I recently found out of an emotional affair, it is over and I'm trying to move toward recovery. We love each other and are talking a lot, though so far it has been academic. Since my discovery of my wife’s emotional affair with a long distance friend from her past I have heard one thing from her fairly consistently. She tells me that I need to consider that we are just too different. She believes that we are so different and have such different needs that we cannot hope to fulfill them and perhaps she is not suited for marriage. She does not think that she can meet my needs because they are not her needs and vice versa. For example, I remember during her affair she would tell me that the reason we were not having sex frequently (1 or 2X a month) is that we are really just friends now. She is very willing to be on her own even though she would be very lonely because all her life she has been on her own and loneliness is the status quo to her. During the affair she was aware of what was going on and sought a lot of information to understand what was going on with her, I wish she would have found this place. She did find discussion of “The Myth of Monogamy.” She believes that she is liberal minded enough to be able to believe that marriage is somehow archaic. I think that she has convinced herself of these things, it helped justify her affair, justify why we should not have to make an effort to meet each others emotional needs and provides her a way out of the marriage without having to believe she is an awful person. I have come to realize that she probably planned to leave me soon if she did not gain admittance into graduate school or later after she completed her degree. She can justify her actions by evolution/biology or a bad economy (she has to move away to pursue her career and could not support us while I looked for work where she went). I fear that she will only go through the motions once we begin counseling. How do I work at breaking through the barriers that she has put up?

<small>[ October 13, 2003, 03:03 PM: Message edited by: jgnc ]</small>