My wife of 20 years recently had an emotional affair with an old love of hers..it has not become sexual at this point aside from some kissing according to her. I do believe in her and trust what she says.

She says that she has now discovered the reason for the affair was that she feels I have held her and our 3 children "emotional hostages" for years..and she needed emotional support and is too lacking energy to continue our marriage. She has feelings for the other guy, but is not sure if she really feels for him or if they are false feelings. She also no longer knows what she feels for me and can't say if she wants to try again with me. She feels as if I controlled her and the kids.

I grew up in a really screwed up home, and I guess I learned those behaviors. When she and I have gotten to a bad places in the past, I have taken some clothes and left...only to ride the bus around the city and then return to ask forgiveness. I have also threatened to hurt myself if she were to leave me. I never realized what an effect these things were having. I have set up therapy for myself and so has she. But I am so afraid it is too late...that she may really love this other man and my family will fade away. What can I do? Folks, I don't know what else to say right now...this is all my fault, but I feel so empty right now. I just want to make it right.

We are still living together...this has happened quite suddenly over the past few weeks. Our kids are 4, 13 and 16. We have never got to the point of splitting up before, but we have had disagreements about money, parenting, all the usual. Never any type of infidelity before. Like I said, I am still at home, actually sleeping in the same bed with her. She stared a new job today, and when I left to take the kids to school I got at least a small hug and a peck of a kiss on the lips. Guess that's a good thing, huh? This guy she was seeing was her "first" in high school...I knew about him, but she did not begin to try and contact him until December. Even in the midst of things, she would say she loved me...look in my eyes and smile. I knew that I was in trouble with the marriage..and was sure she was cheating when she called his name out while making love to me! She also says it often in her sleep. He is younger, single and more attractive than me...I don't know how I can compete with that. I want so badly to call him or email him and ask him to send her back to her family...but I know that will just make things worse as he would probably tell her I did it. Any continued advice appreciated....

Brian

<small>[ January 19, 2005, 07:53 AM: Message edited by: baltimoredrummer ]</small>

Brian,

This is the right place for you. You're situation is defintely not hopeless. Before you take any actions, read Marriage Builders concepts and try and learn first of all, how it is that you find yourself in this situation and then, start gradually to form a plan for how to deal with it.

I am very sorry that you find yourself in this situation but there are many here who are currently struggling with infidelity or have gotten through it and restored their marriages.

I would assume that your wife is not willing to end this emotional affair? Is this true?

This is also a good place to start:

WAT's Quick Start

Brian,
I do know waht you feel.
I have been married 22 yrs. I have a 17,13, and also a 4. I always did my best taking care of my H and family. but for some reason that was later all my fault. My H had (has) an emotional affair. at least yours has a face. My H's is a stranger he met in a game room. and he doesn't seem to want to let her go.. any way she gives him signs that she need to move on he still emails her about how he misses her etc...

he also still leaves at home and in our bed....
and does like nothing is wrong or that he is doing anything wrong. I hurt and hurt alot.. but not ready to make any decsions yet. he say he loves me and never stopped but that she is earier to talk too. a faceless stranger that the only thing he knows about her is waht she tells him. what a fool he is becoming... I hope she is worth losing a wonderful wife like me lol and kids.

take care

At this point, she is not willing to cut off contact with the affair. She has entered therapy individually, as have I. She will not discuss couples therapy at this point as she says she does not know if she loves me or wants to be married to me...she thinks she needs to work out her feelings for me and this other guy in therapy herself.

I feel like I don't have any hope, here. I still am at home, she sleeps in bed with me, changes clothes in front of me, stands nude and asks me for a robe in the bathroom. But yet she tells me that she does not know if she is in love with me...that she does not find me physically attractive anymore...and she is angry of this "emotional abuse" she alleges I have done to her. She hugs me goodbye and goodnight and I get a little kiss on the lips. What does all this mean??

Hi Brian
me again.

just my opinion here... cause I', kinda in your shoes.
I think your W like my H is not ready to give up the life they know with us. they like being married to us sleeping with us routine with us. but the other person gives them a fantasy life to( I mean I could use one to) they talk to someone they says all they NEED to here. how wonderful they make each other feel. only because they dont' share the bills, jobs, money problems, kids or life for that matter with each other.... only the things that they NEED. selfish huh??

my H had a gambling problem he spend most of our married life in a card room. staying away form home, me and kids.I stayed home wondering what did I ever do to disevre such a life.. its me who should of found someone years ago.
now since he found her his head and his heart is at a diffenent place and noting I say or do now he can see or hear. He NEED this now. and denies that he is doing wrong. Just talking he says.... but never sees the hurt in my eyes.
also he doesn't know i have read all his emails to and from her... that's way he can deny it all he has no idea how much of this I know. but he does I know I. yes his bubble has been pop! and the relationship is slowing down. and now he seems like my H again but I do I get pass all this. yes, what do we do????

take care Brian it nice to know that there are men out there that have morals.

Brian,

As I say, there are many people here who have gone through this and can help you. If you want to save your marriage you will need to learn how to do a Plan A. Plan A is probably the hardest thing you will ever do in your life because it requires complete selflessness; you will have to forsake all of your needs and learn how to fullfill your wife's needs.

Plan A is about negotiating for an end to all contact between the wayward wife (WW) and the other man (OM). If the affair continues and NC (no contact) is not succesfully negotiated then Plan B is the next option in which all contact between you and the WW is terminated.

Affairs do not usually last; most times they end for one reason or another. If you want to save your marriage, you will need a strategy for how to deal with the situation while you wait for the affair to end.

Read everything here and develop a plan for how to deal with this painful situation. You may want to order some of the books here - I would suggest "Surviving An Affair" and "His Needs, Her Needs".

The "General Questions II" area gets more traffic; you may want to start a new thread over there. Many of the veteran Marriage Builders are over there and can give you excellent advice.

baltmore:

Sorry you are a victim of your wife's choice to have an EA. It turns your life upside down, or it did for me. There is hope. She hasn't left but I must tell you, the most past loyal and loving people will lie to you to protect their new loving relationship.

Trust your inner gut and not her words at this stage. Be prepared for the possibility of a PA too. Her saying his name during sex is not good. Do everything and anything to disrupt the affair and keep her home so she can fall back in love with you. It takes many-many months to undo the affair and the feelings from the affair. Deal with in a pro-active manner, do not brush it under the rug. They don't end easy.

Good Luck

TooSoon

She seems so angry and distant...I am afraid that if I interfere too much, it will only drive her farther away from me and closer to him. How do you do it? How do I interfere with them and not alienate her from me? I would appreciate any ideas from folks who have had any successful interventions here...

Brian

All that you can really do is expose it, to friends, family, which really comes under the heading of not enabling it, not keeping it secret. It sounds like OM is not married, otherwise exposing to wife of OM is in order.

Have you read concepts?

Baltimore:

</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial"> At this point, she is not willing to cut off contact with the affair. She has entered therapy individually, as have I. She will not discuss couples therapy at this point as she says she does not know if she loves me or wants to be married to me...she thinks she needs to work out her feelings for me and this other guy in therapy herself.

I feel like I don't have any hope, here. I still am at home, she sleeps in bed with me, changes clothes in front of me, stands nude and asks me for a robe in the bathroom. But yet she tells me that she does not know if she is in love with me...that she does not find me physically attractive anymore...and she is angry of this "emotional abuse" she alleges I have done to her. She hugs me goodbye and goodnight and I get a little kiss on the lips. What does all this mean?? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">You are being forced to come to grips from the hard cold reality that your wife has gone out and have fallen for another man. This comes with the expense that she has fallen away from you at the same time.

When my wife admitted her EA to me she said the problem she now has, she has fallen in love with someone else. These were hard words for me to hear. Now the good news is my wife's relationship and your wife's relationship was not built on reality and it is your job to chip away at the relationship by doing the steps that Dr. Harley lays out for us to do. Don't misunderstand, she may be in love with another man and her perception of the relationship is real to her and maybe him.

I plan A'd till I was blue in the face, I appealed to her, I begged her, I used the kids as a tool to break the affair, but nothing broke the feelings she felt for the OM. I printed posts from the board and I got her to read them, I bought books, I convinced her to go to counseling and nothing was breaking through to her. She saw my daily pain and suffering and my sleepless nights, my tears and it didn't change her feelings for her OM.

It was only when I brought pain to her and the relationship that got her attention. The pain was from exposing the affair to our kids and to other family members, etc. I threatened to destroy her reputation and her loverboy's reputation at their work place. I threatened to tell everyone all of her family members to humiliate her further. She still continued with the affair so I called the OM's parents and brought them into the nightmare. It was then that she knew I was going to fight to the end and I would do anything and it was then that she knew that I had nothing to lose at this point.

The parent's worked against my wife and they blamed her for the affair. They said their son was innocent and they instilled in him their beliefs. The OM began showing his own ego and attitude of selfishness. All of these things were chipping away at their base of their relationship. Now their loving conversations turned to them worrying about losing their jobs and their reputations and it wasn't as exciting for them as prior to me strongly rebelling against them. My son told my wife he will never have anything to do with her OM, causing another blow to my then WW. I kept pressure on her everyday, but she was still apartment hunting and furniture shopping so I had nothing to lose but to go for broke.

My wife built a reputation as a good Christian God fearing woman at her work and she was scared to death that her co-workers would find out. She was also afraid that her mother would find out. I eventually gave her an ultimadum to make a choice, him or I. If was him, I will expose her as the phoney hypocrit to everyone that mattered in her life. She hated me with all her heart and soul at this point but she finally said the words, "I will give my two weeks notice at work tomorrow". Those words were the turning point and the beginning of recovery for us.

She did quit as she said, withdrawal (more hell) kicked in, and we crawled back one day and sometimes one hour, at a time.

There are so many other issues not said here but I must stress to you, Dr. Harley says exposure is needed to disrupt the affair and he is right. I say the earlier you expose the better. Do it before they become so committed to each other.

These affairs are not built on Reality and adding reality to the affair has a way of changing the fantasy from the fairytale to seeing the pain and suffering that is caused.

I hope this helps you some and I will fill in the blanks if you have followup questions.

TooSoon

<small>[ January 21, 2005, 06:48 AM: Message edited by: TooSoonToBeComfortable ]</small>

Here is the latest as the saga continues….. I am exhausted after all this going on for weeks. Last night it got to be time for the news (and ER was over..) so I told her that I was going to bed. She said “ok…I’ll be up in a couple of minutes, I just want to see how much snow we are going to get.” So, off I went….washed up and realized that my back was aching from work yesterday. I went downstairs to get some Tylenol…and there she sits on the phone with him! I asked how she could justify coming to bed and sleeping next to her husband after talking to her boyfriend. Yes, I know…I should not have done that…. I decided that it was my house, and I pay all the bills, so I was not going to give her privacy to talk to him. I sat right down next to her on the other sofa. She kept talking, saying “yes, I understand…I know”, etc. I was really angry at this point, so I opened my mouth again….I said “well, if you don’t have anything to hide, would you mind if I joined in a conference call with you on the other line there?” She told me (with him still on the open line) that they had wanted to talk all week. She said OM had just finished telling her that he did not love her, that there would be no relationship with them in the future, and that she needed to go back to her family where she belonged! Then she says “he (the OM) has been your best friend through all this….he has been the one to always take your side”…..I simply said, “Well, I thank him for that, but the truth is, YOU are supposed to be my best friend, not him.” I then went to bed.

Last night was her first therapy session…..she says that her therapist told her not to make any rash choices such as leaving or asking me to leave. She asked her to think of the reasons she married me, and why she had left the OM when they were younger. She seemed ok, this morning when she went to work….I still got my little kiss and hug when I left this morning.

So much for not doing any LB’s!!


Brian

Sorry to hear you are going through the same thing. You need to do your best to make love to her with your heart. What I'm saying is hold her hand, tell her how much she means to you and win her back. It's hard I know because I'm on the reconsilation stage with my wife. She fell for my best friend from the war. I talked to her untill I was blue in the face. The whole time I let her know how much I loved her and tried to be understanding of her needs that I wasn't able to meet being so far away(I,m over seas for two years, 13 mo done). I was even understanding of how this happened. It's hard but show her you love her. Tell her you love her. Make her the center of you life. A good book to read other then the ones on this site is LITE HER FIRE. It really goes along with His Needs Her Needs. I even convinced my wife of 18 yrs to go threw His Needs Her Needs book with me. We each read a chapter then politely tell each other how we FEEL about how that need is or isn't being met. We do this over the phone or email. Best wishes.