Yes this is correct. I still love her although 3 months of her blaming me has changed the way I feel. Before the affair she was kind, sweet and caring but I realise now like with her depression she never communicated properly, always burying what she felt even if she wasn't happy with something. We stopped having sex but I thought this was something she wanted, still loved her even though that was missing.

I am not a quitter and take my marriage vows seriously so would still be willing to work on it and have tried but she is still with the OM so do wonder if given all the issues we have to deal how easy it is going to be to reconcile

I posted this on another thread earlier this week:

The reason I posted this to him and that I'm repeating it to you, is not at all to say that marriages without children should not be fought for, but to try and show you how it might seem from the point of view of a WW with no children, in a relatively short marriage. If she has convinced herself she is no longer in love with you, what is the incentive for her to give the marriage another try?

You have written here about becoming discouraged during Plan A to the point that you now want to enter plan B. Plan B is appropriate when the BS feels their love bank becoming depleted as you have said, as it protects it from further depletion and shields the BS from further pain. It sometimes also has the effect of making the WS miss the life they had with the BS, but that effect is felt strongest when there are children, and when the marriage is relatively long.

I have heard Dr Harley convince BHs in your position, without the pull of kids and a long marriage, to Plan A for longer than other BHs because if they want a shot at saving their marriage, Plan A is the best they can do. Plan B is unlikely to work with a childless WW who is nearly or actually out of the door.

There are no obvious solutions for you. I just wanted to make those points for your consideration.

Thanks Sugarcane, food for thought. It sounds like its going to be much harder for me to save this. When I asked her to leave she did say she loved me but whether that actually means anything I don't know.

It sounds like I need to decide if I want/ am able to plan A for a long period of time. Currently the thought of doing that given how she had treated me does fill me with dread but maybe that will change.

I also think you writing Dr. Harley will help you figure this out. When can you write him?

I will write to him now. Any tips, do I need be as detailed as possible?

Thanks BH

You're welcome, friend.

Give him a summary of your marriage and where you're at now. Tell him where you're at mentally and emotionally.

Read this thread and listen to the clips. Tell us what you think.
jah's thread-Three affairs-is it time to quit?

The thing about Plan A is that it is done when the WS is still with the OP. For a betrayed wife Dr Harley recommends abandoning Plan A very quickly if the WH continues to see the OW, but for a BH he recommends a much longer Plan A. This is partly to do with the different constitutional strengths of men and women; men are normally able to soldier on in the face of an active affair for much longer than women. It is also to do with the relative positions of wayward men and wayward women when they have affairs.

Men are quite capable of indulging in sexual activity with more than one woman at a time. They do not have to be in love to break their marriage vows and even if they fall in love with OW, they are easily capable of loving more than one woman at a time. Therefore they often want to keep their marriage and keep their affair. They are usually cake-eaters.

Women find it distasteful (to say the least) to be married to one man and have sex with another, and they do not have affairs because of a primary interest in sex, as men do. As a general rule, women have affairs when they have fallen out of love with their husbands, and they usually do so after a long time of feeling unloved and neglected. (This is not to excuse or sympathise with women's affairs at all.) A married woman's affair is often undertaken only when she is on the way out of the marriage and has no intention of coming back.

This means that a different kind of attack is needed depending on whether the wayward is a man or a woman. A wayward man should be abandoned into the arms of his OW, whom, he will soon find out, is not half the woman his faithful wife is, and is also not the mother of his children. He will miss the love of his wife and children and he will miss the life he had with them. He possibly never intended to leave his wife for OW and would have been sublimely happy to have had both women to hand for years to come. Plan B forces him to make a choice between the women, and the choice is far more likely to be his wife than his whore.

A wayward woman, however, has already grown to hate her life before she had the affair. She may feel that she has spent years putting up with neglect, indifference or whatever and that now is her time. She is ready to walk and if her husband pushes her out of the door with Plan B she will run. Her feeling that she has been ill cared for must be overcome by the BH if he is to win her back, and he can only show her that she is loved and cared for by doing a sustained Plan A. When he eventually can do that no more and goes to Plan B, the wife will know that she had somebody who fought hard for her for months, and who was prepared to love her despite what she did to him by having her affair. That sends a powerful message to a woman when eventually her affair breaks down.

For a betrayed H, the strategy is usually to wait out the affair while being the best husband he can be. A betrayed wife should wash her hands of her H and turn her attention away from the affair, but a betrayed H needs to do the opposite.

I am only saying above what I have heard Dr H say in many many radio shows. The Plan A message comes across much more clearly if you listen to the radio show regularly, than if you read SaA and the advice columns on this site. A betrayed H has a long, hard and selfless struggle on his hands if he wants to do Plan A properly. That isn't to say that he should not go to Plan B ever, but he needs to dig deep for Plan A, rise above the hurtful behaviour and hurtful things that his wife will say to him, and Plan A for a long time. I don't think that 3 months is what Dr H meant for a man.

Again, I don't see any easy solutions in your case, with a 4-year marriage and no kids and a wife who has already left home. I don't think your chances of recovery are high. However, I think you need to fully understand the strategy of Plan A-ing a wayward wife before you decide on Plan B.

Thanks SugarCane, really helpful. I suppose the only difference in my case is that my WS has had a huge amount of other stresses in her life that will have played a role in her unhappiness. We have been doing a self build and been living on site in a caravan through the winter, were infested with mice, she hates her job, feels like she is the parent to her mum and sister, has been depressed for years, gets frustrated with her friends, the list goes on but I hope she may begin to gain some clarity once the ads begin to have an effect and she has had some time to think. However it could firm up her resolve, I don't know. I also think exposure will make her more reluctant to reconcile as she has told her friends i am th villain and has said she can't face my family,

Those aren't differences; those are exactly the sorts of stresses that wives take into account when they decide that the marriage isn't worth it. Instead of a self-build, most wives have kids and might have had to work full-time and care for ageing parents as well. It is not just the interaction with her H; it is life as a wife in general that drains some women.

It would be a hard task to solve each of the problems on your list (the caravan, the mice, the sister and mother, the career, the friends), but each and every one of those issues must be removed if she is to feel happier about her life.

If she hates living in a caravan you need to move to a rental house until yours is ready, or sell the self-build before it is ready, or something else, but stop living in a caravan. If she feels like a parent to her mother and sister she needs to stop doing whatever she has been doing for them - and so on. Each one of those problems is solvable (if not easily so).

If she is young and as yet childless, you could sell the self-build or rent until it is finished and she could give up her job and go to university, to change her career. If you sell the self-build you could move to a cheap part of the country so that you do not need her income. There are solutions but you need to think of several and talk to her, negotiating a lifestyle that would make you both happy.

Sugarcane, just wanted to thankyou for your detailed replies, they are really helpful.

As soon as I found about the affair we moved into rented accommodation but she carried on with the affair which is why I asked her to leave. The thing with the self build it was her dream to live in the country. She wanted it more than me.

I have tried in the past to solve the others but she seems unwilling. She has complained about her job every day for the past 3 years. I have suggested she look for something else, reduce her hours, go bak to university but she always made excuses. I have offered to support her financially whilst she find something sh ould enjoy.She hated her previous job and the one before that.

Similarly with the others I have tied to make suggestions to help, many many times. Maybe I have not been communicating properly but have tried many different approaches. If deep down she has been depressed ( and not.telling anyone) maybe this has meant she hasn't felt she wanted to do things differently, I don't know.

I'm no expert on depression, but from what I understand it could have worked to stop her lifting her head up and seeing the any possibilities for change. it is a seriously debilitating illness. It may be that the best course for you now is to Plan A while waiting for the medication to take effect so that she is more receptive to negotiating a future with you.

When it comes to making suggestions, you will have to work really hard not to sound fed up and frustrated when she rejects everything you suggest. When she rejects changing jobs again, changing again if she is still unhappy, going back to university, giving up work for a while�absolutely everything you say, you must not adopt a "well do something, for goodness sake"�seething irritation with the constant objections and rejections. You need to commit absolutely NO love busters at all if you are to win her back, either now or when the affair ends.

You should order Dr Harley's book on negotiating, He Wins She Wins, from Amazon right now (or from the online MB bookstore, if you are in the USA, which I suspect you are not). You should also read Lovebusters. You should listen to the radio show every day (it is played online on a loop) so that you really learn the concept of the Love Bank and learn how your interactions and your lifestyle affect your wife. You will also hear a lot about Plan A-ing a wife and how sustained it needs to be.

When you write to Dr H as I think you plan to do, you should ask him about the fact that you told her to leave because of the affair. Living apart makes Plan A difficult, and it allows her to carry on her affair without hindrance. I don't know whether he would suggest asking her to move back in, but I think you need his advice about that. He might suggest you wait a month or so for her medication to work and then discuss the marriage, making offers to change your lifestyle so that you can both be happy.

Thanks SC. I have been very careful about LB when offering advice, partly because I used to try and solve the problems in a previous relationship which caused major issues. I only suggest nowadays and don't take offence when my WS decides not to follow my suggestion.

The main criticism my WS has about me is that I haven't taken her feelings into account and perhaps that is true. I have not noticed her depression or unhappiness (but then no one else has) but I do accept that managing the self build has been all consuming in terms of time and energy and I clearly missed the signs.

Will get those books, thanks. You are correct don't live in the US, live in the UK, how did you know?

Because you said "mum"! Around here it's all "mom", which is simply not correct.

I live in London.

Ah ok, yes mom is not right! I live in Manchester.

You have made me think about what some of the common problems my WS has had. Generally it seems she gets frustrated with someone to the point of it affecting her. With work she tries to change her job but that doesn't help as there is always another set of people to frustrate her. Her mum and sister she complains to me about them all the time but never tells them. Her friends she doesn't see as often rather than discussing her frustrations with them and then when I started to do some LBs I went on the list.

Does anyone know what this is? She works in healthcare, patient facing so she her job is to always ask about her patients but to never reveal her feelings.

When she said she had been unhappy for 14 years she also said she wanted to run away and live on her own in an isolated cottage away from people. Common theme maybe

Haha I knew that's what SugarCane was going to say.

If mum is mom. What do you say for dad?

Dad is the same, dad or grumpy old man if I am not in ear twisting distance of him!

From the complaints you listed earlier in the thread it seems that she complained to you for some time and you did not address her complaints. In Plan A, you will need to show respect for her complaints and her perspective and show a willingness to respond to everything she complained about. You need to make a sustained effort to show that your marriage will be different - for life - if she ever comes back to you.

Did you plan to have children? Is there any contention about that issue?

When you first questioned her about the affair she claimed that it was not serious and that she had ended it. I know that spouses lie about affairs as a matter of course (mine did to a staggering degree) but I have a feeling that her affair was not as embedded as many are. It particularly worries me that you told her to move out on the basis of erased text messages and hiding her phone. Clearly there was still communication between her and OM and she admitted as much, but you don't know how deeply it had gone and yet you pushed her out. As a childless wife in a relatively short marriage, what was to stop her leaving of her own accord if she was in love with OM and completely finished (in her mind) with you? And yet she didn't leave - you made her leave, and now if you want to save the marriage, you have to Plan A this "single" woman who was unhappy in her marriage to you, from a distance. That is going to be so hard to do effectively.

This is what I want you to ask Dr Harley about; whether you should ask her to come back if, as she says, she is finished with OM, or if the affair is not deeply entrenched. The whole point of Plan A is that it fights an active affair. I'm not sure that it was tactically wise to put her out of the home because the affair did not end immediately after exposure.

If this affair is little more than her getting her head turned by the nearest man to pay her a few compliments, you can fight that and win her back. How can you know when she has finished with him, and what should be the conditions of her return? I read that this was "the builder next door" but also that you moved into rented accommodation recently. Is he next door in that new accommodation, or have you left him behind? If so, how far behind? How easy would it be for them to see each other now? How near is he to the self-build, when that is finished? If he is near, you can never move into that house, so as I suggested before, you need to make plans to sell it. I don't know about the housing market where the house is, but in London things are absolutely crazy and you could sell a shoe box within a week for half a million pounds. If you are going to have to sell, do it now while the market is hot.

Have you begun composing that email to Dr H? I don't think that we foreigners can be on the radio show in person, so that means that you need to write a detailed email so that they have all the information they need to discuss you on the show and give you full answers to this problem.

Remind me, please, of this OM's circumstances. Is he married? Did you expose to his wife or girlfriend?

Did you expose to OM's grown children and his GF?

Hi,that was the only person I couldn't track down, his ex girlfriend. I exposed to his facebook friends, sons (they are grown up) his work colleagues and his customers. He threatened to sue me for slander.

He is not married.