You are showing him your hand. Don't confront him, he knows he is having an affair.

This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Thanks for all the advice.

Your marriage can survive this. Dr Harley has created a very strategic plan to kill affairs and recover marriages, he has devised this plan after 40+ years of dealing with marriages damaged by affairs. The more rogue you go from that plan, the less likely your marriage will be to survive. We have seen many times people who just let their emotions guide the way, and it ends up disastrous.

A proper and thorough exposure is the single greatest way to kill an affair. People who muck this step up, or refuse to do it, have a much smaller likelihood of recovering their marriages.

Right now you want to be in what Dr Harley calls 'Plan A.' Plan A is twofold: 1) fill his EN's and avoid lovebusters, show him what kind of marriage he can expect if he stays, be at your best and be the better option, and 2) simultaneously do whatever you can to kill the affair (exposure).

If he says he wants to be with her, remain calm. Tell him that you love him and you are sorry for your part in the failure of your marriage. Tell him that you can create a better marriage than you have ever had, but he must first end his affair with skanky.

Meanwhile, get a VAR in his car pronto. You already have his confession that he is talking to this woman (having an EA), but I am guessing this is far more entrenched than he is letting on. You need to get the evidence so you can expose it properly and he cannot downplay it as a simple friendship. Get your exposure list ready, as soon as you have the evidence you will want to do a full exposure starting with OW's BH.

Thank you, this is exactly what I needed to hear. I am definitely going to go out tonight and get the VAR. I will try to put it in his car while he is asleep. I'm sure my catching him calling and texting her is just going to make him more careful, so I wish I'd maintained my composure, but I will not let it happen again.

Also, another quick question. As far as his ENs are. Do I attempt to have him take the quiz so that I am certain of what they are? I don't know if he will or not, I just don't want to be doing the wrong things. I know he says he doesn't want to work on our relationship at all, so I suppose I'm just confused on how I show affection for example, if he doesn't want to be near me. Thoughts?

You are doing great so far.

Don't worry about letting your emotions get the best of you, we have all been there! But now you know that it is not strategic to do so and you have a plan to follow.

Working on your marriage together in that way, by having him do any MB material for instance, is really not going to help right now when he is involved in an affair.

Affairs are an addiction, just like drugs or alcohol. That addiction is very powerful, it makes people risk their careers, marriages, families, their entire lives sometimes just to feed the high. You can see this in the media all the time, people who risk their entire lives for an OW/OM. What is so special about that person? Nothing, in fact in general people 'affair down' and have affairs with someone who is less desirable than their own spouse. It is the HIGH that they chase, more than the person. This high creates foggy thinking, the affair 'fog.' People who are in the fog do not think rationally, much like a drug addict looking for a fix doesn't think rationally. You can't reason with someone in the fog.

Exposure is waking them up with a cold bucket of water, the water of reality. It is the single greatest method to wake someone up from the fantasy of an affair.

Until you have killed the affair, trying to work rationally on your marriage is just not effective. Which is why killing the affair is step 1.

What have your WH's complaints been about you? Are there specific things he has said he wants that you have not been doing? Are there things you do that he has been asking you to stop doing? Start here.

You can also look at the top EN's for men in general.

Dr Harley does not recommend women being in Plan A for more than 3 weeks. In that 3 weeks you want to do a complete exposure, and if the affair hasn't ended and he hasn't committed to recovery yet, you will want to look at separating. I am guessing exposure will have a great impact in your case, if you do it right. But this Plan A of being wonderful while he is investing in another women will not go on forever. If it comes to separation, you want to leave knowing that you were at your best for 3 weeks and left him a taste of what a great marriage with you could be like (vs fighting and acting emotional and crazy...).

I would suggest you notify the mods to move this to the surviving an affair forum.

I see BrainHurts posted this to you twice. I sure hope you don't continue to ignore this.

I know this has already been touched upon, but STOP trying to talk your WH out of his affair. That does NOT work.

Is there a reason that you are not posting in Surviving an Affair?

She has attempted to put spyware on his phone and got busted. She does have a keylogger on the computer and is working on getting a VAR today in a manner that is untraceable (cash transaction).

Yes I saw that.

Unfortunately, what I have noticed over the years is that people who are posting in MB101 with affair issues tend to want to resolve the problem by meeting ENs and avoiding LBers - even when telling us that they are snooping.

Hopefully that's not the case here.

MrsSmyth, did you get the VAR today?

So I went to look for the VAR yesterday, because Thursday I was unable to leave the house again after my husband came home. I went to Walmart and they only had two, and they were both a little too conspicuous. He is obsessed with his car and it's new, so I'm worried about putting something in there that LOOKS like a recording device, should he find it when cleaning the car or something. I think I'm going to have to figure out how to order one that doesn't look like a recorder. Has anyone used the USB type? That's the one I'm leaning towards because I think I could pop that in his briefcase and that way it would go in the car with him and into the office. I also found an iPhone charger that has a hidden camera that can be watched remotely. Any experience with those? I was thinking of putting it in our bedroom, because it needs wireless to work and I know he doesn't have wireless at work. I'm still hoping I can figure out his iPhone password so I can someone access his iCloud account and connect him to the teensafe tracker. He told me Thursday that he has told these other "people" he can no longer talk to them as he wants to make this decision to be alone "without any outside influence, even subconsciously". He is much more present and himself, and he's slept soundly the past two nights since I confronted him about the password changes, but most likely he's just blowing smoke up my [censored]. I want him to get comfortable again with my acting normal and not suspicious so perhaps he will slip up and leave some evidence. I am thinking about going out tonight and staying out late. I am hoping he hops on my computer at some point while I'm gone and logs into his email. I have the key logger working in the background. Any advice is appreciated.

Oh, also, has anyone done all the surveillance and then not found evidence of an affair while doing Plan A? What do you do at that point? I am strongly considering hiring a PI in a couple weeks if nothing comes up just so I can be certain. But is a PI useful if it's just an emotional affair and not physical? I just want to know the truth.

Use 3M command Velcro strips and stick the VAR under his car seat.

Don't wait a couple of weeks to hire a PI. If you don't have evidence by Tuesday night, call a PI to follow your husband around. He is likely meeting with her on lunch breaks and during work hours. Meanwhile, pull his credit report and check all the bank accounts for suspicious transactions.

In the 6 years I have been on these boards, I have never seen a case where everything pointed to an affair (and in this case you already KNOW because he has admitted it to you), and the BS *diligently* snooped, and did not find any evidence. There is always evidence, sometimes it is just buried better than other times. In your case, I do not think your WH is being super cautious and anticipate a VAR giving you your answer.

Get the VAR and put it under his seat. I don't know anybody who checks under his seat regularly. You don't want it out in the open where he can see it so it isn't really important what it looks like. I would start there right now, you can go to the fancier stuff if you need to but I don't think you will need to.

Do you have your exposure list ready? When you get the evidence, whether it is an EA or a PA, you will want to do one massive exposure. Your most important target will be her BH.

Did you read the exposure 101 thread and are you ready to do this?

Ok the VAR is in. It's underneath the passengers seat. I bought a second one to hide under our bed, I'll put it there later today. I couldn't find any sort of GPS tracking device, which bummed me out because he's going "out" this afternoon to his friends' and I'm feeling like he's being weird about it. He definitely trimmed up his nether region this morning in the shower, because I saw a disposable razor in there after he got out and that's the only thing he uses them for. When I checked again later it was gone. I'm so mad that I didn't get to install the spyware on his phone before he changed his iCloud password. I'm gonna try to get him to use my computer to add some music to my iTunes.

I also wrote down the mileage on his car. He's going to a friend whose house we were at yesterday so I know exactly how many miles it should take him to get there. I was thinking of dropping my son off with my mother and driving by there at some point as well to see if he's there. Thoughts?