Now this was a reasoned reply. Nice!
Couldn’t agree more.
Congratulations!
I wasn’t sure it was possible to take the most selfish and cowardly option, but you’ve apparently managed.
Hmm, I really feel like you’re not thinking this through very carefully. I suggest you try addressing some of the specific worries and suggestions that have been posted. It will keep the thread going and the advice coming (and you said you wanted help), and, more importantly, it may help you to think about this thing a little more objectively.
So ask yourself this. Is the affair attractive because of who it’s with, or because you’re bored with your marriage and current family life?
Take some time and really think about it.
Robin
You haven’t been listening to anything that anyone has (rationally, calmly) explained to you, have you? Don’t you think your husband deserves happiness? Not necessarily with you, but happiness overall? Don’t you think he deserves the tiniest bit of honesty? Lies-by-omission are still lies, and I doubt your marriage vows included the caveat that you could screw your high school True Love if you got bored with the groom, while ensuring that Beneath-Me Husband would pay your bills in the meantime until you decided to pack up and leave.
Honestly, I had more sympathy for you until you posted this. Get individual and couples counseling in the meantime - if you want, go into it thinking that you’ll be happier for when you leave him and hook up full-time with your lover. You need to think about this.
The OP will simply ignore any posts that do not validate her dishonesty and narcissism. So I imagine this one will be similarly ignored.
Just in case : does your “brightness” entitle you to special rules? If not, then why not inform your husband and let him also find someone special to share love with?
I wrote the above in the companion pit thread, but I don’t think it violates IMHO rules, so I’m posting it here too.
Well isn’t that grand? A whole bunch of other people will be made unhappy, but as long as you’re happy, to hell with the lot of 'em, right?
Ugh. Once upon a time, people aspired to being noble. Which meant even giving up their own happiness sometimes if it meant that others would suffer. However, the ‘me’ generation attitudes began to prevail and now far too many people put themselves before everyone else. Doesn’t matter how many people end up hurt so long as you are happy, right?
Sorry, but I do not join the people who congratulate you on your joy. For starters, I agree that it’s based on the myth that a person whose smelly socks you don’t live with is somehow more magically wonderful than the man in your own life and expect that you will become every bit as disillusioned with this man as you did with your own husband.
Secondly is the ‘my feelings before everyone else’s’ attitude. Where do you think that you are entitled to sacrifice others’ peace of mind on the altar of your pleasure? How do people manage to acquire such an attitude of selfish entitlement?
Then there’s the complete dishonesty of it all. You made a vow and you’ve broken it. You are deceiving people. Lying to people who trust you is reprehensible in all situations.
Finally, it’s the cowardice of the thing. If you have been so unhappy, then you should have left your spouse long ago and given him a chance to find someone who truly appreciates him. I am not at all impressed with your attitude that you are so superior to him and that you tolerate his presence. That is contempt. And you cannot possibly love someone for whom you have contempt. But rather than being honest and facing the consequences, you have sneaked around behind your husband’s back for the duration of your marriage.
Do you think he’s such a fool he doesn’t know that you don’t love him?
Nothing about this is admirable, brave, or worth congratulations. You asked for help; here it is: grow some balls and divorce your husband. Then take up with this guy. Try living your life honestly. And give a tiny thought, every now and then, for the feelings of others besides yourself.
Me too. Most of Western society would also agree. You’re the one with an outdated view of what “society” things. The divorce rate is very high so obviously that view is hardly widely held. I don’t believe that a single person in this thread is saying that staying married and ending the affair is the only right option. Are you being purposefully obtuse?
It’s my humble opinion that you should go out and get a job. You’re not getting divorced because you’re too lazy to work? You’re obviously not too lazy to coordinate a 30 year affair.
The advice I can offer is that you should only have safe sex. Quite aside from the other issues already raised, your husband should not be unwittingly subjected to potential sexually transmited diseases without his assent.
The good doctor’s wife, here. My father had an affair when I was a teenager, fifteen years ago, and I thought you needed to hear how your actions are going to affect your kids.
You’re fooling yourself if you think your children will never suffer because of this. It will come out–somehow, somewhere, during the affair or after it ends it always comes out–and your children’s faith in you will be damaged. It might just suffer a tiny little crack, or it might be shattered completely, but it’s going to be damaged, and that’s going to hurt them. Whether or not you semantically lied to them or withheld information, they’re going to feel like you lied. I’ll give you 100% guarantee on that one. Odds are pretty good that pain will plague them to a certain extent for the rest of their lives.
I’ve been the kid in this situation. My dad’s affair wasn’t a long-term thing and it didn’t directly affect my life–he and Mom worked things out, so nobody moved out, nobody new moved in, and things went on pretty much as they’d been. On the surface, anyway. Under the surface…well, fifteen years later things between us still aren’t completely right, and they probably never will be. No matter how much I love him, and how much I enjoy spending time with him, I don’t trust him, not really. The man could probably tell me the sky was blue and water was wet, and there’d be a tiny little voice in the very farthest back part of my mind that snorted and said, “Yeah, right.” It hurts to feel that way about anybody, but it’s really horrible to be that way about your own daddy.
The worst part, though, is that under all the good feelings I have about him, there’s this tiny little kernel pure, unadulterated hatred. There’s a piece of me that hates him for lying to us, and for the pain my mother couldn’t keep out of her eyes, and for the times in those first few years after the affair when she’d look at him and I could tell she was struggling to keep the doubt out of her face and voice. That part of me has buried itself deeper and deeper over the years, and it hardly ever comes out at all these days except when I read something like your OP, but it’s there. And that part is here to stay, if not for my entire lifetime, then at least for his. It breaks my heart to feel that way about him, and it always will.
I won’t even get started on how crappy a relationship I’d have had with that other woman if my parents had split up and she’d been part of my life. But I would have hated and resented her, and that part of me that hates my father would have stayed a lot closer to the surface.
Yeah, it’s kind of like renormalization in quantum electrodynamics; just divide by the infinities and everything works out.
My mother did this same sort of thing, and not only did it work out badly (financially, legally, and otherwise) for everyone involved, she never forgave everyone else for driving her to it. Narcissistic self-deception and compassionate concern for the emotional well-being of others go together like claymore mines and kittens.
Stranger
Maybe your husband will never find out, but your kids will. I found out about my dad cheating on my mom way, way before my mom even got a whiff of the affair. Kids are very perceptive.
The result? One kid hates my father with a passion, the other kid avoids him like the plague, and another kid is just civil towards him.
Weigh carefully…
All too true. Herpes is in up to 25% of the population and can be so minor in outbreak that some people don’t even know they’re infected. HPV is in 75% or so. If the OP’s husband were to discover evidence of her infidelity by a nasty outbreak of warts or sores on his genitals, that wouldn’t require any clever detective work to figure out what was going on. (Those diseases aren’t entirely prevented by condom use but that does cut down the incidence by a serious amount.)
And do you think that Aeschines accomplished this with his wild thrashing and froth about Blessed-by-Jesus-Monogamy Mode? I don’t. His more recent posts have communicated this far more effectively than his first unsympathetic unasked-for rant. I do agree with him, so +1 points for having the correct message, -3 points for spraying the message in spittle.
But then again, too few to mention?
I wish I could say I was surprised and saddened, but no, evidently she wants her sugar daddy to continue to pay for and raise her neglected hellspawn children about whom she seemingly could not care less, all the while she’s bumping uglies with whomever is whispering sweet nothings in her ear this week.
Do I have a problem with the concept of an open relationship? No. But honey, this ain’t it.
When you go out to meet your lover, where do you say you’re going? I assume you’re lying. And breaking your wedding vow is a lie. It doesn’t have to involve words-- the act of having an affair turns your marriage into a lie.
But here’s what’s really unfair: by deceiving your husband, you are taking away his choice to stay or go. Maybe he wouldn’t want to continue to support you for three years if he knew you were fucking around on him. You are cheating him of the love he deserves, of his money, and abusing the trust he places in you (not to mention the trust your children place in you). How can you feel good about doing that to him when you admit he is a good person who is working hard to support you and your kids?