I have lurked here for the last couple of months. I am very confused by the roller coaster I am on. Here is my story.

ME-BS 29
WH-29
MARRIED 8 YEARS
NO KIDS

H has had some chat/porn issues in the past but nothing in the last 4 years. I went out of town with my family over Labor day. I found a charge for a internet chat site on our credit card while I was gone. Confronted him about it and he said the usual stuff. One time thing blah blah. One week later his cell rang at 11:45 at night. He was asleep so I answered. It was a girl asking for him. I woke him up and asked who she was. Turns out it is someone he has been chatting with for the last month and half. She lives locally and they met at her work that day. Said it was nothing sexual just friendship. Well I was still uncomfortable and did some digging and was finding to many clues. Finally found enough to confront him. D-Day was 10/23/04 he admitted he had slept with her the first time he met her while I was out of town over Labor day. They had slept together one more time after I found the porn site info and he was mad.

He swore up and down he wanted to work it out. So that is what we have been doing. I left town for a week one month after D-Day to spend some time on my own. When I got home it was like he did a 180. No longer all sweet and kissing the ground I walked on. I knew something was wrong. I found out he is talking to some new person he met at a bar while out with friends. They are just friends but they kissed once. I know he has had NC with the first skank. I told him NC with this second one. I found out last week he continued to call her just to see if she was ok. I won't know if he is lying about the NC until I get the phone bills this month.

H has been on anti depressants for the last year and a half. Says now he feels like he is self destructing. I don't know what to think. He seems lost and confused. It is pissing me off because I feel like I need to take care of him....when I am the one that has been betrayed. Anyway finally felt the need to get it off my chest. I have the book SAA on its way!

Welcome to the boards. Sorry you are here, but glad you came for support. I am also new here, dealing with a WW, but I would encourage you to not react too rashly at this point. It hurts like heck, but if you want to make this work, you have to do some soul searching of your own.

What were these OW providing your husband that you were not? In my situation, my WW was looking to OM for conversation and someone that would listen carefully. I failed in that aspect and have had to be very careful in how I communicate with her. I can't keep committing the LBs and expect her to stick around.

Hang in there. Good luck.

Hurtinfla,

Reading what other people are going thru has been a great help. The hard part is he says there is nothing I did wrong. He says it was just friendship with these ow. Someone to talk to and chit chat with. I told him last night that could be our problem. I come home for work cook dinner and then we just hang out and watch tv. He said what are we supposed to talk about. So what does that mean he wants something new? I wish he would tell me there is something I could work on. I feel there is nothing I can do to stop it from happening again.

My husband too used to say I was perfect. He met a woman at a bar and met her for drinks several times and kissed her. If I was perfect, why would he do this?

Turns out, I wasn't so perfect. We both were not meeting each other's emotional needs. He was just saying I was perfect because I wasn't doing the innappropriate things he was. Take a close look at yourself and find out what needs of his you are not meeting. Something is not being met for him to do this. For me it was SF, RC and AS that I wasn't meeting. Once I changed to begin meeting, he has been a different man and has been trying to meet mine too.

Gee, Sally, your story sounds a lot like mine. My W told everyone that I was "The Greatest Husband in the World"...including her affair partner. The somewhat funny thing was that he believed her...and she believed herself. Reading "Surviving an Affair" and going through the Emotional Needs Questionaire helped us figure out a few things <img border="0" title="" alt="[Roll Eyes]" src="images/icons/rolleyes.gif" /> Too bad we had to wait so long to find out.

NFA: The link in my signature line contains the best resources we found to help us.

notfun - please absorb everything in SAA when you get it and give Plan A a good try.

But, the behavior you describe - getting caught, giving her up, but then starting with a second OW - is very indicative of problems beyond a garden variety affair (the kind that SAA focuses on).

Please suggest counseling to your H right away. Suggest it for you as a couple. Perhaps the deeper issues that are indicated in your H will bubble up.

JohnH39--

Do you have a link to your story? I would be curious to read since you have some similarities to me. Also curious about how your W reacted to uncovering the A and how she has done afterward. When is a couple considered "in recovery?"

No link, but I will post something I wrote 18 months ago when I get home.

"In Recovery"...Hmmm... when both are working on it, AND contact with the OP is ended.

Now, to be fair, I would say our recovery started the day my wife told me, even though intermittent (one or two phone calls per month) work-related contact continued for about 6 months - but they were both looking for other jobs during this time. And, there was a noticeable positive change in my wife once the OM left the company. I have no doubt about her committment to recovery before he left, and they did not see each other or communicate about non-work matters during that time (they were in offices 5000 miles apart), but the closure brought by complete NC was very helpful.

Better yet, I'll post our story as we told it to our church 3 weeks ago. Our names have been replaced by "H" and "W" below to protect our privacy. </font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> Message to xxxx Church, 11/21/04

W:

When H and I met in 1982, we quickly discovered that, in addition to our faith, we shared a love for music, physical activity, weird food and exploring ideas. On our second date we talked about how great it would be to live overseas with our kids.

Eight years into our marriage, our dream came true: we had the opportunity to move to Europe with our children, to help start up my company’s European operations. While H took care of the kids, I quickly became married to my job. The kids came second, God third, and H last. I was on the road almost every weeknight. I didn’t worry, because H could do anything. I told people he was the perfect husband.

H:

What W did not know was that I was increasingly unhappy with our relationship. I felt that she had turned away from me, and I read five different books on marriage, but nothing I tried seemed to work As time went by, my resentment grew, and my head and my heart were at war. I fantasized about leaving her for other women. I had frequent thoughts about how I would live if she died in a plane crash while traveling. I tried to stop these thoughts, and struggled to keep my wedding vows, but more and more, my heart was not in it.

W :

As job pressures grew, one of my male co-workers offered me comfort and admiration, and soon the relationship became an affair. I tried to stop several times, without success. During this time of struggle, I asked God to please not let me go.

When we moved back to the States, I began to invest more in my relationship with H, but there was still a wall of deceit between us. One Sunday, the sermon was about how lack of repentance is worse than the sin itself. That morning, God told me “now is the time to tell H about the affair.” I told God yes, but He would have to help me. I had no idea what would happen: how H would react and what the consequences would be.

On Wednesday, October 3rd, 2001, I began the hardest conversation of my life. “I have been unfaithful, and I am not worthy to be your wife. I don’t know if you can forgive me.” I still couldn’t believe what I had done, to God and to H. But when I said the words out loud, God clearly showed me the reality of my sin, and it broke my heart. Recognizing and confessing the truth was the painful start to healing. The truth had begun to set me free.

H:

I now had a “theologically acceptable” excuse to leave. But I stayed for several reasons, two of which stand out:
• First, it was the bravest thing and the clearest demonstration of repentance I had ever seen. When W turned toward God, God turned her toward me. I had been struggling to turn W back to me. I wasn’t about to give up just when I had seen the first steps in that direction.
• Second, while I had been a good husband by the world’s standards, I knew that I had ignored some things that God had prompted me to do as a husband. I thought that the pain I was now experiencing might be related to my disobedience, so I committed myself to doing EVERYTHING God’s way, from then on. It soon became clear to me that while he may allow it, God hates divorce. Therefore, God’s desire was that W and I repair our marriage.
However, I was not sure I could overcome the pain and forgive her, and I had no idea how to re-establish trust. I committed to recovery - if I could, with God’s help, get through it.

I called Grace and asked for some help choosing a marriage counselor. God also led me to the book “Surviving an Affair”, which gave us answers to some of the “Why?” questions, a practical vision of what a good marriage should look like, and some tools to get us there.

W:

The Sunday after my confession, a key verse was “those who prove victorious will be dressed …in white robes”. As I listened in my broken state, God touched my wounded heart and whispered: “that includes you.” He also showed me that I had not accepted forgiveness for some other sins from earlier in my life. By hanging onto these and feeling like a sinner, I was more likely to act like a sinner. But now God showed me that He had forgiven me completely. This doesn’t seem fair; somehow we think that we need to carry the scars and baggage of our sin forever, but God wants us to be clean and whole.

H:

I prayed a lot, because I struggled with not wanting to stay married, and with forgiveness. Whenever I thought of a new way to look at what my wife had done wrong, God showed me how I had done exactly the same thing to Him. Since the Lord’s Prayer says we must forgive others to be forgiven, I HAD to forgive her to get myself straightened out with God. I needed forgiveness too, and had to humble myself to join my wife at the foot of the cross, where God could heal us.

But, forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. We had to build a new, healthy relationship based on God’s design for marriage, not just go back to the same old patterns. As I saw W change, and saw those changes stick over many months, my trust in her was slowly rebuilt.

W:

The journey of healing was long, with good days and bad days, days of hope and days of anger and despair. We cried together, cried separately, and cried out to God. We read more marriage books, and practiced what we learned. We grew closer to God and to each other by praying together every day. We began to see ourselves and each other through God’s eyes.

H:

This path is not one that we would have chosen. Yet, we are building a marriage that is far better than it ever was before. We are involved in the marriage enrichment ministry at church, trying to help others avoid the pain we experienced. Our dream is for the Church to become a place where people can talk about their marriage struggles and get help, instead of suffering in silence. We have renewed and deepened our commitment to God. Our relationships with our children have improved, and they are seeing a positive role model of what marriage can be. Our 15 year old son observed: “What Satan tried to destroy, God made better than before.” He can do the same for you.
</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Two of the books we read that I highly recommend are "Torn Asunder", and "The State of Affairs". Both helped us to understand the things that led to my wife's affair that "Surviving an Affair" did not explain.