First you say this:


Followed by this:

What is the point of asking him? If he says that it was from a co-worker or something you will still have doubt because the book seems weird and you know that he is capable of lying to you. If he says that it is from OW then you have just resurrected the memory of when she gave it to him.

It is a book not a family heirloom. If it seems "weird" then just lose it.


then followed by this:

Why do you need a message to never let that sort of thing happen again? I'm pretty sure that message is already deeply ingrained in your heads.

As you stated in the beginning, the goal is to delete OW from your consciousness. Keeping the shells in view will only trigger your WH to remember OW while triggering you to remember the pain.

It almost seems like a form of punishment aimed at your WH to remind him of when he betrayed everything that he stood for.

Mmmm the aim is to build a new life, devoid of affair triggers. I don't think you understand, Pink that every time he is triggered to think of her, your marriage is shook to the core. EVERY time.

So allowing potential emails and shells to trigger him is a bad idea. Plus he will be waiting around wondering if she is going to TRY to contact him - since it is so easy.

This in itself is a trigger. Its easier for his mind to focus on YOU if he knows those avenues are dead.

I also can't understand the mentality where you believe it is good that you will be able to 'see' resumed contact. That is no protection.

Resumed contact will clean out your marriage like a thief in the night whether you 'see' it happening or not.

When burglars clean out your house, you change the locks, you get alarms, you make the house safe.

You don't change nothing but stand around planning to watch them do it again.

IMO, people who don't GET the addictive nature of affairs usually have this type of mentality.

They think the affair happened because their spouse was vulnerable to the evil manipulative OP etc. When it's as simple as the WS allowed someone to meet their ENs, the feeling of romantic love was triggered, boom and now this person will always be a danger. Just like any other affair.

They think they can trust their WS to not to continue taking hits off the crackpipe if they denounce the OP or and swear on a stack of bibles that they realized how wrong it was, etc.

Any time I see a great deal of emphasis on how evil and manipulative the OP is, that is a that this is happening and steps are going to be skipped....

Yes that's a good point, we should stress the addictive aspect here.

Pink, do you accept the addictive nature of the A means he can fall off the wagon at any time?

Happily recovered waywards have gone back to the OP after 20 years. They missed the 'high'.

Like alcoholics they have to accept that they have no control over it and get rid of triggers forever.

An alcoholic can't hang out in bars without feeling real temptation. An alcoholic won't stop at one drink.

An a wayward who gets one hit of attention from their addiction source will crave more.

This is genius. Yes. I get it about the robbery. My H came home last night (yay!) and we talked a little. Jet lag has to pass before conversations can be all that productive but he clarified some email issues/questions that I also had and I am feeling much better about our ability to work on this together. We established that he will block her, as have I. So she will not be able to send messages or see our pages and we will not be able to see hers. Maybe fb needs to be deleted too.

Can there be degrees of addiction, though? Or people who go too far without being addicted? Like someone who binge drinks once and is able to stop vs. someone who is drinking themselves into a grace and cannot stop.

Isn't the whole idea meeting needs that affairs come from unmet needs and once those needs are met in the marriage there is no reason for an affair? I am feeling optimistic about this concept because I can see where unmet needs were and am fixing this, so feel like, what point would the OW serve in his life? Even without me meeting his needs, he left her. Not to get overly secure, either, but there are several ways to look at this and some are positive too.

Affairs can happen even when needs are fully met. That is why we have EPs, extraodinary precautions. Everyone would cheat so we have EPs to prevent temptation!

Would you like to test that "degree of addiction" by endorsing continued contact with his OW? Why not try that out and see if his feelings are triggered again? He almost destroyed your marriage over this relationship, I am sure it will be different this time...


No, not at all. If you believe that meeting needs will protect your marriage from an affair, I fear for your future. We have many, many affairs that occurred on this forum where the needs were met 100%. You can test this theory if you want.

Could you answer this, please? People are trying to help you but it's hard when you only answer some posts and not others.

PS, here comes a

There is a certain level of BS denial happening here and we would do you no favors by not pointing this out to you.

You told us in your thread last month that your WH feels terrible about hurting the OW and wrote her a NC letter "letting her down gently" and telling her she was his true love. He then told you this was a lie because he doesn't like hurting people. You seem to believe this?

You also just posted a thread very recently in OI that your WH was erasing his computer history each morning.

Your H is still foggy and I fear there is at the very least one sided contact still happening. And if you weren't in denial about the addictive nature of affairs, you would be more proactive in preventing this

I also feel this and posted the same to you on your original thread. My otherwise remorseful WH remained foggy and if I had installed a keylogger I could have found the secret email account and saved myself the heartache of DDay #2 after months of thinking we were in recovery.

Hi, Pink.

Affairs come from weak boundaries. Unmet needs can 'expedite' an affair & make it more likely, insofar as they can make it more likely that someone will relax his/her boundaries, and so it is always a good idea to identify & meet one another's most important emotional needs. However, with proper boundaries in place, infidelity would not occur.

Re: your question about degrees of addiction, I think that it is more difficult to break free of a long-entrenched relationship than a brief one. If I recall correctly, your H's affair occurred with someone he'd known for decades. I'm not sure hom much contact there was between him & her during your marriage. However, it's clear that she still had a positive balance of "love-bank" deposits with him, as a result of providing (not only recently, but also years ago) affirmation that evidently met a need of his. Your husband does not seem to fit the profile of someone who (figuratively-speaking here) "binge-drank" once. Rather, he was been sipping, at least at intervals, for quite a while, leading up to as well as during the affair.

I should interject here, that the people who've chimed in are not doing so to discourage you, or to belittle the positive progress that you & H have apparently made. No one plans for being betrayed, and no one does recovery perfectly. My wife & I didn't. That he ended things with her is a very positive development, of course. That is clear. It gives you a chance to meet needs that you couldn't meet while you were separated.

That having been said, the risk of renewed contact is the biggest threat to all of the progress that you have made. Several times during my affair, I resolved to end it, and once, before it became physical, I even did so. But my Achilles heel was that I continued to see her at church music team reearsals, continued to talk with her, and eventually resumed taking her calls. And soon the affair was back on, full-bore. Mind you, this was someone whom I'd known, at the time, for less than two years, and to whom I'd scarcely given a second thought or paid any attention whatsoever prior to about 2 months before the affair began in earnest. Recontact is a disaster if it happens.

By contrast, your husband has known this person for a LONG time. I would say he is more at risk of a relapse than I was. BTW, my former OW didn't only cheat with me; prior to me, she'd also been conducting an affair with an ex-BF of hers from, you guessed it, high school, with whom she'd renewed contact & kept in touch throughout most of her marriage. Just based on my anecdotal familiarity with that, it seems to me that people who've maintained contact with exes from long ago have more deep-seated problems with proper concepts of boundaries in marriage.

The gist of what I'm trying to get across in this post: Your husband may, possibly, be well-along at redefining his previous concept as to what constitutes appropriate boundaries, and may be implementing that; but you don't know this for a fact, and it is FAR from habitual for him at this early stage; and for this reason, (1) you need to be working with him (and he with you) to cut down on his opportunities for contact with her to the greatest extent possible; and (2) you need to be watching him like a hawk.

With regard to (1), no one is suggesting that you cut him off from the internet altogether, as though this were practical in the 21st century for anyone who wishes to be able to maintain an income (other than though burger-flipping or lawn-mowing, which will probably not meet your financial-support need). But shy of your knocking down the internet altogether, there are lesser but very important steps that need to be taken, and it is vital that you & he extend yourselves, even at the price of some inconvenience, to take these steps, in order to facilitate his getting through withdrawal. (And if he still harbors any positive thoughts or regards for her whatsoever, then I assure you, he's not through withdrawal.) There's a reason that the necessary steps are called "Extraordinary Precautions", not merely "convenient precautions." Getting him off a FB acount of his own is a wholly reasonable & practical step and is not even all that extraordinary, and the fact that she could still reach him through other avenues should not inhibit you from closing off that avenue.

Take heart, but take action. It's too soon to trust.

Well done, sir. Well done. Pink, what say you?

Hi all,

Thanks for all of the replies! I will try to answer all questions...(was out late last night meeting H at airport and just got home from work - so pleased to see all the great feedback!)

Can I just say you were all 100% right about the travel? We had a few days of making meaningful contact (which was nice, and he'd send a morning song, which was really sweet) and then I was filled with tons of doubt and fear because I couldn't see him, he could have been doing literally anything...it was awful. He had not been there (in the US) without me since the A ended. Yikes. Well, we survived.

***edit***

So no data logger for the same reason really; he runs various checks on his work computers. If I did do it, he would have to know, so we could put one on, but I don't see the point because - similar to my logic with a lot of things - he has enough access to other computers to be able to have secret communications if that's what he wanted to do. I suppose a lot of this just seems to be a lot of work just to create a false sense of security. He could get around any of this. It is a way of life here (getting around the government blocks) so it wouldn't stop him (if he wants to do this again) and it won't make me feel secure.

He never wrote an NC before recently because he ended it with the OW before he came back to me, so I had nothing to do with their break up (aside from exposing four weeks earlier). Also we were fighting constantly as it was the first time I had seen him since the A started and I wouldn't let him stay at the house, so I was even more disconnected from the process, which took him weeks to entangle himself from (he says she was threatening to kill herself). When I started posting here, I was trying to work out if we should back-up and do and NC letter. Some people said yes, others said no. He did write it. I was really pleased with what he wrote.

We are discussing the fb thing this weekend. He is jetlagged at the moment, so just keeping things light until we can focus. I do totally get the reasons people are saying, but I need to feel it myself to have the conversation effectively. I know people think it's weird I don't see fb as much of a threat given the history. But it's like, if an airline has a plane crash, I feel that airline is about as safe as you can get from that point onward. In my mind things don't happen in the same way twice. They might happen twice (!) but not in the same way.

The good news is he is 6000 miles away from her for the next 248 days! So while I am not trusting too soon, I am feeling like we have some space to dive into this recovery without distractions and without me having to be too militant, which is a luxury I should enjoy while I can.

I do have a separate question about the results of the needs survey. I will post separately.

Whoever said I am trying to punish him by keeping the shells out? That has a ring of truth to it. I might be doing that. I actually forgot about them but just looked up and saw them...they are not a trigger for me now, for some reason. What is? A woman I work with who looks a bit like the OW. Maybe I'm just weird.

Sorry if I left out details people asked. It's late and I couldn't get the computer to work unless I went to the screen where you couldn't see previous posts.

Thanks again - so much great advise.

Yes they can. My FWW first A --> Myspace, second A --> Facebook. So pretty much the same way. The problem for me (and you now), is that he will be more careful using it next time. The only thing more devious than a wayward, is an experienced wayward. Just be careful here.

That was me and I said that because I used to do things like that myself...until I found MB and learned the more effective way to recover was to change our lifestyle and focus on the present not the past. So put the shells away ok?

I also used to try to talk myself out of snooping. However, I got over that after DDay #2. Snooping is an excellent way to rebuild the trust when you can verify what he is doing when he thinks that you are not looking.

Emphasis on "when he thinks you are not looking." which implies that you keep some of your surveillance methods unknown to him.

PS, we don't think it is "weird," we think it is a reaction based on inexperience. You just are not able to comprehend the risk that the rest of us can see. When a spouse gets hit by a car playing chicken, wouldn't it be smart to get out the road? Well, you are telling us that you "don't see the threat." And that is fine. You don't know HOW to recover a marriage and we get that. But we are trying to tell you HOW.

Just let him know that getting rid of facebook is a very basic extraordinary precaution to prevent another affair. It's not even negotiable.

And about the keyloggers, I would find a few that he uses the MOST for and install keyloggers on those. A good one cost about $100 for the first one, but the 2nd and 3rd usually come with a significant price break. You can program the computer's virus and anti-spyware to ignore the keyloggers so he can't find them in a scan. This is yet another basic method of snooping that will keep you safe and create more trust in your marriage. A good one is eblaster at spectorsoft.com.

I've heard Dr H describe a few one night stand affairs as not true addictions. The WHs found it easy to ditch them. However they were still strictly NC'd because sex can trigger emotions we are not aware of.

Anyone who met emotional needs in an affair will have become an addiction. Affairs are fake, which also makes them PERFECT. Affairees always say lots of cheap, fake supportive nonsense to each other which feels euphoric on top of the needs met at home. You must remember that we are talking about brain chemicals which are more addictive than crack cocaine.

Love is more addictive than crack cocaine - and affairs are like a more intense, pure, perfect (however unrealstic) shot of that. Everyone on the planet would be addicted to this if exposed to it.

It's why adultery spreads like wildfire.



Affairs have absolutely nothing to do with the needs met by the BS.

The high flown, fake, fantasy is created all on its own by two people. The BS plays no part in that.

No real person or relationship can compete with the perfection of la-la land.

Your ability to meet needs had NOTHING to do with his affair.

You are still not getting how much of a danger renewed contact is to your M as it is in ANY affair. We have seen how gaping holes like the ones that you have in your EP plan end up leading to the affair restarting, and I predict it is going to take getting burned for you to take this more seriously.

Again, (1) email & phone number should be changed, FB dropped and any other way they communicated closed and (2) keyloggers should be installed on the home computers AND his cell phone. Quietly.

Just because he has access to other computers and social networking at the workplace s NOT a reason to skip these steps. If that was the case, no one would implement these measures.