Know the way forward, but have some gnawing doubts

I caught my W of 15 years, sexting with her boss.

I am 43, she is 44. My W was my first real girlfriend, and she is a wonderful, smart, confident, independent and professionally very successful woman. Over the last 15 years we have built a great life together with 2 beautiful kids, nice house, and are financially stable. I'm not the most emotionally expressive guy and my W does not a have a big sexual appetite. She has reached out to me several times over the years stating she needed more from me emotionally, and wanted to to feel wanted. I found it difficult to satisfy her needs, and mostly ignored it since i thought everything else we had going for ourselves (kids, house, money) was good enough. I also did not push her for more sexual intimacy either. Instead, i prided myself in being a supportive husband to an ambitious woman, who grew in her career over time.

Anyways, caught her red handed sexting with her current boss. My world came crashing down. Following things happened next:
- She immediately broke it off with the guy, promising to change jobs as soon as she can.
- Seeing my anguish in the initial days, she was genuinely remorseful on what she had done.
- After the initial peak of hurt, as I thought about what next, it was clear we couldn't separate, at least for the kids (9 and 11)
- We had long conversations over the next few days, where we discussed why it happened, what happened, when did it start, what led to it, etc.
- As we got more open with each other, we realized we hardly knew the other person in the marriage.
- This was quite pleasantly unexpected. Helped us to plan how to fix the marriage and move on. Kind of like a second marriage to the same person.

All good so far.

However, there are some red flags over the course of her affair, i would like opinion on.

1. According to her story, although there was attraction between her and her boss for a while, the full blown messaging was relatively recent. She's always talked to me about work and mentioned several times what a good boss he is. We've met together with family a couple of times too. However, when the sexting started I was a bit suspicious, as she would be on her phone a lot, hiding from view, smiling, etc. Once when i had to use her phone for something, i noticed all chat history with her boss deleted. Which was odd. I teased her about this and also told her I trusted her, since she knows what's at stake. She laughed it off saying it was nothing, in turn teasing me if I was jealous. We left it at that.

So, she knew what she was doing something wrong, got warned about it, got reminded of the consequences, but instead tried to turn it around and blame me for jealousy.

My Interpretation: Of course, she was trying to protect and continue her affair. It felt too good for her to stop, even at the risk of her being almost caught and reminded of the consequences. Or she thought, she would never get caught. Was she really ready to risk it all?

2. Just before she got caught, we were on a family vacation planned long time ago. At this time the sexting was in full swing. She would be on her phone a lot, and when the kids were away would come over to me and be overly affectionate. Literally having messaged something like "Missing you..... Cannot wait to be back......." and then coming over to me give me a passionate kiss.

My Interpretation: I found this to be a bit psychopathic, she says she felt guilty. It would make much more sense to me if she ignored me or did her sexting privately.

61 comments posted: Wednesday, November 8th, 2023