Hello everyone,

I am new here. Very grateful to God I have found this website! I wish I had discovered it a bit earlier, but we are only in the beginning of the recovery process, so still not to late to take some advice on board.

My story is as follows: 5 years into our rock solid marriage as I saw it I noticed my DH's attitude changing - he became less carrying, often irritated, cold etc. It took me several weeks to make him confess he started as he described it �paying attention to other women', felt he didn't feel anything towards me anymore and was considering leaving us (me and our son) because he wasn't sure family life was for him. He denied having an affair. Some time later I started having a 'suspect' OW in mind, a colleague of his, but he denied it. Soon after that I had to leave the country to look after my mum who was in hospital. I told him I�d give him time to sort himself out and when I returned home 2 months later he apologised for being so stupid and reassured me he�d fix everything. We got back together and our married life continued as before.

However, about 2 years ago he started working away coming back home only for weekends. It was hard, but I knew it was only temporary. In the beginning of this year, I started having some unexplained anxiety without any particular reason. Something didn�t feel right. I looked up his former colleague I mentioned above on FB and realised she worked only 1 hour away from where he worked. I accessed his TimeLine through his Google account but there was no evidence he travelled to see her. Nevertheless, my apprehension grew. Later in May this year I found a poem on his laptop dedicated to that suspect OW. He wrote it in 2015, but recently accessed to read it. Sadly, it was only the tip of the iceberg.

Over the course of 2 weeks as a result of my investigation and several discussions with him I found out the following:

1) In 2015, he had an emotional affair with his colleague, OW#1. They spent a lot of time together outside work in a company of other non-married colleagues and sometimes alone, going out to cafes, restaurants, other places. He thought he had fallen in love with her and wanted to leave me and our son. She knew he was married with a child. After I left for 2 months, he reconsidered everything and realised that he did not want to continue the affair, that his feelings were not true, but superficial and stopped all contacts with her.

2) In February 2017, he met another woman, in our town. Although he has worked away, he occasionally did shifts here as well. He started flirting with her and began seeing her outside work. I work in the same company, but never met her. She was single, he told her he was married, she didn�t mind seeing him anyway. They spent time together going out, he sent her flowers, helped with work-related issues, assisted with promotion, she invited him to her place where he once kissed her. He told me he realised it was all wrong (I was pregnant with our 3rd child then). But kept seeing this OW#2 as a �friend� inviting her for coffee several times after that. He explained that eventually he felt it had to stop, he deleted her number from his phone and never saw her again (she was transferred to a different department).

3) Over the last 2 years when he was working away, he started watching porn, was regularly using dating apps and went out with at least three of his female colleagues. Maybe more, I may never know the truth.

4) I mentioned above I didn�t find out at once, but over 2 weeks time. He wouldn�t confess to me straight away. If it wasn�t for Google Activity and my persistence, I might have never known anything! At the early stage, I send a message to OW#2 on FB asking if there was something going on between them. At that point I knew he had sent her flowers and shared a poem he had written in 2015 to OW#1 (to show off I guess). She replied saying their relationship was strictly professional, and that she knew he was a married man and she would have never cross that line etc. I soon discovered nothing of this was true.

Now we are trying to rebuild our marriage. It�s really difficult for me. I don�t trust him. It still hurts a lot. Although I have access to everything and can track him every minute, I know there are still ways to conceal things. We wrote up an agreement. He still works away which we cannot change at the moment, but will be resigning soon. I won�t go into much detail, but he makes a lot of effort to restore our broken marriage. I have no doubt he had indeed cut off all the connections with OW#2 before I found out. However, there is always a chance, of course. I guess I just need time and reassurance to be able to regain trust and he knows he needs to work hard.

There is still one thing bothering me. I wanted to ask you about it. I wanted to get in touch with OW#2. To tell her that I know what happened between them � I don�t think she knows. And that she should never do it again to anyone else � because it will have a detrimental effect on the married people�s life and eventually her own as well. She is a young attractive woman of loose morals, in her mid 20ies, careless and very selfish. My words may fall on death ears. Or maybe not.

Maybe it�s a stupid idea� Sometimes when I think about it, I feel writing to her will give me a feeling of closure and maybe help discourage her from engaging with married men in future. At the same time, she may just laugh at me. My biggest argument against is that it may make her feel important and maybe she would want to seek contact with him again�Which is the least thing I want to happen. Also, I don�t want to engage in any kind of conversation with her � just want her to read my message. I can block her after sending it, of course. What are your thoughts/ experiences? Do you think it will help me move on? Is it worth it?

Thanks a lot for reading and responding!

Hello FHL, welcome to Marriage Builders. You have a very rare situation in that your husband is out looking for action. As long as that is the case, the affairs will continue. The typical affair happens by accident; a married person with poor boundaries allows another person to get too close and before they know it, are addicted to the other person.

That has not happened here. Your husband is actively seeking affairs and has a lifestyle that gives the opportunity to pursue them. Unless he makes a radical change in his approach to marriage and his lifestyle, this will be your future.

In your case, you would need to arrange your lifestyles so it would be impossible for him to cheat. For example, you would need to be together 24/7 and certainly never be apart over night. If you can do that, there might be some hope, but outside of that, your marriage could never recover.

Another suggestion would be to expose his affairs. Affairs thrive on secrecy so when others know about them, they are not nearly as much fun. The more people who know about his affairs, the more people to hold him accountable.

Please go read the Exposure 101 thread linked in my thread.

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.

This is perfectly understandable. I would suggest there have been other affairs you don't know about.


Exactly. Waywards are very clever so as long as he is out of your sight, he can cheat.


He made an "agreement" in your wedding vows. Making a new agreement will not prevent him from cheating again. Making it impossible to cheat will.

After you expose his affairs and start following the checklist that MelodyLane posted to you, when you send the NC (no contact) letters to the OW that will be your message to the other women.

Hi MelodyLane,

Many thanks for your response. You are absolutely right: sadly, my husband has been actively looking for romance elsewhere. He did admit to it. He also told me that although the first affair was by accident, the next one which happened earlier this year was a result of him seeking someone with loose boundaries to enjoy the process of courting. And yes, that's true, our current situation (living apart) was totally in his favour.

I have read the checklist, thank you. I have two major issues here:
1) He won't be able to move back to his current position in our town for a maximum of 6 months. However, he tries to spend more time here working from home. It is not always possible though. It is not ideal, we both understand it's wrong.
2) He told me he had sent a message to OA#2 to cut off all connections with her weeks before I discovered they had had an affair. He doesn't have her number anymore, no email addresses in his contact list. I have access to all his accounts since then and haven't noticed anything suspicious. I also know that she is permanently relocating to an area miles away. Do you think I should still ask him to write another letter?
3) Exposure to his family is a problem: they live in a different country and don't communicate in English. I need someone to translate it for them. It may take time for me to arrange it.

Hi BrainHurts,

The problem is that she doesn't know that I discovered because my husband had ended the affair weeks before D-Day. I am pretty confident there was no contact between them since then. For this reason, I wanted to write a short letter myself. I wrote to her on FB before I found out but was only suspicious at that time, and she responded to me with phrases like 'You can have my word I would never do anything like that', �There is no excuse for anyone to come between a couple�/ �I would never do anything knowing the man is spoken for� etc. I am not feeling at peace because of that.

I would also make it a requirement to recovery that he take and pass a polygraph test. I do not believe for a second you have The truth, I think there are still things he is hiding from you. For instance, it is not believable that he was actively seeking a woman with loose boundaries 'for courtship.' He was seeking her for sex. I believe these were PA's and there may be more and you certainly don't have full disclosure. A polygraph is your best bet to getting the truth, and you cannot recover without it.