Thanks for the encouragement, WC! I did get a chance to talk to a friend who's an attorney (although not in divorce law), he gave me a great idea on a possible weakness in WW's case. If it comes down to a custody battle I can pull it out of my back pocket if necessary. I will talk to the same divorce lawyer whom I will talk 17 years ago in D-Day 1 soon.

I did have a discussion with WW tonight. I mentioned that the divorce legal fees will likely run $50-75K. Why don't we not go through that and put the money towards renovating our house instead? Spend $100K on the house instead of some lawyers' yachts? That did get her thinking.

Atta boy! Good going man.

Good job! Could you follow it up with a trip to a home improvement store and dream a little? Frankly, if she's been visiting apartments, you want to emphasize how better your home is/can be. There is no way she can afford an apartment nearly as nice as your home.

Yes, I've arranged for a designer to come this week to work with us... This was one of her big complaints, that I wasn't involved with her on the project (she hates making ANY decisions). She said she will think about it. I mentioned this while watching HGTV with her. Hope she will bite!

***EDIT***

citation needed.

I've heard Dr. Harley talk about how it's almost impossible to get women to leave an abusive relationship, so it sounds like you misunderstood.

Also, you don't understand Dr. Harley's definition of abuse, so I don't think you need to be advising people on the subject.

***EDIT***

This was certainly my experience

I had no idea how abusive my husband was (30 year marriage) until I looked back on it. I would not have divorced him had I not discovered that he was also a serial adulterer with no desire to change. Women are wired to adapt and adapt in a desperate attempt to find a way to stay married but of course at great personal cost.

***EDIT***

Update: Had a great conversation with the divorce attorney. He actually remembered our conversation 17 years ago (I didn't actually pay him anything at the time, since we reconciled so quickly then).
He said I've done a great job protecting my assets and chances are WW will have a difficulty time claiming my house, since I purchased it three years before marriage and put a large down on it. I never made the mistake of converting it to a joint deed, even though WW pushed me several times. At most she can claim just a small part of the house since my income funded the vast majority of the payments.
The best part is I most likely do not need to have to finance her separation or her apartment. She will need to think hard if she wants to take $20K from MIL to sign a lease and live in a dumpy apartment. MIL is very thrifty so this is going to hurt a lot!
He did say given the situation, I have an incredibly generous human spirit to be willing to reconcile with WW a second time. He asked if I am willing to have this lingering doubt in my life, even if she reconciled, perhaps for materialistic reasons. I told him it's only been two months and she's still in the fog and I unfortunately still love her. But I guess that is truly food for thought.
I do have the designer coming in a couple days. I asked WW to be there, she said, "Well, if you want me to be." So the carrot may be working as well as the stick.

typicalman, please check your email.

***EDIT***

Moderator's note: STOP!

Still frustrated by inability to find the secret cell phone. WW is on guard all times, I've sneaked out and looked in the car, nothing. She was suspicious as to what I was doing... Don't want to make a Lovebuster over it. She's got the room arranged a certain way to notice if I've been searching around...
I've asked DS to help me search for it as well. She's got it off most of the time so I can't call and find it. Turning into a real cat-and-mouse game!
She figured out I was tracking with her main cell phone, so she turns it off at times. But from triangulating with credit card purchases it looks like she just goes to the mall for shopping trips (I used to complain before about how often she goes there to shop!)
VAR should be arriving in the next few days, will get the velcro ready!
Any other snooping techniques I'm potentially missing?

Are you putting a VAR around the house also? You might be able to hear where she is putting the phone or nanny cams?

Yes, I better go order another VAR.
I woke up at 4 am and started searching the car again. But WW woke up as well and confronted me, asking what I was looking for. I told her, your secret phone of course. She got really mad again and went into the fogbabble about how we shouldn't be together then, if there is no "trust." How can I have trust if she's the one betraying me?
Anyway, a wasted effort. She got mad and said what I said about redoing the house, etc. is all because I want to save "my" money. So difficult to talk to her in this condition.
Will have to redouble the snooping efforts, but on the low down. Probably will have to lay low for a few days to wait for her guard to be down.

Ohmigosh!! I am sorry to laugh but that is so crazy. I would tell her that you would have trust if she would stop hiding things from you.

That's exactly what I told her. But as you know, there's no point in arguing with someone in the Fog, and she definitely is, or is going through withdrawals. It's so frustrating how my life is a series of up and downs now for two months since D-Day. I feel like I've contracted affair bipolarism. I'm just upset that I burned a Love Buster with the unsuccessful effort.
What my lawyer told me is hitting me now though. He is sympathetic to my willingness to reconcile, but asked, "Why do you want to trust her again when she has proven to be untrustworthy?" Especially when she is resistant to seeking help, whether through MB or other counselors.
She's betrayed me twice now, and I'll have to look over my shoulder for the rest of my life even if we were to reconcile, romantic love rekindled or not. And what's to say in the future the romantic is extinguished? This is so frustrating!

And he is correct, however, we have seen marriages like this turn into happy, affair proof marriages. If she doesn't come around in, let's say, 6 to 10 months, you will want to start thinking about separation.

The big thing you have going against you is that this is a very long term affair. That means she has essentially been fogged out for your entire marriage. Not saying she can't change, but it sure is a long shot. That might be the reason why her fog is so persistent. My guess, however, is that her fog is still so obvious because she is still in touch with the OM.

Ironically, it may be that hte best thing for your marriage is for her to move out and get an apartment. That will quickly kill the long standing fantasy of this affair. She will have to realize that the OM will never ever be anything more than an online boyfriend.

I remember about 10 yrs ago we had a similar case, where a WW spent years pursuing an online affair with a married man. The BH ended up leaving and divorcing her after trying everything to save his marriage. Even when they were divorced, she still spent her time on the computer talking to her OM!! The power of long distance affairs is just amazig to me.

Looking through the email trails for the 9 years, most of them were just innocuous Happy Birthday type messages, they even exchanged our children's pictures. There were several years without contact or just one or two emails. What really accelerated was the fact that OM got his second divorce last March and I think started to contact her again around October this year. That was when the email frequency started. (Yahoo has a function to show a histogram of emails from a sender).
She told me she has no plans to be with OM, and he has no plans to move here due to his business (the primary reason they broke up before I came into the picture). In their very last emails (that I found before D-Day), she told him to find someone who wants to be with him (unlike his two ex-wives) rather than for his money.
She just said that she wanted to be away from me because of my Exposure actions and my callousness. Revisionist history of course. We actually had a lot of very happy times in the 17 years of marriage, but now she is blocking it all out, which makes me very sad.

Like I said, the affair has been going on your entire marriage. The messages were not "innocuous" at all because they kept their feelings triggered. Contact never ended. This is a long term affair that never ended. It is much like the type of alcoholic who only binges every few years.


Of course she would tell you she has no plans to be with the OM. Do you think she would tell you if she did? You don't know what their last communications were about because she is hiding her phone. People who have nothing to hide, don't hide. And I seriously doubt she has ended her affair given her state of fog.


Her anger over exposure just underscores that fact that she is still in the fog. The FOG is created by continued affair contact.