Been relatively happily married for 15 years with 3 kids - 11, 9, 5. Wife kissed a guy at a bar 1 year in and that was very hard for me to get over as lots of people in our small town knew about it. I know a kiss doesn't seem like much but it really affected me. About 7 years in shes' in Vegas for work and butt dials me from a room at 4AM and there was definitely a guy in the room. She again said there was kissing an inappropriateness but no sex. I catfished the guy on facebook with a fake profile of hers and got the full details and it seems she did come clean about it. This one was easier for me to get over because I knew it was a guy she'd never see again vs the first guy was from our original small town.(We no longer live there) I did act out after her episodes and would go try and hurt her by kissing other women on weekend guys hunting trips where we'd go to bars, so I have some fault here as well.

So on April 15 she comes back from a work trip to ATL and is very tired and goes to sleep. My youngest child brings me her phone and I notice an email from one of her superiors using a gmail acct. The email looked guilty so I responded to test the waters. He starts going on and on about how he misses her and all kinds of other stuff that told me there was a relationship. I had my suspicions as there was a 1AM call on her phone records from December and when I googled the phone it was this old guys #. The reason she was tired is because she stayed up with this guy at a high end restaurant drinking expensive wine all night.

I confronted her that night and she denied at first and then told me yes it was an inappropriate work relationship with a much older superior. She said it started out as just long chats about any and everything and was a good friendship and then they had dinner alone on 4 separate occasions and then he escalated to a kiss on the last one. Shes 39, hes 63 and a multi-millionaire. He is based out of Cali and we live in Louisiana but she travels frequently as does he.

I never got angry, told her I could never leave my kids etc. Once I pulled phone records, it was apparent they they were very close. She was talking on the phone with him nearly 10 hours per month. I thought I'd just get over it like the others but I asked to be notified about all communication between them. She didn't notify me of a call right off the bat and I came unglued and was ready to end it. Since then she has notified me of every call.

I had too many drinks the other night and I message the guy from her phone and he is definitely still head over heels for her. I know it was wrong but I did it.

Just knowing that he still has access to her really bothers me. Even though they are across the country they still see each other at big meetings 4-6 times a year and still are on the same conference calls and same emails.

Can I she keep her job and I get through this?

Hello cajun, welcome to Marriage Builders. The answer to your question is no. You will have to choose her job or your marriage because in order to recover, she should never see or speak to this guy again. Every contact puts you both back to day 1 of recovery. You should never be apart overnight again. It sounds to me like she has very poor boundaries around men and unless that changes, you are looking at more of this in the future. If you are interested in saving your marriage, she needs to make a radical lifestyle change in her approach to marriage. That means no more overnight travel [she should quit this job right away], changing all of her contact information, no opposite sex friendships and complete transparency. I would suggest you get the book Surviving an Affair and follow the program in it. The first steps would be to follow this checklist.

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.

More evidence that you should never be apart overnight.