My wife of 12 years came to me on April, 27 and told me she wanted a D. This was out of left feild for me. We went to two sessions of counseling. Both times she was quite and said she was not in love with me anymore.
She pushed me hard to go to mediation and get a uncuntested D.I went along, stalling all the way trying to get her to talk more about our relationship. Finally on May 11th, frustrated with my stalling she left her love email on my computer to find. She was planning on meeting him on her business trip in 4 days. I got very upset, took the kids out for breakfast and called her. I asked that she pack a bag and stay with her sister. BIG MISTAKE! Played right into her hand. She has now moved all her cloths out.

We had a chance to talk face to face last Thursday, she requested we meet at a restaurant. We talked about five minutes and she hit me with. "WE ARE NOT GETTING BACK TOGETHER"

She is do back this Friday from another business trip. I need to know Where do I go from here.

In this case, playing right in to her hands might not be the mistake you think it is. It is much like the Plan B Harley suggests, though Plan B is only supposed to be used after Plan A is over.

I was in a similar situation (SAHD), and I considered walking out 10 minutes before she arrived home from a business trip, with a note saying "See ya!", essentially dumping the kids on her. She would not have been able to keep her job if she had to care for the kids herself, and it is not that easy to find a live-in nanny on short notice, not to mention that she could not have afforded one. I don't recommend this, mostly because of legal issues surrounding abandonment and child custody. As it turns out, our home was a refuge for my wife, even if she did not love me nor was in love with me. Kicking her out (as you did to your wife) may have had a similar effect to me walking out, i.e. giving her a dose of reality - she would have lost her refuge and lost much of her contact with her kids, neither of which she was wiling to give up. On the other hand, my W was not in love with the OM, either, so you are in a worse situation. Also, at the time, I could have called any one of three firms and started the next day at a salary of $50K+. The economy is not like that now.

Anyway, Harley specializes in restoring the "in-love" feelings between married couples that make marriage emotionally rewarding, and I can guarantee you, his methods work. Unfortunately, when there is another person in the picture, it makes things much more complicated. Fortuneately, Harley is kind of a specialist in recovery from infidelity, too. Click on the link in my signature line to find out more about the path to recovery. Pay particular attention to the Plan A/Plan B stuff.

Thanks Johnh39. I have read the information you passed on.
Job, I have been home for 7 years. We sat down 7 years ago and made that decision together. She would finish her MBA and pursue her career. I was the better choice for handling the pressures of diapers and screaming kids. Now she says I do nothing all day and should have made plans to go back to work. My youngest just started kindergarten this year. Nonsense!

She has become a workaholic and has a business trip at least once a month. Where does finding a job fit into this picture. Emotional needs have been unmet for both of us. I looked at it as a phase we were going through. Better times ahead. I want my wife back. Divorce under these circumstances will haunt me forever.

In reading, I see that this may take a long time. How do you ask your children to bear through this? I am strong in front of them, they only seen me cry twice these past 2 months.

How do I hit here with the same weight sledgehammer she hit me with? Wake up see what is happening here. We need change in our lives, not disaster, despair and hardship.

A revelation to us was taking the Emotional Needs questionnaire (ENQ) together. It was particularly a revelation to me, because I saw that not only was the OM meeting her top 2 EN's - so was her job, when it was going well. No wonder she was a workaholic and in love with her job! Her job was her affair partner long before the OM. I doubt she would be willing to ake the ENQ and give you "real" answers as long as she is involved wiht the OM, so, I think your only hope is the Plan A/Plan B path that Harley lays out. It is not easy, and I recommend you get help with it from an MC that understands the process - if you can find one. That and pray.

I understand your perspective. My EN's were less well-met than my W's for a long time, too. (all her energy and attention was going to her career.)

Oh, yeah, you might want to check out divorcebusting.com or divorcebusters.com (I'm not sure which) - because some of Plan A and Plan B will be like "doing a 180". It might help get you in the proper frame of mind. Also, teh book "The State of Affairs" by Mulliken may be helpful as well. It discusses the relative contributions of pleaser and controller personalities to marriage difficulties, affairs, and recovery.

<small>[ June 04, 2003, 04:36 PM: Message edited by: johnh39 ]</small>

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> We went to two sessions of counseling. Both times she was quite and said she was not in love with me anymore. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This should be no problem for a decent counselor, if your W is willing to work on things. Any Harley-aware or Chapman-Aware ("The Five Love Languages")counselor should be able to show you how to restore feelings of love for each other. However, while she is engaged in an affair, she is not willing to work on things.

A note about EN's. EN's like Domestic Support and Family Committment asare not very intimate. For a SAHM, those things can be HUGE, because helping with those things show that you appreciate how important her work is to the family. But for working moms with husbands who are SAHD's, those things you do all day for her and for your marriage don't really get to her heart. In our case my wife's top EN's were Recreational Companionship (spending time together), Admiration, Non-Sexual Affection, and (good) Conversation. These are more personal and intimate than FC and DS.

Because you are a pleaser (please note I would NEVER recommend this approach to someone who's spouse perceives them to be controlling, in fact I might recommend the OPPOSITE approach), I think you need to play hardball. Gird yourself for battle.

Consult an attorney to find out how many days you can be gone before a court will consider you to have abandoned your family, and consider leaving for that period of time. See if there is a way you can leave for longer if you set up some sort of schedule for visitation, and otherwise disappear from her life. Let her know that you consider your agreement of 7 years ago broken, you are no longer willing to sacrifice your own career for hers, and that you still want to be married to her, but are unwilling to do ANYTHING to enable her affair - like provide free daycare for your children so she can continue to ignore her responsibilities as a mother and a wife. Get a job and go back to work. If you can't find a good job right away, take a crappy one and keep looking. Live with a friend, or if you live in a town with a college or university, find a cheap place where some student has dropped out leaving their roomates with a higher monthly bill, and fill their spot. If you live in Minnesota, many companies have company policies against romantic relationships between co-workers in a reporting relationship, because state law here assumes that sexual harrassment has occurred if the subordinate in the work relationship ever sues. If your state has a similar law, or if the company she works for has a similar policy, you may be able to get them both fired, or at least the one in the higher position, if she and the OM are not peers. I understand this could lead to a bankruptcy on your part. As traumatic as that would be, it would probably not be as bad as a divorce. (And BTW, divorce will lead to some serious financial problems, too.) Some states still have Alienation of Affection statutes on the books. If yours is one of them, file a lawsuit. Don't actually go to trial - the idea is to make the affair public, and serve notice you will not go quietly into the night like some nice, safe wimpy guy. This is a war and you must have a battle plan. Don't get discouraged if you lose a few battles. Keep the overall objective in mind. Tell her and your family and friends why you have left. Tell the OM's wife. Tell the OM you know and are not going to just roll over and let things happen - he is interfering with your marriage and you would like him to cease (this will probably have no effect, but some OP's have SOME ethics, and are told by the WS that their spouse does not care about them, is abusive, is deranged, etc. If this is the case, it will at least expose her to be a liar, which is a good thing for him to know, as it will harm their relationship and dent his trust of her.)

Now, I am not an MC and I don't know your exact situation, so some of this may not be wise. ALL of it will be hard. Easy is not an option for you right now. Get SAA and read it. Check out http://www.divorcebusting.com/. What I have recommended above is similar to Michele Weiner-Davis principle of "doing a 180". Time is short. The hardest part will be keeping a clear distinction between fighting her and fighting FOR her and your marriage. Because she is trying to destroy your marriage right now, there will be times when it seems like you need to fight her to save your marraige, but that will not work. You must let her have her choices.

<small>[ June 05, 2003, 10:40 AM: Message edited by: johnh39 ]</small>

John39 thanks again for the great information. I talked with Steve H. today. He has given me some things to start out with. I am meeting with W tomorrow. She stopped by to pick up the kids today. What a cold fish! I told her she looked great. &#8220;Oh thanks&#8221;. Short answers as usual. This is not the beautiful person I married. She canceled me off the joint credit card. She must have seen him on the trip. She left with the kids, I shut the door and absolute terror ran through me. Alone. This it what it could be like.

I wanted to know. Should have asked Steve. I wrote this wife-chasing idiot a letter last month and have not sent it to him. I know his email address. This is a non threatening letter titled &#8220;The other people in life&#8221; I introduce myself and my children to let him know there are real people being destroyed by this malicious act they are engaging in. Do you think sending it would hurt my talks with my wife?

I am really not sure if I am going to be able to hold out while she continues to be so selfish and uncaring. How long did it take your wife to turn?

Well, it was a little different than your situation. I was ready to abandon her because I felt so unappreciated and like she was doing NOTHING to work on our relationship about 9 months BEFORE her affair started. She made some miniscule movement in the direction of putting some effort into our relationship, which, combined with the fact that she was overwhelmed at work and I had agreed to the temporary (overwhelming) assignment before she took it, gave me just enough emotional fuel to continue. I felt I had agreed to this lifestyle for a limited time and was obligated to tough it out. By the time the A started (which was unknown to me, at least consciously) I was almost ready to walk again, because there had been no progress. But, as I said before, she was not in love with the OM, and the A did sort of jolt her awareness of how bad our relationship was, and how little she was investing in it, so she started to do a few more baby steps in my direction, which again kept me from leaving. Things did not actually get all that much better, but I thought I could hold on until the end of her temporary position. About 20 months later, she took a new less challenging position in a new location (where she saw the OM less often), and I thought our marriage would start to improve. It did, sort of, but progress was slow for about another 10 months, and I was getting more and more dissatisfied, all the while not conscious of the "invisible elephant in the living room".

About six month before she told me about the affair, I took a part-time job. That co-incided with some positive changes in our relationship, and she started putting more energy into us. But while I had noticed and appreciated her efforts, my feelings for her had continued to deteriorate. My head and my heart were at war. I was finally seeing effort to do things I had asked her to do for years, yet I didn’t appreciate them. I frequently fantasized about leaving her for other women, and was tempted to have an affair, literally hearing a voice in my head saying: “Why not? She did”. I had investigated getting a separate bank account. I had frequent fantasies (which, not co-incidentally, had started somewhere around the start of her affair) about how I would live if she died in a plane crash while traveling for work. All this was continuing, and even getting worse, while I saw evidence of our marriage improving, and saw her making greater efforts. I thought I was crazy, or just plain evil. When she revealed the affair, it all suddenly made sense. Those kinds of thoughts stopped the day she told me. I now believe that those thoughts and fantasies were just my subconscious telling me what I did not want to believe. My heart knew what my head did not want to admit.

So, I never left or kicked her out, and it took her three years of an affair for her to turn around on her own. Though I also attribute that turn-around to God. We started praying together frequently about 8 months before the affair ended, after I attended a conference for men at our church where the conference speaker recommended praying together daily. We were not that regular, but did pray together twice or more per week. (Now we pray together daily. <img border="0" title="" alt="[Smile]" src="images/icons/smile.gif" /> ) As she got closer to God, her conscience bothered her more and more. It was a sermon in late september '01 that finally did the trick and convinced her she had to confess. About half our story from my perspective is at: saveyourmarriagecentral newsletter archives in the may newslettter at the bottom of the page. The second half is in progress.