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I’m going to really struggle to figure out that question: does she really want me? She has so much to lose. Comfortable life, inordinate amounts of free time, she could maintain some social status if we stay together. So she could cling to the marriage just for those reasons alone, regardless of whether she actually and truly loves me. This immense betrayal is very strong evidence that she in fact does not love me very much. How can words even begin to measure up to that?

It's good you can have some sense of humor and generate memes about this.

I'll tell you this about the whole "does she actually love me?" "am I just a utility to her?" etc. It's a question that only she can answer over time to you through repeated behaviors that prove her claims. Eventually those backhoes did get the ship unstuck over a long period of time, one scoop at a time.

She has to be willing to move mountains for you, and she has to have the patience and persistence to do it one rock at a time.

I'm confused about something...you said this other guy was a high school classmate, did you know this from the beginning of did you find out this information later. Maybe you said already and I missed it.

As far as does she love you? I personally believe people tend to over analyze this question. People love different, it means different things to everyone.

I'm sure your wife loves you, the question is what does her love look like.

This was a very difficult thing for me to navigate. Its was hard to reconcile her words and actions of love with the betrayal. At some point it dawned on me that her betrayal had nothing to do with her love for me. Her love simply loved different then mine. Her love was selfish and conditional, but it was still love, as best as she knew at that time.

Well, confirmed lie #1. WW just confessed to tipping OM off to the confession after she had told me previously that she hadn’t. Lying to protect him, not a good sign.

So now I’m 1000 times more suspicious. Trying to get OBS on the phone to confirm. Sent a FB message to OM telling him I will be relentless in getting thru to her if I don’t get that confirmation. Not feeling like getting fucked with today.

It really doesn’t matter what she says. Her words are not indicative of anything.

Her actions, however, show you how she feels or what she really wants.

Example: she says she wants to stay married. How is she showing you that? Is she still being selfish and talking to the AP - then that shows she has no respect for you or the marriage. Is she waiting for you to fix things OR has she started trying to make amends? If she is "not ready yet to make amends" then I would say that’s not a good sign.

Dday2 - our marriage was over. I was D him. Day 1 after dday2 he was doing everything possible to prove to me he truly wanted to remain married. And that took many months of consistent behavior and transparency blah blah blah before I ever considered R.

I never told my H to what to do. I gave him no help to R. But he proved to me had a good chance to R and be happy.

To me, if a cheating spouse dies next to nothing after Dday — it’s not a good sign. I’m just saying….

I'll tell you this about the whole "does she actually love me?" "am I just a utility to her?" etc. It's a question that only she can answer over time to you through repeated behaviors that prove her claims.

You just described Bayesian logic. Never thought my statistics training would apply in a situation like this.

I don't mean this to say you should be tolerant of lying. If you number them, prepare for large numbers.

If you are playing lie baseball, I can assure you that she will have three strikes.

EDIT TO ADD: How can you tell a statistician is a Bayesian? By their posterior.

EDIT TO ADD 2: I am a prolific poster here (though to a lesser degree than I used to be). I do risk analysis as a career. I built a decision tree and populated the nodes with my beliefs on likelihood, and I sometimes revisit it to make sure I still agree with the numbers. See this thread for a notional simplified version:

https://www.survivinginfidelity.com/topics/653367/logical-fallacies-from-ws-and-39/?AP=81

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 7:59 PM, Wednesday, June 29th]

This was a very difficult thing for me to navigate. Its was hard to reconcile her words and actions of love with the betrayal. At some point it dawned on me that her betrayal had nothing to do with her love for me. Her love simply loved different then mine. Her love was selfish and conditional, but it was still love, as best as she knew at that time.

I don’t recognize what you describe here as love. We had 1st Corinthians 13 read at our wedding, like almost everyone does in our circles.

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

That is what I recognize as love, and not just because it’s in the Bible, but because it rings true. That’s what I want my marriage to be. She is very resentful. She is not very patient or kind to me. She does not compromise well.

To me, if a cheating spouse dies next to nothing after Dday — it’s not a good sign. I’m just saying….

I’m worried about this. I don’t know what to expect of her. She did surprise me in taking on trying to retrieve her old texts, definitely a tech thing that would have stretched her, she did that without being asked. I think I am taking up a decent amount of her bandwidth at times with questions. She is working on the timeline, or so she says. Should I expect her to have found therapists for everyone and have a 10 step plan for healing? She is bereft, and she isn’t a strong problem solver to begin with.

That thread is fascinating, and I love the diagram. I am a person who tends to use logic in decision making more than the population average, we’ll just say. And I teach about behavioral economics and logical fallacies. So how is it possible that I find myself here, shouldn’t that have made me a off the charts commodity?

It's easy to realize everyone else is irrational and stupid.

It's much harder to realize that even if you are in the top 0.1% of rational intelligent individuals, you are still ultimately driven completely by hardwired value functions and emotions you have no control over. Thus, behaviorally, irrational and stupid.

I'm confused about something...you said this other guy was a high school classmate, did you know this from the beginning of did you find out this information later.

At some point a while back I knew they were former classmates. Again, this hobby started as a family affair (no pun intended) and my kids and OM’s wife and kids were around. I had no reason to suspect from a wife of 17 years with no significant previous issues.

It's much harder to realize that even if you are in the top 0.1% of rational intelligent individuals, you are still ultimately driven completely by hardwired value functions and emotions you have no control over. Thus, behaviorally, irrational and stupid.

It’s being aware of the power of our emotions and the control they have over our decision making that would put someone in that top 0.1%, IMO. I’m sure you’ve read Thinking Fast and Slow. The Nobel prize winner writes in the opening that there is basically nothing we can do to really change our emotional, illogical decision making, it’s just human nature.

BTW. Don’t know if you mentioned this, but she has ended everything to do with this hobby right?

She isn’t blaming me for the cheating, she has blamed me for all our relational problems over the years.

So, to go back to that topic, she was raped, married, divorced, then met you.
You were a virgin and married her. Then you were clumsy and uneducated at sex and she was triggered, resenting you for 17 years and punishing you for wanting sex.
If that is correct, what the actual F?
Reread that timeline and please give us like a bullet point here.
She then had an affair through a hobby. After the affair, did she try to repair your sexual relationship? I bet she didn't but she is trying now.
After the affair ended, how did it end, you didn't mention that.
Did she quit the hobby?
Did she come home and rock your body because she realized what she did to you? (Most cheaters don't do this and shows how selfish they are.)
How good of a wife was she in the year since the affair ended?

The best advice DrStrangeLove got which I wish I had was when she throws out she will do anything to make it up, tell her to write a list of everything she did with the other guy. Every single thing and how she plans on making that up to you times 10. She sent sexy messages - now for you times 10, she watched the kids while he went out - times ten, she woke up and sent him good morning texts and I love you's - time ten. See how it becomes a huge mountain she has to climb. It shows her resolve.
Lastly, have you moved out of the bedroom? It makes a strong move to stop being affectionate to her and helps you separate. Otherwise it becomes hard to hate and push away someone you love while wanting someone to comfort you in these horrible times.

InkHulk - you said:

She did surprise me in taking on trying to retrieve her old texts, definitely a tech thing that would have stretched her, she did that without being asked. I think I am taking up a decent amount of her bandwidth at times with questions

Also this earlier:

Well, confirmed lie #1. WW just confessed to tipping OM off to the confession after she had told me previously that she hadn’t. Lying to protect him, not a good sign.

If you want to retrieve messages, I think you should take that on yourself.

One of the messages you might have found was that she tipped off her AP. Was her taking on message retrieval really a smoke screen for hiding messages from you?

[This message edited by LostOpportunities20 at 10:34 PM, Wednesday, June 29th]

I'm sorry that your WW has done this to you. Nobody can appreciate how devastating it is unless they've been through it.

It's sad to have seen this story so many times that even as I'm catching up on this thread, I can see it coming. It's almost never "just one time". They're almost never truthful from the outset. It's much more common for them to never be fully truthful than to be truthful from the start.

And one that you should think about - they almost never confess out of the blue of their own accord. There is normally some circumstance that has forced them to confess preemptively so that they can control the narrative. OBS may have discovered and OM is working hard to keep her quiet.

Has your WW sent the OM a "No Contact" letter? It should be a short, clear message acknowledging that what they have done is wrong, that she wants to reconcile with you, and that he should never contact her again in any way. No sentiment at all, just "No contact, period." You need to see it before she sends it to verify those elements. She needs to agree to let you know if he makes any attempt to break NC. She needs to understand that any violation of NC from her may end any chance for R.

I understand that you want her to show that she is being open and actively trying to make amends for the harm she has done, but you cannot trust your WW to do anything related to gathering information about the A. The time she spent looking into retrieving messages is just as likely to have been spent destroying all traces as trying to recover anything.

Instead you need to gather and safeguard everything you can find yourself. Calendars, emails, bank records, backups - everything. Check her phone for secret accounts, suspicious apps, GPS history, etc. Check her contacts for potential false names for the OM. Check her cloud accounts for photos or messages that may have been uploaded and deleted from her phone. Do not tell her that you're doing any of this.

So, to go back to that topic, she was raped, married, divorced, then met you.

You were a virgin and married her. Then you were clumsy and uneducated at sex and she was triggered, resenting you for 17 years and punishing you for wanting sex.

She did not marry the man who raped her, but she did stay in the relationship with him for a while until he called it off with her. She and I met not long after that. We took our time getting started, dated for about two years, and did not have sex in that time. And yes, I was a virgin. During our dating time we were passionate, if anything she pushed my boundaries. We were comfortable with making out, we had a couple times where she ended up topless and felt guilty about that. We made it to our wedding night, and I thought I had done what I was supposed to do, climbed the mountain, ran the race, etc, and now it was time for the amazing reward. Except it never happened. Penetrative sex triggered her, but neither of us really knew it. She took so much responsibility for the rape and subsequent actions in the previous relationship that she refused to consider it rape (a very common response amongst rape victims it turns out). But refusing to recognize rape does nothing to blunt it’s terrible after effects. Our passion disappeared, it was replaced by mechanical sex. We had a bunch of kids early on. Neither of us really knew what was going on. I got incredibly sexually frustrated but she refused to consider she had something wrong with her, it was a source of conflict if I so much as suggested it. It has only been very recent discovery to get at some of these roots. We had great hopes of a brighter future. Turns out I had been sharing her all the while. Unreal gut punch.

[This message edited by InkHulk at 11:54 PM, Wednesday, June 29th]

She then had an affair through a hobby. After the affair, did she try to repair your sexual relationship? I bet she didn't but she is trying now.

The affair does not seem to have had a direct effect on our sexual relationship. I did not notice any changes, she hid it from me well.

After the affair ended, how did it end, you didn't mention that.

Her story so far is that she felt overwhelmed with guilt after they had sex the first time and decided to "be friends".

Did she quit the hobby?

She did not immediately quit the hobby, and in fact like I mentioned early on she actually travelled with OM’s whole family on a hobby event in order to nanny the kids, this after the admitted sex. She has since quit the hobby, partially for financial reasons, partially because I objected to the increasing time commitment, and I had some suspicions. I went to an event once an something didn’t feel right. OM was there, but I asked her about a different guy, gave a half joking comment about it. I don’t know what else factored in to why she quit.

Did she come home and rock your body because she realized what she did to you? (Most cheaters don't do this and shows how selfish they are.)

I don’t know, it was almost 18 months ago. She says she had sex with me the day after he did with him, but I have no specific memory of it.

How good of a wife was she in the year since the affair ended? didn't but she is trying now.

Before today I would have said the last year was one of the best of our marriage, but revelations of today are reframing that. I dedicated a lot of effort to pursuing her this year, she liked that attention and I think made her want to commit to me. But she was hiding this secret and continuing at least an EA with OM the whole time. She signed off her no contact letter with "I love you". That isn’t standard practice on those things, is it?