My Wife Had an Intense, Highly Deceptive Affair, Part II
Hello, all. I’ve been posting in JFO over the last two months and the thread is about to reach its capacity of 50 pages. It was suggested to me that I consider expanding out to the General forum with my new thread, so here I am.
Old thread: https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/topics/656164/my-wife-had-an-intense-highly-deceptive-affair/
As you can see by my latest posts, I am still very much in the thick of it all, but let’s hope I don’t need another 50 pages of discussion to figure out if I want to attempt R with my wife.
In addition to my recent posts in the other thread, I can also give an update on yesterday, my wife’s 38th birthday. It was a hard day and I knew it would be going in—Feb. 24 was my wife’s second hotel stay with AP where she did some especially carnal and hedonistic acts (anal, handcuffs, four hour sex marathon, etc.), so the three month anniversary was going to be a trigger on top of the emotional complexity of celebrating her birthday.
My wife was at work and I was working from home (it was a busy work day for me), and I had to run errands, including grocery shopping to make dinner and have a cake so our two children could celebrate that evening—we also hosted my father and his wife for dinner as they were the babysitters that day.
I spent the morning in overdrive between work and driving around town, so it kept my mind busy, but the afternoon was bad. I’m still finishing up Mrs. Walloped’s thread (I have already read both of Walloped’s), and it really resonated with me—I spent much of the early afternoon in tears.
For one, at 2.5 years post-DDay, it felt like they were in a similar spot as me, who is only two months passed DDay (March 15). The thought of going through this pain for years more is unbearable. But second, I don’t feel like my wife is fully in on giving 100% to heal me. She is certainly trying—I see it clearly—and she might do a string of a dozen things right, but at least once a day there’s a big red flag. She still can often become defensive in conversations and she is still very selfishly orientated, entitled and victimized when she analyzes issues—it’s always about how something makes her feel and almost never empathy for how I feel.
I’m becoming increasingly less tolerant of her flags though—last night, after we had an enjoyable dinner celebration and the kids were asleep, she became very defensive when she asked about my day and I noted that I need more from her (we had also exchanged some texts during the day, so she knew I was in a bad place and trying my best to brave through celebrating). I stopped the conversation—I couldn’t believe she was raising her voice and telling me about how great her effort has been while I was sitting in front of her pointing out the issues.
We broke for a couple of hours and she re-engaged later in the evening—as always, starting the conversation by apologizing for her defensiveness. But then immediately becoming defensive in the new conversation. She really doesn’t see it; or she really hates me—I’m not sure there’s a third option.
She claims to want to R more than anything, but I don’t feel it. I certainly don’t feel it enough to want to reciprocate by offering R to her—and truthfully, I am not nearly over the affair enough to give R a fair shake right now. I know R would be the hardest thing I ever try to do, so I’m just not willing to do it unless I feel like it’s her sole purpose in life right now, and I don’t feel that way.
I’m also not ready for D—we have 17 years of history and I loved her every minute, along with the two wonderful children we brought into the world (ages: 7 and 3). I’m not ready to pull the plug on that life yet. As I noted frequently in the first thread, I have a high pain tolerance and I want to stand in this fire as long as I can stand it before giving up.
So it leaves me in a hellish limbo. The days drift on, but I don’t feel myself healing and I don’t see her making enough progress on her array of personal issues.
We have been in CT since the first week of DDay—we both like the therapist, who has been fairly hard on my wife. I think the sessions are worthwhile as she takes the advice of the therapist more to heart than if I say the same thing.
My wife has been seeing her own IC for two months, but those sessions, according to her, have been less helpful. Her IC keeps putting a positive spin on very obviously horrible things. My wife is planning a swap, this time to a psychologist (which I think is probably for the best considering her FOO and significant sex issues).
I have my first IC session today and I’m looking forward to it.
Anyway, this is me getting the ball rolling. As readers from my first thread can attest, I’m an open book, so feel free to probe away. There are plenty of dark corners to be explored and nothing is off the table from my perspective. I’ve found this forum to be incredibly therapeutic and I owe the posters at JFO a big thank you for their tireless help these last two months—thank you.
I’ll leave it there for now, but I understand many of you won’t have all the significant background from my thread, so I’m happy to repeat things or link back to key posts.
982 comments posted: Monday, September 5th, 2022
My Wife had an Intense, Highly Deceptive Affair, Part 3
I'm still here.
For those unfamiliar with my growing saga, here are the previous threads:
Part I: https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/topics/656164/my-wife-had-an-intense-highly-deceptive-affair/
Part II: https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/topics/656633/my-wife-had-an-intense-highly-deceptive-affair-part-ii/?ap=1
I'll kick off the new thread with this post from the end of the last one from Farsidejunky:
Dr. S:
I am going to suggest (again) you read the parable of the scorpion and the frog...as you continue to twist yourself into a pretzel trying to understand why she can't stop stinging you...
That's a parable I know well and it is very relatable to my situation. My WW is the scorpion that keeps stinging me. And both of us seem confused by it every time--perhaps it's just in her nature. And that's what she's tying to change. The day I see her stop fighting to change, will be an easy point to walk, but I'm not there just yet. Let's hope it doesn't take another 50 pages to figure out though.
578 comments posted: Saturday, September 3rd, 2022
My Wife had an Intense, Highly Deceptive Affair
Last Tuesday I (37M) discovered that my wife (37F) was having an intense emotional and physical affair with a colleague on the town PTA for the last three months. We met in 2004 and married in 2012. We have two children (seven and three) and the married man also has children of similar age. His wife is not aware of the affair.
They met in Sept. 2021, kissed at a PTA holiday party on Dec. 17 and had a highly carnal overnight at a nearby hotel on Jan. 4 with unprotected sex (my wife lied about being in a different state for a work overnight). The affair progressed to meeting up in his car in a parking garage—she’d leave work a little early and meet for an hour before taking the train home for dinner. She give him oral sex in the car largely, but sometimes they’d do other things as well. They met four times between Jan. 18 and March 2 in his car.
They also had a second overnight stay in the same hotel on Feb. 24, that one pushing more boundaries, including anal sex, handcuffs (the man is a cop), and an attempt at sex in the tub.
Lastly, they had an ongoing texting relationship throughout that involved friendship, emotional support, working together on PTA events, and of course, sexting. All of that would occur with me in the house, sometimes even while I was sitting next to her watching TV on the couch.
I discovered the affair on the evening of March 15 when I overheard very suspicious comments from her visiting mother and sister (who my wife had been confiding in about the affair). It built upon much of her suspicious activity in recent months: on her phone, staying up later than me, drinking more, aggressively giving me more sex, snapping at me on strange swings, etc.
I called my wife out on it and she denied it. I pushed and she gave me a lie: that she kissed a co-worker Dec., but that was it. We talked through it for a few hours and I was highly suspicious, but also didn’t want to make too big of a deal if it indeed was only a kiss. She gave me oral sex and went to bed.
I stewed for 20 minutes before taking her phone into the bathroom with me. Reading her texts with her mom and sister, I confirmed an affair was happening with a local man.
At 4 a.m. I woke her up with proof from the phone. She admitted to having sex with the man on PTA, but only once. I pointed to a text she sent to her sister that noted her doing it "again." She pivoted to it only happened twice.
Her version of the story at that time involved her meeting him in his car in a big local parking lot in the middle of the day to have sex with him wearing a condom.
I probed her all night and day. I couldn’t wrap my mind around her story—my wife is not the type for the story she shared. It festered with me for days as I kept picking apart her story, gaining new details. She wouldn’t lock in exact dates and times for things and I kept narrowing things down based on our text messages and work schedules.
We also discussed the man, with me citing we would call him together after an agreed upon plan for handling cutting him out of your life. She claims to have misunderstood and she called him separately and claims she told him I found out—and his only concern was whether I’d tell his wife. They also corroborated stories as my wife wanted to prevent me from finding out about the hotel stays and frequency in his car.
He called her that night still terrified about his wife, but my wife deleted record of the call initially, before deciding to tell me about it.
On March 17, we had sex again—it was raw and emotional and I do not think I was ready for it.
On March 18, I gave her the ultimatum of restoring all her deleted text messages so I could read them or we get divorced. She wavered and I called my lawyer (we have a prenup). She tried to get her parents to send her screen shots of all their texts, but I refused to compromise because she was clearly hiding something.
She eventually broke down and thought the marriage would be over once I found out that she had sex in a hotel with another man for four hours (truthfully, I was initially relieved that the story about her fucking in broad daylight a quarter-mile from our house in the middle of a crowded parking lot was fake).
What followed was a broken dam of emotion and truth from my wife—she was coming clean (at least I’m now confident it’s close enough). I spent the evening pulling through all the dates and details I described at the top of the post.
On March 19, we had a great day. I was finally able to process a real version of the story and I started to feel optimistic about reconciliation. That evening we had a very intense sexual session that lasted two hours—completely hedonistic, rougher than usual, and it included a bit of anal sex, which we haven’t done in 15 years.
March 20 was a bad day—we weren’t able to get all her texts back, but we went through all the texts with her mom going back to Dec. She was ruthless to me—every day texting her mom about what an asshole I was and me being oblivious to it. It seemed transparent that she was doing it to convert her mom to supporting the affair as her family was very opposed to it and constantly offering advice to stop it—her father largely stopped talking to her entirely once he found out. My wife was also very upset about me contacting a lawyer; she felt it worked in opposition to our desire to reconcile.
March 21 was another good day, but also emotionally difficult. It was a work day, but we were both home and spent a good portion of the day having sex between her meetings (I know, hysterical bonding).
We had tickets to an event that night at an arena—the same one she met the guy at on Jan. 4 to watch an NBA game while he worked (he finished his shift and drove them to the hotel). Entering the arena, we waited in line just outside the parking garage she met to give him BJs.
I kept it positive and looked at it as a chance to see how a date night would go—it was overall good, but she had a lot of sadness in her eyes throughout the night. It felt like it forced her to see how badly she fucked up and the mistake she made hurting me so badly.
Yesterday we did couples therapy, but spent most of the time talking about how we met and our families, but we’re going back again tomorrow. Today we each went back to our office jobs (but we fooled around again a little this morning despite advice from our therapist not too).
I understand this is tremendously long, and I skipped over so many details. I feel left in limbo right now. I care so much about the well being of our children and want to make this work, but I don’t know how to forgive her.
Last night I tried to guide our conversation through some articles I had read. I pointed out how important it was for me for her to accept the blame for the affair—she ultimately did, but I could tell she was still processing it as she had just spent three months justifying every action.
I also pointed out how important it was for her to cut contact with the guy. He reached out to her again on Monday via text and we agreed on a response to tell him we are reconciling and he shouldn’t contact her, followed by blocking his number. She ultimately did, but she wavered on blocking him initially and then admitted it to me later. It feels to me that she was more concerned with getting closure for herself with him than my feelings, even though she eventually agreed with me.
I guess I should stop typing, but I’m an open book to share more info. We have a complicated sexual past that could be its own thread—and we were certainly bad communicators (I can be dismissive of her concerns at times and she often shuts down in conversation with me).
The primary problem is I don’t know how to get back into a routine—the massive lies over the last three months make me feel like I will never know her truth again.
970 comments posted: Monday, July 4th, 2022
