contact him and talk someone will say something to wake him up.

You don't know who will tip the balance in your favour by saying something to your WW. Truth is infedility is not unique to you. It's not going to traumatize everyone and will not be more harmful to the relationship at this point. I'd give up the one month if I were you and emphasize that you need the no contact letter.

Good luck.

Dr. Harley is rewriting SAA to include exposure.