Any advice how far and to what details, is it good to me to go asking questions. The affair lasted 8 years, with meetings 2-3 times a year, there were also two shorter affairs earlier on. She is sorry in NC and we are committed to recovery. She does resist further questions saying they are too painful.
I do feel it is selfish of her to resist for this reason, feeling that this pain is something she should gladly care to show willingness to recovery.
On other hand I am afraid if all those details will help me recover. Any real life experiences that it actually helped of hurt to delve in older past?

T1963,

You need to write down a very complete list of questions in a notebook, provide alot of space for her responses, have WW answer them in writing in the notebook.

Then take her to a polygraph have the examiner ask WW if she answered your questions truthfully.

You have gone through hell for years and years, your WW can suffer for a few hours of truth.

You also need to go back and expose the OM to their wives and etc. Unless you want your WW to continue cheating on you.

God Bless
Gamma

I want to avoid "interrogations", we had some of those in past and it was not good. I want to be building our new love an avoiding LB but I do fell I need those answers to closure.

I am thinking of writing a possibly list of questions, as factual and nonjudgmental as possible but including detailed intimate things when I feel I need to know them. I want to give it to her in one of the moments when I feel somewhat down, asking her to have it and to bring them up whenever she feels ready to talk, stressing that the earlier we are done with them the sooner we can move ahead.
One remaining question to I want and can handle details that I do not know, like what did they do that we haven't done, in what way as he better than me, why couldn't she stop despite several crises. How close she was to decide to leave me.
Couple years ago he divorced, clearly hoping she will choose him, she did not .. but was close at times.

Can you tell us what you know about the affairs, please? When did the last one end? How did it end? How do you know there has been NC? I read a little from the last thread you started in 2007, and it seems as if she was refusing to go NC for some time.

Who were these OM - old boyfriends, work colleagues? Were any of them married? Were their wives told about the affairs? Were your children ever told about them? Who else was told - parents, friends?

You seem to have had an incomplete recovery - which is to say no recovery - from these affairs, especially the long one, since you are still asking questions all these years later. If you had been given Dr Harley's advice when you posted here before, you would have made sure contact had ended and was impossible to restart, and begun a new, transparent lifestyle that integrated your daily lives so that you never needed to wonder what your wife was doing without you. Yo would have spent at least 15 hours every week out of the house on dates alone together and you would have asked all your questions about the affair before you entered recovery, and then never brought it up again. Bringing up the affair simply keeps the most unpleasant and hurtful thing that ever happened to you on the front burner, poisoning the atmosphere between you and interfering with your happiness.

Your wife has had a high number of affairs covering a long period of your marriage. It is unusual to come across a married woman who has so many affairs. Everyone who has affairs does so because they allow someone else to meet their emotional needs, but your wife seems to have had a secret second life for most of her marriage. Why would she have done that?

When a spouse wants to stay married to a serial cheater, Dr Harley recommends a complete change in lifestyle so that the cheater cannot continue to behave as they did before, dating other people while married, as if marriage meant nothing. This often means that they cannot work in mixed workplaces ever again.

There is so much to ask and wonder about in your situation that I almost don't know where to start, so I'll leave it with the questions I asked at the beginning of this post and await your answers.

tomek, what is there to save here? Surely you accept this is a way of life for her? The real question is why you choose to live like this?

It is a crying shame she did not leave you yet. "YET" being the key word.

She has no reason to quit having affairs.

Thank you guys, but I did not ask you to critisize and judge me, with as little material as you have. This is not helpful at all. Could someone instead answer the question I posed, give as example of detaile level they did ask about affairs and how id did help or hinder the recovery.

Why should we not judge your situation? So you can remain in denial for a few more years? Enabling your denial is not "helpful." I believe anyone with sanity can judge your situation and judge accurately that there is nothing to save here.

A marriage with a serial cheater is not a marriage. I ask you seriously, what is there to save here?

It doesn't look like you are the best judge of what is helpful and what is not. How are you in a position to judge that?

I apologise if my questions came across as criticising or judging. As you say, we have little material about your situation, and the questions I asked were to try and understand it better.

I asked because I am unable to answer a general question about when to stop asking for information about the affairs in a specific case. Dr Harley's advice is for the key information to be obtained as quickly as possible after D Day. Ideally, when the affair ends (which might not be immediately after D Day), as the couple decides to rebuild the marriage, the betrayed spouse is given the key information about the affair. This includes the name of the affair partner, because the BS must know the identity of the person who will forever be a threat to their marriage, and the general conditions under which the affair took place; did it involve business travel? Visiting each other's homes or booking into hotels while the spouses were at work? The BS also needs to know how long the affair lasted and they need to have evidence that it has ended as is impossible to restart, otherwise recovery cannot really begin. The BS cannot go into recovery with unknown facts causing them worry, such as whether the APs are still in contact.

However, Dr Harley recommends against the couple having conversations that revisit the affair over and over. Once the major information dump has been held at the beginning of recovery, the subject of the affair should never be brought up again. The couple should get on with the work of recovery, building a new, integrated, happy, romantic marriage. If the affair is ever brought up during recovery it ruins the building of this happy marriage.

So, that is why I asked about what you already know about the affairs. If you do not know the identity of some of the OMs, if you do not really know whether your wife is still in a position to contact them, or if you do not know whether the wives were told and are holding their husbands accountable at their ends, you may well be wandering around blindly hoping to be in recovery when really contact might still be continuing, which is not recovery at all.

If, however, you already know major details of each affair, such as what happened and with whom, and you know that there is no possibility of contact, then you should not be asking any more questions about the affairs. If there are problems in your marriage then it may well be that you are not following Dr Harley's programme for recovery, rather than because there is more you need to know about the affairs. If you build a happy, romantic marriage then you will not want to ask about the affairs, which were the worst thing that ever happened to you. Talking about them will ruin your happiness as a couple for days. Bringing the affairs up from time to time is also a way of continually punishing your wife.

I asked all my questions because by now, apparently several years after the last affair ended, you shouldn't still be asking questions. The affairs should be not be a topic of discussion after all this time, but if your wife has kept major secrets from you then you cannot begin to recover and you will need to find out the missing answers, so I asked you what answers were missing.

Once again; this is not intended to criticise or judge you, but to help. I spent some time yesterday and today writing to you that I need not have bothered spending.

Thank you sugarcane, my angry comment was adresses mostly at melodyline who as you can see latr really went out of line with her attacks. I apologize for sharp words adressed to You.

To answer more. The previous affair ended about 10 years age. 7 years ago she started profesional friendship that turned quickly to emotional affair. Till last month I was. Ot aware of its reach and was oscillationg between trying to limit ot and accepting my defeat in hopes that this will be a safe outlet. We are forigners and do still feel lonely here.
Only a month ago i found out it was a PA, lasting 7 years, and slow going, they meet 2-3 times a year on professional confeences. In those years the OM divorced, clearly planning to start new life with my wife, but she opposed it from onset and decided to stay with me. I am in contact with his ex but this is not much help.
She promisses NC and show how devoted to recovery she is, but it is impossible to have a solid proof in the future. Lets face it. If she will want to hide it better i cannot prevent it, and I know it. All the preventive measures can be overcome . I do have to admit that my questions have also ulterior motives, curiosity, will to punish her, wanting her to pay some price.
She keeps asking "what do you want me to do, I will do whatever it takes" but what is thee that I can ask, other that, stop this behaiour forever?

Oh my goodness, I've been through this. My H's 3.5-year PA took place during business travel. When I discovered it first, after it had been going on for six weeks, he simply pretended to stop seeing her and it never occurred to me that the addictive nature of an affair would mean that he was continuing. He carried on meeting her on every business trip, meeting for sex in hotels about twice a month (travelling from London to Brussels, and sometimes spending whole nights in other European cities when she had to travel for work) - oh my, it was a completely parallel life, a complete other marriage for him.

I think some instinct drew me to this thread because I could sense that your wife's affair is not over. Is she continuing to travel for work? If so, she is seeing him, you can count on that.

I need to leave the forum for a few hours but I will be back later. In the meantime, I urge you to listen to what MelodyLane has to say to you, if she comes back after you have dismissed her as you have. She helped me end my H's affair for good and save my marriage. She did more for me than I could have done for myself. You'd be a fool to kick her off your thread.

Thanks, what is over and not over if they meet 2-3 times a year. She is travelling next time in may, he said he will change plans and not go. She suggested we go together but i see no sense of it. I am not able to control her every move. She has career that she will not end, and that require some degree of independence.
If I would need to make it impossiibe to have an affair i better divorce now.
Did your husband stopped traveling? Stopped going to work?

I'm not SugarCane but I had similar happen. 12+ years of my husband having "another wife".

He had to quit his job that "required independence". It took us making it impossible to have another affair. For a time, I even had to follow him into public restrooms so that he didn't ask to borrow a stranger's phone to contact her while he was in the restroom. <---and it took MelodyLane pointing it out to me that he WOULD contact her in any way he could find. Affairs are addictions, and I had to learn to look at him as an addict on crack.

You're right, if you don't want to take the steps necessary to make it impossible to have an affair, then divorce is the other option. If YOU and your wife won't take the steps to totally respect and honor your marriage by safeguarding it in this way, then there is no hope for recovery to even begin. You can't even get to "ground zero" with a clear slate until you are ready to take these steps.

When a couple decides to attempt reconciliation, one of the first things Dr. Harley recommends is examining the conditions of the affair. Then the couple must work on eliminating every single condition.

One of the conditions of many affairs is travel. So he strongly suggests avoiding spending nights apart, since this encourages a secret second life.

And yes, many people here have had to change careers, leave jobs, move, end friendships, share passwords, install keyloggers, and any other action that would be needed in their situation to make having an affair essentially impossible. And it's worth it, because affairs are so common and so devastating. Anything a couple can do to make it virtually impossible to have an affair is worth it.

If you and your wife cannot end the business travel, then recovery is impossible. Even if she never has another affair, the travel will be a trigger for you.

My H occasionally still must travel for his job, but I always go with him now.

tomek, to answer how much to know about the affair. As much as you want. Unanswered questions will haunt you for over thirty years.

Though you have to be told that whatever answers that you hear you will never be able to unhear them.

You need to learn about recovery from affairs. Start by reading all the articles on this website. Get the book Surviving An Affair by Dr Harley.

Your WW needs to leave that job. Risk of having affairs spending nights away are to great for having an affair. Your WW has shown that she can not handle that situation.

Have you ever emailed Dr. Harley?

Email your questions to Joyce Harley at mbradio@marriagebuilders.com. When your email question is chosen to be answered on the radio show, you will be notified by email directing you to listen to the rebroadcast. If you would like to consider being a caller, include your telephone number. You will be called by us to explain the procedure to you. Every caller will receive a complementary book by Dr. Harley that addresses their question.

tomek, you have been here for 14 years now dealing with affairs. You have the same problem today that you did when you arrived. You will be dealing with them for 14 more years unless and until you and your wife "make it impossible" for her to have an affair. That is the solution to your problem. Your wife has led a secret second life for [at least] the last 14 years and that was made possible by her job and by not having complete and total transparency in all of her dealings. Her life should be so transparent that it would be impossible for her to have an affair.

If that does not happen, then you should get divorced unless you are willing to continue to live in an open marriage.

That means she stops traveling and never spends the night away from you. She would need to follow extraordinary precautions to prevent another affair. Otherwise, there is nothing here to save. Your wife has affairs because she is a serial cheater who is actively looking for it.

From Surviving an Affair, pg 66-67

The extraordinary precautions do more than end marriage-threatening affairs; they help a couple form the kind of relationship they always wanted.

These recommendations may seem rigid, unnecessarily confining, and even paranoid to those who have not been the victim of infidelity. But people like Sue and Jon, who have suffered unimaginable pain as a result of an affair that spun out of control, can easily see their value. For the inconvenience of following my advice, Sue would have spared herself and Jon the very worst experience of their lives.


Checklist for How Affairs Should End

_____The unfaithful spouse should reveal information about the affair to the betrayed spouse.

_____The unfaithful spouse should make a commitment to the betrayed spouse to never see or talk to the lover OP again.

_____The unfaithful spouse should write a letter to the lover OP ending the relationship and send it with the approval of the betrayed spouse.

_____The unfaithful spouse should take extraordinary precautions to guarantee total separation from the lover OP:

_____Block potential communication with the lover OP (change e-mail address and home and cell phone numbers, and close all social networking accounts; have voice messages and mail monitored by the betrayed spouse).

_____Account for time (betrayed spouse and wayward spouse give each other a twenty-four-hour daily schedule with locations and telephone numbers).

_____Account for money (betrayed spouse and wayward spouse give each other a complete account of all money spent).

_____Spend leisure time together.

_____Change jobs and relocate if necessary.

_____Avoid overnight separation.

_____Allow technical accountability.

_____ Expose affair to family members, clergy, and/or friends.

Have you seen this?
Traveling Jobs

I do feel that I am entitled to have every question answered, and I am sure I can prevail to have her do it. But as you rightly said what is heard cannot be unheard, I am afraid, I am not sure to what degree of details I want to go .. wonder if people have experience with this ...

tomek, do you have Dr Harley's book, Survivng an Affair? It will take a very comprehensive approach to recover your marriage. Getting the truth is a very small, but important part. That should be your guide for marital recovery. You can download it right now on amazon.com in e-book form. In the meantime, Harley addresses this issue in this article: