I’m not sure exactly what you are asking but I’ll try to describe just a few of the emotions felt during my long-term emr: <p>Stage 1: I met this person that I greatly admired. He was a great person and an even better father. He shared the child rearing 50/50 with his wife. He did the drop off and pick up of the kids, parent-teacher conf, homework, etc. This was something I had for a long time wished my husband who had the attitude, “there were kids you take care of it” would do. So I got a little crush. I guess he had a crush to because he proceeded to flirt with me. <p>Think back to before you were married and were attracted to a girl for the first time and all of the emotions you felt and the fun that flirting was. Nothing feels better than that infatuation. <p>Stage 2: So the emr progresses and becomes physical. You’ve gone past the infatuation stage. Your emotionally connected to this person. It’s a secret that only belongs to the two of you. It’s a fantasy and boy is it a lot of fun. <p>Stage 3: You begin to grow tired of the secrecy. You have this person you adore but you can’t do anything with him. You can’t share the day-to-day stuff with him, even something so simple as going out to lunch requires planning. You can’t introduce the two people you care most about in this world, your husband and the other man, to each other. Your jealous of the wife but you also feel sorry for her and know that she’s the much better person and that under different circumstances you might want to be her friend. <p>Basically the fantasy still has a big allure and is still fun but the rest of the world is catching up to you and you don’t know how to end things. <p>Stage 4: You crash. You wonder how you could be so stupid. You wonder if everything he ever told you was a lie. You wonder if you lied to him. You wonder if you are going insane and what the truth is. You know now that whatever you felt at the height of the affair was not worth this pain and you know you have only yourself to blame for that pain. You hope that the people you care most about, your husband and family, can/will forgive you. You hope that someday you can forgive yourself. <p>Those are just a few of the emotions/stages that I went through. I don’t know how you can use it to help your wife. It’s a roller coaster of emotions consisting of real highs and extreme lows. Unlike the betrayed spouse a wayward spouse chooses to ride the roller coaster thinking that the joy is worth any pain, it’s not.
