SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Yes. A lot of times, when a wayward realizes that they have lost control over you, they lose their mind even more.

I cut off communication with my wife and now my phone has been on fire with phone calls and text messages from her.

Is this common?

Yes.

You see, an affair is rather like a three-legged stool. You can balance pretty well on a three-legged stool without a whole lot of effort.

You just cut one of the legs off the stool. It went from a fairly easy thing to a very difficult thing.

And yes, be prepared for her to blow up your phone and to go from begging and pleading to more sinister tactics.

If she threatens suicide, call the police.

Whatever you do, don't go over there. You don't know what she plans to do.

Cat

My WW called and I didn't answer, letting the call go to voicemail. It seems she was driving the new car I bought her a few months ago and some old lady rear ended it.

I of course made the cursory call to ask her if she was hurt. No, she wasn't; but the rear bumper is messed up. So she wanted to know what she was supposed to do.

I'm glad she's fine, but I find it ironic that I get the call when she's got a problem or a need. I'm certain the POSOM could tell her how to exchange info and get the police involved if possible (they both know how to do that).

Sigh.

[This message edited by 36yearsgone at 2:59 PM, October 11th (Wednesday)]

do you have a VAR on you at all times?

do not want you to get another domestic violence charge. (even a false one)

If she keeps it up, tell her she can try to win you back after the D, but I would not marry her again.

She can just try to live with you if she gets tested for stds, is transparent, goes complete NC with the OM, etc. But then she gets to live with you if she behaves. (no false charges, has real remorse, and takes ownership of her actions)

She is still in contact with the OM during the false DV charge.

when has she really stopped contact?

She is not a safe person for you to have in the same house.

She will keep it up, because you are supposed to be there for her at her beck and call.

why does she want to be with you based upon her actions? I do not see where her actions show that she cares at all about you.

Sorry.

but I find it ironic that I get the call when she's got a problem or a need

36, remember what I said...you're viewed as an ATM/Utility. You mentioned that it is hard for you to "turn off" the responsible self you've always been. I expect that these will be her continued appeals to you. A problem is that it can be her conduit for trying to hoover you back in. You've done well with your responses to her since the DV ambush.

The 180 works in helping you detach emotionally. You actually employed a "soft" 180 with the hairdresser/tip call. A full, hard 180 would be NC with her except for tight boundaries created and enforced by you such as text/email only, only emergencies involving family, D matters handled only through atty.

The 180 will likely generate more attempts to communicated from her. Look at it this way: that will just give you more opportunities to practice the boundaries you put in place by not responding.

Normal folks want to help other people and have a sense of responsibility to do so. That's why the 180 takes practice.

I of course made the cursory call to ask her if she was hurt. No, she wasn't; but the rear bumper is messed up. So she wanted to know what she was supposed to do.

My 18 year old child knows what to do in an accident. I'm surprised your wife has no idea. I guess its time to learn.

This was not an emergency. It was yet another way to get your to respond. Next time don't respond unless she is calling from the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

She had an affair when we were engaged.

My red flags are waving red flags.

Brother, gently, Was your son's death a suicide?

36,

If you went through this thread, copied out just your posts, and made a single document out of them, what impression do you think a counselor or psychiatrist would get of your wife? What comes across in one scenario after another is that for your wife, it seems to be a series of control and power games, with her constantly trying to force you into a subordinate position. And if you try to change that power dynamic, how does she react?

When you decided to spend a night at a hotel, you had to be taught a lesson. Cue false DV calls to the police, which your wife made in co-operation with the OM.

You go dark and stop responding to her every need, she blows your phone up. How dare you slip the leash, you're not getting away that easily.

In the middle of the affair, she brought the OM into your home, to lie to your face about the affair, then to suggest you chauffeur them around town for their pleasure, like some kind of servant, with the aim of finishing the evening with a threesome in which you would watch him have sex with your wife, most likely in the bedroom you share with her. It would have been the ultimate humiliation, and your wife was fine with that, because all of her actions seem to be about enforcing a hierarchy of power within the relationship, rather than about love between equals.

From what you say, you have bent over backwards to show your love and devotion, and acts of love are one of the 'love languages'. Some people might appreciate that, but it seems like your wife came to take you and your devotion for granted, and possibly progressed beyond that to seeing it as dependence, which put her in a position of power over you in the relationship. You became the worshiper, she became the worshiped. And she got used to that. And maybe, after a while, your acts of love started to lose their meaning to her, because she had to do so little to keep receiving them.

And then the OM showed up. An experienced and cynical player who knew just how to manipulate women at an age where they are starting to lose their looks and confidence. Using a combination of teasing and temptation to make ideal candidates identify themselves to him, he would then make these women convince him why he should give them all the good things he had to offer. He made them work for it, with the reward of the ego kibbles and reassurance about their looks that they made the grade and were good enough for him. And one woman after another fell for it.

Working in that office must have been like shooting fish in a barrel for him. He played it so well that the women ended up in competition with each other for him. He must have a huge disdain and disrespect for every woman who falls for his technique, but they are so desperate for his validation that they see giving themselves to him as a privilege. Or he drugs, beats, and rapes them. Whichever technique gets him what he wants.

And your wife's ludicrous quote about the OM being a 'better' man than you? It is all about power. You will bring your tribute to her feet if she does nothing at all to deserve it. The OM, on the other hand, made her work for his attention, and keep working for it. And she was impressed by that, and took it as a sign of manliness. She became subordinate to him, and made her marriage and family subordinate to him.

However, as she herself acknowledged when you suggested the OM should pay her hairdresser's bill, there is no way on earth he would do that. That is not how the power dynamic between her and the OM works, and she is fine with that. When she needs a bill paid, a shelf put up, a car crash administrated, she comes to you and lets you do the work, because that is how the power dynamic works between you.

What she established with the affair was an utterly unhealthy power hierarchy in which the OM was King, she was Queen, and you were her faithful servant. I am sorry to put it that way, because you are a great guy, worthy of much better treatment and love, but every interaction involving you and your wife, or you, your wife, and the OM, seems to indicate that is how your wife saw things.

You say that your wife will not take responsibility for her actions, and that she tells you that you just have to 'get over it'. That sounds very much like she does not see it as her position within the power hierarchy in the relationship to have to explain or justify anything to you, because a Queen does not justify herself to a servant. And whenever you want to be treated as an equal, or - God forbid! - as someone she should answer to, she responds with outraged anger, and acts of punishment like the false DV charges, to try and put you back in the place she has assigned you in the relationship. Which is serving her, and letting her do whatever she wants.

It is possible that there were always elements of that power dynamic within the relationship, but you were happy to let it slide because you were happy loving her and showering her with praise and affection, using your support as a means of demonstrating your love. So the unhealthy aspect of the unequal balance within the marriage did not show itself or cause problems for years. And then the OM appeared, and the full extent of your wife's view of you as a subordinate blew up into its full ugly blossom, understandably causing a substantial shock to you.

It is hard to gauge whether or not your wife is still involved with the OM. She is certainly unlikely to be honest about it, but even if he is out of the picture, her dismissive attitude to you, telling you to 'get over it', and doing none of the things a remorseful wayward would do, coupled with her rage if you do anything to escape her control, indicate that her affair mind-set about where you stand in the relationship hierarchy is still very much in operation. For you, it may be about love, but for her, it seems to be about power, and that is why I think you have hit such a brick wall as far as her conciliatory actions have gone.

I believe that your wife's lies and crude manipulation in the MC session are an attempt to turn them into a process that makes you the bad guy, makes you feel responsible for the affair, and which absolves her of any responsibility. If she could manage it properly, you would be on your knees, apologising to her, with the counselors applauding you for taking ownership of your poor behaviour.

Only...You're not allowing that to happen to you, are you? She lies, and you call her out on it straight away. That is very healthy. It is starting to destroy the unhealthy power dynamic in the marriage, and to release your from your subordinate position. However, as healthy as that may be, it feels odd and jarring to you to be doing that.

The same is true of your going 'dark' on the communications front, because you keep trying to live up to an ideal you have of what a supportive husband should do. So when you start taking steps and making progress to break out of the box that your wife has put you in, you end up feeling like you are at war with yourself, and failing to be a 'good' husband.

The combination of your wife's attitude that you should be subordinate to her in the marriage, and your own idealised image of what you have to do to be a 'good' husband have effectively trapped you between a rock and a hard place, haven't they? And I think it is your pressure on yourself to live up to your idealised 'husband' role that is the element that needs to change so you can break out of that trap.

How about, instead of putting pressure on yourself to be so supportive to someone who has not been very supportive of you, you re-focus your energy and create a new ideal role model for yourself, as an independent human being who does not need to keep validating himself by serving his wife, and who will not accept anything other than being an equal within the marriage, rather than a subordinate?

Honestly, you are not being a bad guy or a failure as a 'good' husband when you fight against your subordinate role, because you should never have been put into that role in the first place. Unfortunately, that was how your wife interpreted your supportive actions, and why she thought it was fine to have an affair.

She felt so totally secure about your devotion that she even admitted to you that she laid beside the OM calculating what you might do if you found out, and the worst case scenario that she imagined was that you would have a revenge affair. Divorce did not figure in her calculations, because she takes it for granted that you cannot live without her. That is why people keep recommending the 180, going 'dark', and demonstrating that you are not under her control. It is all about liberating you from the subordinate role that your wife has assigned to you in her mind.

The goal of that liberation is to either build a new balance of power within the relationship, in which you become treated as an equal, at which point your wife will start doing the things you need her to do to prove her remorse, or to release you from an unhealthy relationship so that you are no longer treated as a servant, and can meet someone new, who will treat you as an equal.

The OM does not serve your wife or pay for anything, and she admired that and found it attractive. There may be a lesson in that.

I apologise if anything I have written has been painful to read, but it has been written with your best interests at heart. It looks like you have been trying to deal with this from the perspective of a 'love' problem, when to me it seems to be far more about power. I think that things for you as an individual can only be improved if that element is recognised and addressed. Your independence is the key to a better future for you, 36, whether or not it is within the marriage.

[This message edited by M1965 at 3:34 AM, October 12th (Thursday)]

M1965:

Excellent post. Succinct and to the point. I am going to reread it about 20 times and let it sink in.

Thanks.

Your wife thinks you will be angry then get over it. Your non action has reinforced that.

You should have filed when she left.

The only option you have now us to file to protect yourself. She can do another DV, she can run up the credit cards, she can drain the bank accounts.

She has no respect for you and it will not change until you stand up for yourself

so when is she going to be served ?

Are you ready to wear a VAR and get another false DV charge ? Do you have a 'go' bag with documents, valuable assets and so on in case ?

PREPARE and get her served asap. Stay on the 180 hard

If the car and/or insurance has your name on it, yes, you will need to make sure to be involved to protect yourself, liabilty stuff. If not, let her deal with it. In any case, she can handle the estimates and phone calls once you have intially dealt with the insurance claim, to make sure it is done right. Her problem, don;t make it yours.

36,

If anything I have written is useful, I am glad of that, and I am sure that goes for all the other posters here. None of us want you to feel isolated, because many of us felt that way ourselves when we faced our own challenges. Thankfully, this forum has provided a lifeline for many people who feel they cannot talk to anyone around them, for a variety of reasons.

There is a huge amount that could be written to pull apart every statement that your wife has made since discovery, but you are already aware of the contradictions, the wilful misinterpretations, the acts bordering on aggression, and the flat-out refusals to accept responsibility. What is becoming apparent through your wife’s actions after discovery is that she is trying to engineer a future for your marriage where she has all the benefits of being married and looked after, but with the complete freedom to behave as if she is single and independent. She is demanding the freedom to do whatever she wants, with whoever she wants, whenever she wants, without any obligations, commitments, or responsibilities to you, or to explain why she feels entitled to keep introducing infidelity into your relationship with her (while engaged, and now while married).

Moreover, she keeps telling you that you ‘just have to get over it’, as if you have no other options in life available to you. What makes her anxious about discussing her actions is your growing awareness that you do have other options than accepting the kind of one-sided marriage that she is offering you, in which she has all the fun, with no guilt or responsibilities, and you provide the money, sort out any problems that arise, and accept repeated infidelity because she has fun cheating.

When you think about it like that, she is not offering you much of a future, is she?

By refusing to take responsibility for her actions and the pain she has caused you, she has actively blocked any chance of meaningful reconciliation.

By refusing to examine her motivations and lack of boundaries, she is preventing herself from being able to demonstrate that she will be any less likely to cheat in future than she was recently, or during your engagement. She may be doing this to assert her power within the relationship, as if being unanswerable for her actions and having a permanent free pass to commit infidelity is an essential right within marriage, but it backfires on her by making her a much less attractive prospect to remain married to than if she was remorseful, and paid you the respect of making efforts to change.

In light of your wife’s refusal to own her actions, to show anything like remorse, to do any work to prove that she sees infidelity as a fault within her that she has to fix (and to demonstrate any change in her basic attitude), I think that perhaps the person who needs to do some changing is you.

I think you should consider what the purpose of the marriage is, particularly as it stands today, and what its future purpose is likely to be.

I think you should compare what you put into the marriage with what you get out of it.

I think you should compare what you do for your wife with what she does for you.

I think you should compare your attitude to infidelity with your wife’s attitude to it, and assess how compatible you really are, now that it has become such an issue.

I think you should re-consider whether you have to keep living up to your idealised image of what a ‘good’ husband does, and providing unquestioning support, in light of what has been done to you.

I think you should consider whether greater independence and fewer obligations on your part might be a better role model for you in future, so that it is a better match with your wife’s role model.

I think you should be honest with yourself about whether or not you can live with repeated adultery, no matter how beneficial that might be for your wife.

I think you should understand that if the marriage ends, you are not throwing away 36 years of your life. The content of those years will stand forever, and no-one and nothing can take away the good times or what was achieved during those years. They cannot be erased or lost, whether or not the marriage continues. The issue for you now is whether the marriage is worth continuing, or if its end would free both of you up to live your lives as individuals, without obligations to one another. Your wife already appears to be living that way, but with all of the security that a marriage provides.

I think you should consider how sustainable the future is of a relationship is in which you love her, and she loves her. Where is the love for you in that equation?

Much of what I have written is focused on you as an individual, 36, because like many of us, you willingly lost sight of yourself in your commitment to the marriage, and in your desire to put the needs of your wife and children above your own. Those are good and noble things, but for a marriage to work in a balanced way, providing happiness and security for both parties, that level of commitment needs to be reciprocal. In your marriage, an imbalance has developed, creating a situation in which you have been dedicated to your wife, and your wife has been dedicated to herself. When understood in those terms, it becomes obvious why she does not want that situation to change, and why she is so insistent that her infidelity should be swept under the rug as if it has no significance, rather than treat it as something that could derail the train she wants to continue riding.

I believe she is acutely aware that you are starting to realise how unbalanced the situation has become, which is why she responds to any sign of independence from you by immediately trying to punish you and re-assert her control. It is like she wants you to remain in harness, working for her, and worshiping her. What you need to consider is whether what you get from her in return makes it worth it for you to continue maintaining that imbalance.

If you are not happy for that imbalance to continue in future, the alternatives would be to work on re-structuring the marriage to make it more equitable, with equal commitment and input from both of you, or if that is not possible, to consider ending the marriage and moving forwards as individuals. It appears that you have been making a lot of effort within the marriage, for an ever decreasing return in terms of love, support, and respect from your wife. The mantra in this forum is about getting people out of infidelity, but I see that as just the initial stage of a bigger process to get betrayed people back to a state of happiness. You have spent a great deal of your marriage channelling your energies into providing support for your wife and family, because that is how you saw your role, but I believe that you have reached a point now where it would be good for you to start considering your own needs, what you might need to be happy in life in future, and how likely your wife is to provide it.

[This message edited by M1965 at 4:22 PM, October 12th (Thursday)]

M1965 nailed it. That was one of the best posts I ever read.

What she established with the affair was an utterly unhealthy power hierarchy in which the OM was King, she was Queen, and you were her faithful servant.

M1965

Just to back up their point. What must your wife have told the OM about your character to have him come to your door and assume that you were going to watch him have sex with your wife?

It doesn’t matter if you wind up staying with your wife or not. Either way you need to get a divorce to rebalance the power. My guess is that cheating has been a way of life for her even before your marriage. For her your 180 is like she woke up one day and the sun was setting in the east. It will take her a bit to adjust.

If you must live with her then do it as a divorced couple.

[This message edited by Michigan at 9:30 AM, October 12th (Thursday)]

Excuse the language but why the fuck are you answering her calls?

M1965

What an absolutely fantastic post. I have a similar problem to 36's where I am also in limbo and can't decide. Your post actually bought a lot of clarity to my situation also.

Thank You for your wisdom.

M1965 - Very good post! Speaking of wisdom... remind me to never get into a debate with you because I don't think I would fare too well.

An experienced and cynical player who knew just how to manipulate women at an age where they are starting to lose their looks and confidence. Using a combination of teasing and temptation to make ideal candidates identify themselves to him, he would then make these women convince him why he should give them all the good things he had to offer. He made them work for it, with the reward of the ego kibbles and reassurance about their looks that they made the grade and were good enough for him. And one woman after another fell for it.

Although you didn't use it - the word misogynist is probably one of the most misused words in the English language, usually used by some women in a very disdaining manner against men in a way that reminds me of a man who calls a woman a 'lesbian' merely because she sidesteps his advances.

I would much rather paraphrase from the quote above for the definition. Kudos.

[This message edited by Marriagesucks at 12:05 PM, October 12th (Thursday)]

I had dinner with my wife, at a neutral location, to discuss some business issues.

During the conversation she interrupted and said,

"All my friends say I should divorce you."

The only reply I could think of was,

"Are these the same friends who covered up and encouraged your affair? If that's the case you should also listen to them about getting a divorce."

I'm not sure why she feels the need to bring something like that up. I don't fully understand her end game.

Did you have your police friend with you to this dinner?

If not you're playing with fire!!!!

Even having your police friend there why are you engaging her???

I'm not sure why she feels the need to bring something like that up. I don't fully understand her end game.

To cause hurt and confusion. Did it work? It sure did! Your WW knows what buttons to push with you and what they do because she installed them.

Flip the script. If you have filed for divorce, let all "business" go through your lawyer.