Chobitz, that is an outstanding post and I agree with so much of it but I did want to address the comment above. While it is true that many people here have been victims of affairs,[many on this thread have not been victims of affairs] that does not make them paranoid. It makes them more aware of the signs of an affair. For example, Dr Harley has never been a victim of an affair and here is what he would say about situations like this:


He is a licensed clinical psychologist with 40 years experience. When someone is trained for years to deal with a certain problem are they more experienced or are they jaundiced? Most of the posters here have been dealing with affairs for YEARS [helping others on this board] and have experience in recognizing them, not because they are jaundiced or paranoid, but because they are experienced.

In this particular case, the signs of an affair are very obvious and compelling. When someone is in a fog, as she clearly is, they tend to gravitate to those who will validate that fog. I hope you continue to encourage her to give up her destructive behavior.


Perfectly said!

Agree x 1000.



We have seen this before. Not a good sign.

Chobitz, I just read your backstory and there is a very notable difference in how you handled your marriage problems versus chickenlittle. here You do what most women do in bad marriages: you work to turn it around. You look for solutions and you change behavior that is upsetting your partner. This forum has thousands of such threads. That is how a spouse will typically respond because that is the rational approach to the problem.

It is like my broken down car analogy. When the car is broken down in the garage do you drive to Cincinnati ["get some space"] or do you go into the garage and work on the car? It would be completely irrational to drive to Cincinnati when the car is in the garage. It is the same with marital problems. Obviously, one cannot fix a marriage if one is not there.

This is why a separation is almost always indicative of an affair, because separation will not help the marriage but it will help a person cover up an affair. In this case, it seems her husband has good reason to believe there is an affair.

Melody, thanks for your reply. I always love your advice on this forum, you are always right to the point. Just let me rectify: I didn't say the people on this forum are paranoid. I was referring to my husband, who I perceived to be paranoid back then. Obviously I later came to see that my actions caused this "paranoia" (yet again, my perception and not a fact). He had reason to feel hurt by my actions, although it was not my intention to hurt him. I never realized that I had such bad boundaries around men and only by implementing extraordinary precautions could I earn his trust and get peace in our lives.

Regardless of whether ChickenLittle is speaking the truth or not, her only way forward if she wants to stay in this marriage is total openness and integration.

Melody, just check the link, it goes to a Facebook page and not the forum post ;-)

Thanks for the heads up! I fixed it.

I should add that my husband and I had the same issues early in our marriage. My OS friendships upset him. I was also talking to my male friends about our marriage and my H rightly saw this as a threat. Once I cut it out, he stopped getting upset!

Wow, really? So I am not alone, lol. I feel TV series of today are to blame, displaying all the time how ok it is to be "just friends" with OS people and even exes, even if you are in a serious relationship. Society sees OS friendships as completely acceptable, which in my eyes is exactly why there are so many affairs.

Hi CL-I'm new here. I thought perhaps my story might give you some insight into OS friendships.

A quick background on my story. Exactly one year ago today I discovered that my H was having an emotional affair. I am
convinced that it was very close to becoming a physical affair too. The EA was a huge wake-up call for us both. We weren't familiar with MB at the time, but used a lot of the
methods Dr. H describes in how to recover from an affair without really knowing about MB...some tips we picked up from
other books, some from articles online, some things just felt "right" to us...but in the end, what we did was very
close to MB as far as recovery goes. I am happy to say that while the trust hasn't been completely rebuilt, we've come
a LONG way in the last year and both consider our marriage to be happy. In the last few weeks I've felt that I'm
really getting past the EA and have had this "now what" feeling...we were so focused on recovery, now we need to shift
focus on maintaining and growing our newly defined marriage. I ordered a few books on the subject and MB was one of
them and one of the better ones I read.

Anyway....your situation with your friend really reminded me of my H's EA. The story:

For many years we were friends with a couple...we'll call them Amy and Eric. We really were friends as a couple...at first. I hate talking on the phone, so my H was always the one to call them to make plans. Amy was a stay at home mom, so she was usually the one to answer when my H would call. They'd have a friendly chat, make plans for dinner or whatever and all seemed fine. Over the years I had "uneasy" feelings about his interactions with her though. Nothing specific enough to make a fuss about (at least that's how I looked at things then), but things just felt a little too friendly. At the time, I thoroughly believed that OS friends were fine, healthy even and that I shouldn't feel uneasy about this relationship. I thought that even if they did secretly have crushes on each other, that it was harmless because they'd never hurt Eric or I.

Fast forward about 10+ years. Slowly my husband and Eric weren't really interacting anymore....they both were busy, schedules didn't match up....Eric and Amy had five kids and could almost
never do anything social with us anymore. But my H would still call to check in with them from time to time. These calls were always answered by Amy. Amy and Eric started having marital problems. My H and I were having our own issues...neither of our EN were being met, we just didn't understand that yet. My H called one day and Amy was crying...confessed to him that she was having an EA with an old lover (I am pretty sure it was a physical affair too, but she didn't admit to that)...she had even gone so far as to travel across the country to spend time with the old lover and Eric thought she was going on a road trip with a female friend. All of a sudden the calls between my H and Amy picked up in frequency. Alarm bells were going off in my head...it didn't seem right for her to be telling my H such intimate details of her life. But, I argued to myself...she needed a friend to talk to. She was telling him about
this other man in her life....surely I didn't need to worry about my H...Amy already had her hands full with two men in her life...her H and her old lover. After a few weeks of this, my H told Amy that Eric was like a brother to him and he didn't feel right knowing about her EA and didn't want to hear about it. Amy was quite upset about that and they didn't speak for months.

A few months roll by. Eric comes over and unloads to H and I...his marriage is miserable, Amy says she doesn't love him anymore...they are still living in the same house, but barely speaking. While Eric is there he mentions that he needs to purchase a musical instrument for one of their kids and can't afford it. H happened to have one he wasn't using and gave it to the family. Amy sends him polite but somewhat cold text thanking him. He replies back saying that he heard things aren't good between her and Eric and if she ever wants to talk, he's there. A few days later they start up the phone calls and texts again. At that point H was telling me what was being said in the conversations. She asked him if he'd ever cheated on me. He said he hadn't and she tried to explain why she had on Eric. I got really upset that she had asked him that...it scared me that their friendship was so close that such intimate details/secrets
would be shared. But yet H said, and I agreed, that they were just friends. She needed someone to talk to. He was just being a good friend. That seemed logical, but my instincts were screaming "you're going to be hurt...this is NOT OK".

I peeked at his phone a few times. Saw that their texts were a little too friendly/flirty, but nothing I felt was inappropriate enough to make a stink about. Then a year ago today, I took another look at his phone and saw all of the texts between he and she had been deleted, even though his texts with other people were still there. It took a couple of days for it to all come out...I'll spare the specific details, but in the end I am comfortable that it wasn't a physical affair, but an EA that was about to morph into a physical one.

Our marriage almost didn't survive this. Eric and Amy are not divorced yet, but he's moving out in two months.

I wanted to tell you our story because for more than a decade, my husband maintained this OS friendship and it seemed appropriate. If you had asked me if I was OK with it, I would have said yes. Even when the EA was discovered, for a short while we both thought OS friendships should be OK...throughout our lives we've both had them. But we've learned a lot over the past year (not just MB, but from a number of sources), those OS friendships are dangerous. It's like playing with fire. We've agreed not to have them and that we even need to be careful with friendships with other couples.

Anyway, sorry for such a long post, but some of the things you've said about your friendship with this man and about his wife supporting it really reminded me of our situation. Some of your own comments about your views on having privacy and OS friendships sounded so much like how I used to feel...these relationships really are very dangerous, even if they don't seem that way at first. I supported my H's OS friendships...this one seemed harmless until all of a sudden it wasn't harmless at all.

Take care.

Awesome post, JenDee! If anyone wants to see how many opposite sex "friendships" end up, go over to the Surviving an Affair forum. There are 52,311 threads made by people who found out the HARD WAY where opposite sex friendships lead.

Almost all affairs start as opposite sex friendships. It usually occurs with people who say "I would never do that!!" because they have the poorest boundaries and don't recognize the risk. They believe they are immune because they are not out looking for it.........until they get hit by a car!

Its like the drunk driver who insists he is a great driver!

A very minute amount of those affairs happened with people who were actually out looking for them. They are the rare exception.

People who don't want to hear the truth about themselves always regard being told the truth as a DJ. The plain truth is that exposure will continue to deliver a torrent of DJs directed at your wayward behavior from people all around you, so you might as well get used to it.

You can decide that while living at home. Move home.

The thing is - that's an unethical thing to do to ZEL. You are putting him through all sorts of pain for the sake of your experiment. And as my wife said, there are other ways you could make this decision.

In fact carrying on a relationship with another man is the worst trauma you could possibly inflict on your husband. In the research that has been done, people who have been through multiple major life traumas that include having their spouse carry on like this have rated the other relationship as being the worst trauma they have been through. It outranks the loss of a limb, suffering serious physical abuse, going through a war, or even the loss of a child.

It's all well and good that you want to experiment, but you are experimenting at the expense of another human being. That is a seriously painful and unethical thing to do to him.

A better experiment would be to actually try Marriage Builders. You haven't actually tried it yet, although you've read about it. You've compromised the Marriage Builders plan beyond recognition.

You could actually try the Marriage Builders plan to restore love, but you'd have to practice radical honesty and transparency with your husband, eliminate your secret second life, and eliminate your opposite sex friendships.

The thing is, the plan would actually work.

Any chance you bought the books I recommended?

Your need to get a fix from men using social media is what is causing you to feel depressed...it's false admiration and an addiction. Unless you sever this false admiration fix you'll go the rest of your life feeling like you do now. No man can fix this for you .... you have to want to fix it. By severing ties to this false admiration and letting your husband be the only one to meet this need you will automatically feel 1000x better once you get through withdrawal.

None of these men will leave their wives for you ... you are all just pathetic social media junkies who are destroying lives around you. These men are only using you to get their own fix.

Any man you try to use to get this need met will always fall short ... so you'll have to go through life prowling for low lifes who will give you your quick fix. Is that how you want to spend the second half of your life?

Most women struggle to get the man they love off the couch or to talk to them. Your husband is pulling out all the stops to show you he loves you. That he will make your world a happy one.

That is worth some consideration, no?

ChickenLittle, I was married to a hypercritical guy, and felt so much like you have described. Are you all getting out of the house for dates? I found that being in close proximity to others, my ex treated me so much nicer and I got a better glimpse of the man I fell in love with.

Have you each done the DJ worksheet? Sounds like a needed eye-opener that I am hoping could breach the gap in your understanding of one another here.

A man will do so much but when he stops he stops for good. So now's the time to jump on the train if you want to have a romantic marriage

She is currently wrapped up in a host of other men meeting her needs. Until she is willing to close her lovebank to ALL men...her husband will spin his wheels and their marriage will continuously get worse.

This relationship is a case of a serial cheater unwilling to give up her addiction to men, and her husband cowering to her fogbabble.