okay, i'm new here and i've got quite a long message so i hope if you're reading this that you are patient. about two months ago, my wife told me that she started talking to an old boyfriend online. she asked me if it bothered me. it kinda did but not wanting to be overbearing or possessive i said that it was okay. can you see where this is going? since then she has been coming to bed in the wee hours of the morning. a few times i confronted her about this and she basically got beligerent with me insisting that it was merely insomnia. fine, i left it at that for a little while. slowly we start spending less time together, sex is pretty non-existant and so forth. finally i did a little investigating and went through her email. she had an email from her ex that said in big bold letters : I LOVE YOU. nothing more nothing less. okay, i kept my cool and wanted to see if i could evoke a reaction from her by sending her a similiar email. she basically didn't acknowledge at all the similiarities being that she had no idea i was in her email thinking i hadn't seen that email he had sent. finally things blew over and well it wasn't pretty. i installed spyware on our computer and she got really pissed about that. finally we talked about it later and she insisted that nothing was going on between her and her ex. she compromised and said she would start going to bed with me at night to sleep. well the first day she did and it was back to what she was doing. she told me she didn't think she was in love with me anymore and that really hurt. i asked her why and she says it's her not me (how cliche). okay so i've been depressed. i decided a few days ago to be happy and show her that i loved her by doing things around the house more and reminiscing about old times. well this morning i go to a webpage that has live journals and she had written one on there. on there she had i love you to her ex. she lied to my face about everything. i don';t know what to do. please help

Your wife is having an emotional affair (EA). Do not think this is not serious because it is "only" emotional (actually, I can see that you realize it IS serious, but you probably do not yet understand why I would say it is JUST as serious as a physical Affair (PA)). The plan to recover from an EA is not exactly the same as from a PA, but I do not have time right now to enumerate the differences. The link in my sig line, though geared to a PA, will apply about 95%. Click on it and get started.

Trying,

I am so sorry, but you have just described the classic signs of an internet EA : Late hours in order to maintain secrecy, the anger, bad sexlife, "don't love you", "her not me", and all the other crud that goes with such a betrayal.

The fact that it is in cyberspace makes it somewhat worse. Very easy for the OM not to LB and to assume a fake personality, or rather not show his faults.

You can save your M, don't give up. You came to the right place at MB. JGirl and John39 showed you the way to start going about it.

God Bless
SB

thanks to all who have replied to my message. it's nice to go to place where everyone knows where i'm coming from. it's really to think that things could have gotten this far. i'm always thinking to myself, 'why didn't she tell me how she felt as soon as she started falling out of love with me?'. i'm clinging to the tiny shred of hope i have in my heart. we're going to be going to marriage counseling in about a week so hopefully things will change for the better. i've got everything i need to prove my case, and if she's not willing to listen to me, maybe she'll listen to the counselor. it's so hard because we have a 16 month old son and i think that this is one stupid way for a marriage to end: an internet fling 1,000 miles away. i'm angry, sad, frustrated, confused, paranoid, anxious, and every other colorful adjective you can think of. thank you all again for talking to me. i'll keep this posted and hopefully i can share a happy ending to this ridiculously sad story of a once deeply in love couple. you never think that it will happen to you and then...