Good counseling has nothing to do with right vs wrong, or with blame. It has to do with figuring out how to deal with all the mixed emotions, and how to get on with life without getting mired down in blame and accusations and guilt and doubt.
Be sure you’ve got a GOOD counselor. Good luck.
I haven’t been in that situation but I think I can empathize well with your situation. I completely understand the insecurity and wanting to read the emails just to make sure. And I completely understand not wanting to talk to friends and family. I think I’d feel exactly as you described. And the imagination, oh yes.
Sorry I have no useful advice for you but maybe it will help to know someone thinks they understand.
Don’t be a doormat. You’ll continue to get treated as one until you refuse to be treated like one.
Ignore the posts where people are saying "well you better start working on yourself if you don’t want your partner to stray " fuck that.
Your partner is the one that cheated on you. Not the other way around.
Instead of talking to you about it, she chose to become intimate with another person. It’s her pile of shit, not yours.
Let her take the lead on therapy, that’s the least she can do. Then get involved, and reconcile your differences then move on if you choose to.
Waiting for someone in denial about their wrong-doing to go to therapy is a sure way to make sure therapy never happens. He can start going to therapy for himself, and her decision about whether or not to join him can play a big role in his choice to remain in the marriage (or not). His life has presumably been turned upside-down because of this situation, and there’s no reason he should have to wait for her in order to start dealing with that.
Asimovian is right…going to therapy is good for both people…fatmac will have some emotional baggage to deal with regardless if the wife takes the lead or not. Therapy is not a form of punishment…it is a tool to heal, regardless of who did what.
My ex wife left her diary in the laundry basket. I already suspected or I wouldn’t have read it. Pretty much spelled it all out. Wish I had handled it better.
My advice…walk away, don’t look back. We “worked it out” after but it didn’t last. Wish I would have moved on when it happened. We didn’t have kids so it’s not the same.
That’s just not true.
I know at least a couple relationships that have gone through affairs and, with a lot of hard work, worked it out, and the partners have been happy for 10+ years and counting. Affairs, like other marital problems, can be worked through.
Of course, I know others that ended in divorce, but both partners ended up happily married to other people.
An affair is a symptom. It’s not some sign that the person having the affair is sub-human or never to be trusted again. People can and do work through them. Will your marriage survive? Nobody knows, especially all us strangers on the internet. Is it worth putting some work into? Sure, if you think it is. There is hope. Take it a day at a time, take slow steps, and keep an open mind.
Find a new wife.
Certainly, but the point that Anaamika and I are making is the converse – that relatively few people cheat without marital problems.
The OP’s stated goal is to save his marriage, after all. Ultimately, his wife’s going to have to show the right contrition, he’s going to have to be able to forgive her, and they’re both going to have to work on the problems in their marriage.
Maybe that won’t be possible in the end, of course.
Since you have kids, I think it’s a good idea to try to work it out for their sake. Divorce is really hard on kids. Even if you guys never make it back to having a great marriage, a workable marriage will still be better for the kids than dealing with divorce.
It will probably be a long time, if ever, until you can trust her again. I would say until trust is rebuilt, there should be full transparency between you two. Nothing should be private. Consider having a combined email account (JohnAndJane@gmail) instead of each of you having your own. This way it’s unambiguous that emails won’t be private. Creating secret email accounts won’t be tolerated. Create a combined facebook account instead of each having your own for the same reason. On your cell phones, enable GPS tracking so you can see the phone’s location on a map by going to a website. Let her know that clearing the text or call history should not be done. Verify that the calls on your cell phone bill match up with what’s in the memory of the cell phone.
Did she meet him through facebook? Regardless, have her go through all her facebook friends and defriend and block anyone associated with him. You don’t want her to be able to find him in a moment of weakness. It might be a good idea for you to change the password to her facebook acct to something only you know and deactivate the account for a while. Even if she doesn’t see him again, there are plenty of other exes and crushes that could be trouble. Have her get off facebook for a while to clear her head.
You will somehow have to eventually find it within yourself to forgive her. You may never be able to trust her fully again, but you need to not hold this over her head forever. You may not be able to do this now. Work though these current issues, but realize you may get to a point where you have to consciously decide to move pass these feelings or else you’ll never really recover your marriage.
Look, you have your children to think about (clearly your wife was not). You need to sort things out to ensure that the impact is lessened as much as possible on them. This is about them, it is their family which is threatened and while this should not ge construed as advice to “stay in it the kids” you really need to look at it as detached as possible.
I echo the STDs issue. And, kick her out of your bed while you are at ut, at least until the emotional shock has passed.
This is intended to be helpful advice, but it’s only going to work if his wife is ok with all of that. Personally, I’d see it as a huge helping of “shame and remind the offender of her terrible offense” and I would walk out of the relationship before I did anything that. There’s a difference between rebuilding trust and treating someone like a child or an incompetent or a 24/7 diehard criminal. If you’re to the point that you feel you need to keep her Facebook password for her and block her out of it out of fear that “there are plenty of other exes and crushes that could be trouble”, that’s not a healthy relationship, and I question the effectiveness of that method in MAKING it into a healthy relationship.
You have two kids together and she cheats, her being “sorry” doesn’t even come close to what she should feel if she really valued your relationship.
Three times? That’s almost a pattern, and it will very likely happen again. Your kids may be better without her in their life.
Divorce is hard on kids, many get through it, but it’s never easy. You know what’s much harder for kids and all concerned? A continued tendency for sexual promiscuity on one of the parents part. What sort of horrid examples might that impart on a young person?
If I was cheated on (once), I’d be very, very mad, possibly livid, but I could possibly get over it.
Three times? All parties involved would count themselves lucky that I wasn’t packing a flamethrower that day.
I really respect you wanting to keep things together for everyone’s sake, but it seems to me that she has almost no respect for you based on her behavior. A loyal person would be devastated after even one transgression.
How plausible does “I only did it three times, I swear I’ll never do it again” sound to you?
This isn’t bad advice if they can get their relationship back on track. I agree that a great marriage is better than dealing with divorce, but a marriage without trust is not great. It’s not even workable; it is fundamentally broken. And if the OP can truly never trust his wife again, then the kids will be happier if they divorce. Staying in a bad relationship for the kids’ sake teaches your kids that, if they ever end up in a bad relationship, they should stay in it.
I’ve compiled three likely scenarios of what the future might hold for the OP and his children:
Scenario 1: Dad forgives mom. They stay happily married, and their kids experience what a normal, loving relationship should be like.
Scenario 2: Dad can’t forgive mom. They stay married because of the kids. The kids spend the rest of their formative years in a household seething with angst, with a dad who is distrusting & full of self-doubt and a mom who is remorseful & continually seeks the forgiveness that she can never receive. Kids sense dysfunctional relationship no matter how hard the parents try to hide it, and grow up with a twisted sense of what a normal relationship should be.
Scenario 3: Dad can’t forgive mom. They divorce and (probably eventually) establish relationships with more compatible partners. The kids have a rough time during the transition, but eventually get used to the new normal. Split custody is difficult to work out, but not impossible, and they eventually look forward to 2 holidays every year instead of 1. They get to see how much happier mom and dad are with new partners than they ever were with each other. Seeing 2 functional relationships spring from 1 dysfunctional relationship gives them hope that unhappiness in their own future relationships doesn’t have to doom them to unhappiness for a lifetime.
Although Scenario 1 is the best possible outcome, it isn’t possible unless the OP gets counseling and truly forgives his wife. There’s also Scenario 1.5, where mom and dad pretend nothing has changed “so the kids won’t notice anything is wrong.” But you *cannot *fake this; kids aren’t fucking stupid. They are damn well going to notice the difference between how mom and dad used to snuggle and kiss all the time and go to sleep at the same time every night, whereas now they don’t smile nearly as much, they only hold hands on occasion, and dad spends an awful lot of time at his workbench while mom reads and knits a lot more than before. Being avoidant isn’t going to help his kids one whit.
In any case, I am certain that Scenario 2 will fuck the OP’s kids up *far *more royally than Scenario 3. I was a divorced kid, and it was an incredible relief when my parents finally split up. The transition from married kid to divorced kid sucks a whole lot, but it doesn’t suck more than when mom and dad are too fearful or inertial to kibosh a bad thing.
As a side thought, the OP is neither mundane nor pointless… not by a long shot.
It would kind of be a bummer to have a “Really heavy shit” forum though, as needed as it may come to be.
The counseling is to help you figure out how to regain trust in your wife, and to help you both learn how to do better in the future, whether it is together or separate: it’s not about blame, it’s about solutions.
I hope things get clearer soon.
So they say, eh? :dubious: I’m willing to bet the farm their marriages are nothing more than facades. They stay together for appearances and convenience.
Well, then, that makes everything OK. :rolleyes:
Not much to add beyond the observations of others but I will say the following:
There is no comparison whatsoever to looking at someone’s email vrs infidelity.
The damage done here is not easily repaired. At a minimum you need counseling together & apart.
If you have insecurity issues you probably need to repair those first before everything else.
As much as your wife would like to blame you for her infidelity, bullshit bullshit bullshit! Did I mention bullshit? I cannot fathom how anyone can do this to another person and maintain any belief in their moral superiority.
Finally, you are not alone. I’ve personally had this happen twice (well actually more than twice but in the big picture twice is a good enough descriptor.) As I have always remarked, in this world of billions of people somebody somewhere has already gone through what you are going through now. Your job is to discover what the successful people did to make it through and emulate them. It is not easy, it will take time, it will be painful and the answer may not be staying together.
In my case my (first) marriage of 10 years ended in divorce. As I write this my two children are sleeping in the other room here at my parents home. We’ll be going tubing on the Chesapeake Bay in a few hours. We spent yesterday crashing in the waves at Assateague Island together. My ex remarried the guy she was screwing (well technically one of the guys). In the end I view this as it’s own punishment - he married a woman who cheats, she married a guy who sleeps with other men’s wives. It’s a match made in hell.
I am far happier without her. My children are well adjusted and happy. Life moves on.
As bizarre as it sounds, in the end, this may all be the best thing that ever happened to you. Your spouse has revealed to you she’s the kind of person who would betray you like this. In a way it’s a gift (certainly remaining uninformed is no blessing.) Now it’s time to move on from here.
Good luck to you.
And your point is what? A cheater is a dirty rotten scum who is best just thrown away and never seen again? Once someone cheats they have proven themselves to be unfit for relationships ever again?
Your opinion is of course, yours. But I completely disagree. It’s obvious that people can and do get through affairs like they can and do get through all sorts of marital problems.
For some people, cheating is a deal-breaker. For others, it’s not. Neither side has any sort of high ground on the issue.