Again, I appreciate all the replies, your wisdom and insight has truly been a blessing.
I guess the thing that brought me back here is my wife's recent trigger. It has probably been years since my wife has gotten this angry at me over suspicions of me being unfaithful. I wrongfully assumed that since I have forgiven and no longer hold any resentment towards her for her cheating, that she has too after all these years.
My wife will always be triggered and reminded of my past whenever she interacts with her family. That is completely out of my control. Her resentment and mistrust will always be there.
PLUS (I don't think I shared this before), her best friend that I pursued shortly after we married...died! At the time, after I made my sickening advances to her best friend, she stopped talking to my wife. Their friendship drifted apart, and my poor wife at the time had no idea why her best friend stopped contacting her. After we both started trying to recover, my wife looked up her friend, and then found out that she passed away about a year earlier. She was devastated. I cannot even begin to imagine her grief. She has shared her anger towards me (justifiably so) about how I ruined that friendship, and that because of me, my wife couldn't be there with her friend before she died.
I've re-read some of the articles here, and I think I have to begin accepting that my wife will never recover from my past infidelities. It is too much to expect of her, or of probably anyone. No matter how great I may apply MB principles to guard our marriage, her estrangement from her sisters is a constant, ongoing reminder whenever she interacts with her parents. It's now almost daily, as her dad sends her and her sisters text messages as a group, so my poor wife sees all this communication between her dad and her sisters as an outsider, an outsider to her own family!
Why is my wife staying in the marriage? I think mainly because of our 2 boys, principled Christian beliefs, maybe for financial reasons. I know she loves me, but only to a certain extent, not in that passionate way that was described earlier.
I believe I have been applying MB principles for the most part all these years, but again, I admit I falter at times. The biggest area where I stumble is giving her undivided attention. A major love buster for her is when I don't remember things she has told me. She hates repeating herself when I admit that I forgot something she said, and gets angry with me. I've addressed this as best as I can, but I just have this flaw when it comes to remembering things and conversations. We share a google calendar, and I write everything down to recall later, but then I may not have those notes in front of me when we're conversing. I know part of the problem is that I can get easily distracted, and I've asked my wife to help me with that, such as making me mute the TV if it's on in the background, or being more patient with me when I realize I'm not giving her my UA and waiting for a moment for me to finish up something I may be in the middle of doing. I'm like this with everyone too, not just her. I do it to our kids, and to friends and co-workers. I'm never going to be perfect in that area, and given my past, my wife is rightfully very intolerant of this behavior.
In hindsight, I should have seen as another factor adding to her insecurity of my going to that party without her are my recent issues performing in the bedroom. It's fixed now, it turned out I was taking too much benadryl for allergies. But for the last several months, I was having difficulty climaxing. I'm on prostate medication, and I was suspecting that. But my wife was feeling terrible. Nothing I could say would reassure her that it was not her. She was suspicious that I was having sex outside of our marriage, or that I was no longer finding her attractive and getting bored of her. But, in my denseness, I didn't put together that this recent problem added to her anger towards me about the Super Bowl party.
I see now I've made some bad assumptions over the years. I assumed since the safeguards we've put in place around our marriage are to my satisfaction, that they're also to hers.
We share EVERYTHING: cell phone unlock codes, access to all finances, email & social networking accounts and passwords, laptop computer passwords. We account for our whereabouts at all times using GPS cell phone trackers, work phone #s, never do anything or go anywhere without consulting each other first, stay in constant contact throughout the day via google chat, no opposite sex friendships, keeping conversations with mutual friends of the opposite sex above board & superficial, facetime/skype on the only 2 occassions I had to go out of town (aunt's funeral & business trip for work), full access to home security cameras over the web, and home internet router filtering software we both have access to configuring.
On my end, if I happen to have any incidental interactions with females at work or elsewhere where my wife is not present, I keep it above board, and talk about my wife as much as possible during conversations. And I inform my wife about these interactions, however insignificant they may seem to me. And I know better to never befriend a female, much less be alone with any.
Going to that party was a really stupid mistake, I understand that now. And it's clear to me now that I should not participate in any social events without my wife present.
We had a good talk this past weekend, and reconnected somewhat. She admits ultimately that she wanted me to stay home with her to watch the Super Bowl, and wished that I would have chosen her on my own. We cleared up that miscommunication, and I shared with her that I can only enjoy something if I truly have her blessing, and that had I known how she really felt, I would have gladly stayed home with her to watch the game together. In general though, I realize that I have to make more of an effort to plan to do things with her alone, and show her that I *want* to be with her.
