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I still don't understand WTH she was thinking. I also don't understand how this week is different from last week. She's suddenly being kind and loving. Am I being played again?

Yes and she proved this by acting completely unhinged at lunch where she accused you of tormenting her for questioning her remorse. Look, this woman called the police on you days ago. She blames the A on you and her craziness and yet she's still acting completely bat shit here. She felt it appropriate to drag your poor son into this. According to her, she is in a prime spot to pull more crap because you are refusing to rugsweep. Bringing your cop friend was an incredibly smart move and if you meet up with her again in public, do it again. Have him give a statement to your lawyer about what a wonderful mother she was acting like to pull your son into this. She will always be one bad conversation away from turning you in for a false DV charge.

I knew a man who dated a woman who would falsely accuse him of abuse and she intentionally would set him up just like she did to you at lunch. She would tell him to do this or that because she liked it and as soon as he would, she would use it as proof that he was stalking and abusing her. Her actions really aren't any different. She asked you to come to lunch so that she could prove her remorse and then she used the lunch to make you look like the abusive bad guy to your son. She's still building a solid case against you and she is manipulating your emotional vulnerability to do it.

From here on out, only communicate with her via email. Do not stop the D. Do not see her in person unless you have another cop buddy witness. It is way too risky for you to handle her like a normal spouse who isn't trying to ruin you for her own gain and R is completely out of the question while she is still acting like a lunatic.

I agree with rambler. She is getting desperate and lashing out.

36, I’ve read through your thread and I am sorry you are here.

As I read, it occurred to me that your story is not too different from a poster a few months back; his name is yankees99. The reason I mention this is that we often recognize manipulation of others better than we do ourselves. So, I thought you might want to review his thread and see if you see any similarities between your WWs. I don’t know that we ever heard a wrap up from him, but reviewing how he was working through things might help you.

Also, waitedwaytoolong has some inexperience dealing with a spouse who involves the kids. You might want to seek his advice on how to minimize their impact.

36,

Pull the trigger already and keep moving towards divorce. Tell your kids to stay out of it.

Be prepared for a false DV charge that could head your way.

180 the hell out of her and have an alternate plan in case you are removed from your home.

I was going to 2x4 you yesterday but got busy. Others have done that for me. Nekonamida is spot on as is Rambler.

Time to employ your exit strategy.

36 years is a hard, hard loss but your wife has turned very evil and you are endangered. You must act.

BTW, some sneaking suspicion tells me that the affair may still be ongoing

I wrote a letter to me my WW this morning. I thought I would share it with you.

Dear WW:

I love you but I am still struggling with what you’ve done to our marriage, yourself and to me. I know the discovery of your sexual affair and the aftermath of it have been very exhausting for you. You would like to forget about it, put it behind you and move on to a glorious future. You’ve mentioned that you wish I could do the same.

I can’t.

Your affair has literally cost you our marriage and our future. It has cost me my marriage, my manhood, my self-esteem, my honor, my faith and trust in you, and at times, it seems, my soul and sanity.

Since the revealing of your sexual affair you’ve been whisked away from my arms. I’ve been called names by your friends and out family. Words like Classical Narcissist, fucking asshole and others have been bantered about with respect to me.

I want to remind you that I am the victim of your affair. When your friends or my children call me names because I make a simple request such as change your phone number, you and they need to be reminded that YOU CHEATED ON ME, NOT THEM!

Your sexual affair has wounded my soul. It may not be on your mind all the time, but it is on mine. Your betrayal has caused me to question my core beliefs about anything and everything I once thought true. I have nightmares and daymares, if there is such a thing. I cannot sleep. My appetite is gone. The joy I always found in loving you has disappeared.

I am suffering from some sort of PTSD. Things you do or don’t do seem to trigger my thoughts, emotions and actions, taking me right back to the hell you created. Little things can have big consequences. Your phone, email, Facebook, comments from your friends; turning down a polygraph after such a lengthy period of horrible lies and deep deception. I see things when I close my eyes I don’t want to see. I think things during the day and my mind goes into shock. You did this.

I know that you are probably struggling with what to do. You say you want to save our marriage. You want reconciliation. You want a future with me. You’ve pledged your heart, mind, body and soul to me. These are all wonderful words and sound so pleasant when they roll off your tongue.

Please understand that when I hear your words I have brief moments of happiness, but then immediately fall into despair as I remember yours is the same mouth that uttered lies for such a long time and your lips were shared with another man.

I no longer believe your words. In order for us to reconcile your words need to be combined with three things: actions, motivation and time. You caused our problem. Your words won’t solve it because they have been so misused in the past. You need to take actions you think are appropriate and do so with the proper motivation. Time may take care of the rest.

As for your actions, I can give you a few items that are absolutely necessary for me to even consider moving forward:

No contact with your affair partner or your former workplace.

Immediate reporting of any attempted contact to or from your affair partner or an intermediary.

Access to all your electronic communications.

Revealing of any secret email or other accounts.

Complete Truth and Honesty.

Total Transparency.

These are the bare minimums.

As for any other actions, remember that you made the decision to have an affair and risk our marriage. You have violated me and our marriage in every way possible. You broke it and you are the only one who can fix it, I can’t and won’t do it for you.

Do things that will rebuild lost trust. Show me that you are thinking of me. Speak kindly to me. Show humility. Treat me with the respect deserved toward a man who has not thrown you out or abandoned you completely. Communicate with me. Come clean. Let your motivation be pure. Don’t do anything just because you think it will pacify me. Do everything from a broken and contrite heart.

Back to your motivation. There is a passage in 1 Corinthians 13 that talks about motivation.

“If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

Notice that we can do all sorts of things that look great from the outside. But if we do those without love it profits us nothing. It profits you nothing.

Your motivation needs to come from a sincere love. You may do a lot of things to try to save our marriage, but if they don’t come from a sincere love and devotion they are meaningless.

Remember what love is?

Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails.

As for your friends, are they friends of our marriage or just friends of you? Our marriage is at risk now. Is it really helpful to have friends who are not friends of our marriage? Is it helpful to currently maintain relationships with friends who helped your cover up your sexual affair? How does that make me feel? If you truly want to reconcile how can you hold on to the baggage developed when you betrayed me?

I know friends are important but are they more important than your marriage. Are they more important than me? If you answered yes to either of those questions you are not currently reconcilable.

You broke my heart. Now it’s time for you to break your own heart. Examine what you did. Look at the aftermath, the outcome. Look at how you have destroyed me and my thoughts about you in the process. Consider the cost. Consider who you were during your sexual affair. Are you that same person? I cannot be with that person. I want no part of your infidelity.

I realize I can never go back to being in love with the woman I thought you were. She no longer exists. But, if a new woman can come out of this, a woman with a pure heart, pure motives and a true love for her husband, then maybe I can fall in love with her.

I have chosen to forgive you. All that means is I choose not to seek revenge for your actions. I will not purposely seek to engage in behaviors aimed at hurting you. Your sins are forgiven but your actions are not forgotten.

I will be living with those actions for a long time.

Your BS.

[This message edited by 36yearsgone at 10:57 AM, October 5th (Thursday)]

36,

I know the discovery of your sexual affair and the aftermath of it have been very exhausting for you. You would like to forget about it, put it behind you and move on to a glorious future. You’ve mentioned that you wish I could do the same.

I can’t.

Your affair has literally cost you our marriage and our future.

I think I would have ended the letter right there.

Good luck, bro.

[This message edited by twisted at 10:59 AM, October 5th (Thursday)]

36, your letter resonates with every BS.

Unfortunately, not WS. I wrote several similar letters. My sister said it broke her heart reading it. None got through to my WW.

After DDay2 I wrote a different letter. With a lawyer. It looks like this one got through, but I still have a lot of doubts.

This is a fine letter written from the heart but please don't send it.

A very short time ago... you found out that she and her BF wanted you dead... her BF thought you would be up to being a DD while they drank and danced at clubs and having a grand finale of a threesome at your house... she tried to have you put in jail on false DV charges, She has worked your son into the mix alienating him from you. More than likely she is being nice to you just to gain more time to work a case against you with a lawyer or yet another false DV charge.

From what I can see anything you say or write to her will be twisted around against you in one way or another. Count on it. At best she will see it as buying some more time... for whatever purpose may be on her mind.

If you feel you must write something to your WW... what twisted suggested would be much better IMHO.

She does not merit forgiveness yet, and I wish you hadn't told her that you forgive her.

You see, she'll take that and twist it so that it becomes YOUR fault because you're not over it in 5 minutes because you FORGAVE HER ALREADY.

Now's the time to go dark. Don't answer her calls, don't answer any communications from her. It's time to stop being vulnerable to her, and that means don't share any of your feelings with her. She'll take them and use them for her own purposes, and that, in my opinion, is likely NOT going to be helping you heal.

Go dark on her. Now.

Cat

You are a good man, and that is a very nice letter. I sincerily hope giving her the letter will wake her up and that she will start helping you to heal and that you can love each other again and that she stops the affair.

For your own good, please know that that letter is directed to someone who did (and does?) not care about you (but only her so expect nothing), that the letter can be used by her for false reconciliation so be on your guard, and that by saying 'forgiving not forgetting' you take away the weight/consequences above her head that is a proven method for motivating cheaters to start making repairs.

[This message edited by babypuke at 12:31 PM, October 5th (Thursday)]

You are all making excellent points.

I am beginning to think Catwoman is correct. I shouldn't give this to her.

Maybe I'm better off just writing these letters for my own sake and then put them through the shredder.

[This message edited by 36yearsgone at 12:13 PM, October 5th (Thursday)]

Since the revealing of your sexual affair you’ve been whisked away from my arms.

I'm going to be terribly blunt here but WHAT? She wasn't "whisked away from your arms" - that is some kind of romanticizing what really happened. She left willingly, many times. She tore you down to others - her friends, OM, and has involved your children and the police into her campaign.

She wanted you dead. She was willing to put you in jail on false charges. She was also willing to connect the OM with you for a 3-some. She was OK with all of that.

No one "whisked" this woman away, she ran away while burning down your marriage.

Please do not send this letter. Nothing you have previously said to your WW has changed her, this letter won't either.

You have written your feelings well, but keep this for yourself. She knows what she needs to do to earn back the marriage, she is hoping to take a different route (involving children, the police, perhaps even jail for you).

Protect yourself.

I figure you already send the letter/email before you posted it for us to read so my comments are from that context.

I think you clearly want to reconcile because that is the safest thing - emotionally & financially - for you to do. Based on your description of your WW I think getting true empathy from her might not be possible. She doesn't think the sex matters all that much. She has said that in many different ways and, actually, many women can never empathize with it. For those women they think about the tables being reversed and believe that they would get past the sex pretty quickly because, after all, it's just sex. If this is a person's mindset than it's probably not possible to feel your pain regarding the sex.

I guess I'm pointing this out so that you understand that regret for hurting and deceiving you is pretty much the only real emotions she can feel. She will try to understand the sex thing but will end up only saying the words she thinks you want to hear. She has to fake it because she has no idea how to help you feel better when you think about things like:

while laying naked with the other guy, she figured that I probably wouldn't care because I hadn't been paying much attention to her

My guess is that your horrified reactions will steer her away from uttering disgusting shit like this. The other reason I'm bringing this up is that if these mind-movies are tearing you apart and the sex is the thing torturing you really should stop this reconciliation talk. You might be able to fake being the "husband who sees the sex as just sex" and try to work on the other aspects of her cheating - but that isn't going to work. You will end up leaving her or staying in the marriage and living unhappily ever after. This is a litmus test for a BH when considering reconciliation in my experience. What is killing you the most about what she has done?

[This message edited by ISurvived7734 at 12:23 PM, October 5th (Thursday)]

I've been following your post from the start. Your letter is very elegant and heartfelt but I wouldn't send it. It resonates with us betrayed spouses but I don't think it will impact you WW in the way you are hoping.

All that said, yes keep writing those letters for yourself. It can help tremendously to get it out and on paper. Post them on here if you wish. The shredder is also an excellent idea so you won't succumb to a moment of pain and weakness.

We are all here for you, even us lurkers.

I am new here so I do not have any wise advice to give.

So, just a small suggestion: consider showing this letter not to your wife, but to your son.

I believe that will help him understand what you are going through and how you feel.

Strength!

Maybe I'm better off just writing these letters for my own sake and then put them through the shredder.

Yes. Absolutely. Does Scripture say something about pearls before swine? I think that's the case here.

Go dark, keep your feelings (and your vulnerability) to yourself and make your next communication divorce paperwork served to her via a constable.

Look, I didn't want to divorce either! I truly loved my now-ex. What took me years was to realize that he was too disordered to really love ANYONE the way a spouse should be loved. He would NEVER be a safe partner and he would NEVER see marriage as something that was a true partnership (he was diagnosed as NPD, so a true partnership of equals was something he would never be comfortable with and he would do anything to make sure he was "top dog" and I was the minion).

I don't know if this is or will be the case with your WW, but I do know that putting some distance between the two of you, stopping communication with her and not being emotionally vulnerable to her will help YOU. So will filing for divorce. Right now, you're much too vulnerable emotionally and financially and possibly physically if LoverBoy is still in the picture (which I wouldn't be surprised if this is the case).

You can always cease the proceedings, move them slowly or remarry after divorce.

What you CAN'T do is expunge a DV charge, un-spend a night in the pokey or recoup the money she took out of your joint accounts to do God-only-knows-what-with whom.

Right now, this is your path to getting out of infidelity.

Cat

I'm in the camp of not sending it.

IMO she will use it somehow to twist the sordid truth.

Forgiveness, IMO, must be earned. It could take years to forgive, if ever, and that's primarily based on her actions.

You tell her you forgive her, I guarantee she will use it as ammo against you. Understand it is doing to take YEARS to get through this with or without her.

OK, after rereading it the letter sounds pathetic. I have decided not to send it. Into the digital shredder it goes.

Thumbs up to this.

Cat

But I am still sending the condom bouquets!