Hello Onward.
If you've been together 33 years after meeting as college sweethearts, that puts you both around age 53 now? Two teenage kids?
You say that she had an EA/PA that lasted about 3 years. If my reckoning is right, this happened around ages 40-43 (years 2009-2011)? If your kids are 13 and 15 now, they were 3 and 5 when this occurred? Your WW was perhaps a SAHM when the kids were young? When youngest reached age 3, she was feeling like she had lost herself as an individual with a meaningful role in the world and found refuge with another man.
By the way, if she stayed in contact with him for years, then the EA was ongoing. It's more accurate to say she had an affair that was 10 years (if that's the correct time), with a PA component that occurred over about 3 of those years (assuming she's not lying about that -- cheaters lie and minimize almost always).
Why did she end it? Where is the AP now? Who is he (in other words -- do you know him)?
What about the hookup in 2017? What was she doing at a drug-fueled weekend music festival without her husband, in 2017, as a nearly 50-year old mother and wife? Was the hook up with the same man who was the earlier AP?
I do think you'd find a lot more advice if you were to post this thread on a forum like General or Just Found Out.
Meanwhile, I'll confirm to you that your questions are normal. She has had years to process her infidelity (assuming you know the whole truth -- she is a serial cheater, suggesting there could be more); to you, it's as if it happened the day you found out.
One of the long-term questions you'll need to answer for your self is what you'll say to yourself as you stare yourself down in the bathroom mirror 5 years from now, or 10. At age 53, you're still young enough to start over. Age 63, it will be harder. Time passes and is lost forever. There is in fact time pressure on you to make this decision.
One of the factors that is unique to the "found out years later" scenario is whether the marriage was a dream-come-true in the years in between. It has been about 4 years since your wife last had sex with another man. Has she thrown herself heart and soul into being the best wife a man could dream of having during those four years, as if she was trying to prove to herself, and the world, that she's better than just a woman who cheats? I say it that way because you should assume that the four years before your Dday are the best you're going to have as long as you stay married to her. Going forward, there will always be the overlay of the trauma and humiliation and pain of her cheating.
Were those four years your dream-come-true as a man and a husband?
Another factor is the surreality. You look back at those years before Dday. Every day she lied to you. To your face. Like in the vicinity of 4000 days she has looked you in the eye, the man to whom she vowed devotion and fidelity, and lied as she carried on with her AP, at least emotionally. Really, dawg? A human who chooses to do that to a spouse, is that a human you are actually considering staying married to?
Another factor is the apparent lack of consequences if you stay. She had gave herself a secret hall pass, had her fun, lived 10 or so years in a private, one-sided open marriage with some NSA recreational sex on the side as you chugged away like an unwitting useful engine, working your job, bringing home your paycheck, fathering your children. Now, she gets to pass go and collect $200 without going to jail, just move on in life enjoying the final turn toward the golden years knowing her devoted husband is around to care for her as she grows old and feeble? Does she deserve that from you?
[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 7:43 PM, March 24th (Wednesday)]
