SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Feel dead inside. Met at 15 years old, been together 26 years, married for 20. Hasn’t been smooth sailing for most of it (normal ups and downs) but never infidelity in marriage. Both have felt life has created anxiety, stress, depression, kids, busy lifestyles. I have not been easy and not been the perfect husband (emotionally, financially etc…) but I have NEVER strayed in our marriage. Wife went away overseas 3 months ago and had one night stand (after dinner) with guy she met on the plane. Long story short about a week ago lost my phone so needed to make a call from hers. I saw Facebook message exchange on her phone and at first she said it was "just dinner". But it didn’t add up. I knew deep down and finally she confessed after my probing saying she didn’t want to hurt me with the truth. She asked me to promise her that I would not leave her if she told me the truth. I want to make the marriage work and we start counselling in a week. She is very apologetic, crying, feeling worthless. It’s never happened before but she was away, curious (we met so young and never had ‘loads of fun’), she had company and one thing led to another. She is not a bad person, she is a wonderful mother and has been a good wife but she has broken my heart. I will not break the family for the kids sake. PLEASE NO JUDGING but just looking for feedback to start the journey of re-building the relationship from scratch. Just devastated and feel such grief and loss.

So sorry to read brother, but unfortunately there is more.
First thing is breath, now that is done start thinking. You have already stated that there will be no consequence for the betrayal as the first thing she stated is not to leave her? You will need some answers and you need them to make informed decisions.
Did they practice safe sex?
Medically she and you need to be tested for STDs as well as STIs as some can be transmitted by saliva.
Why is she in contact with OP?
To relive the thrill or to keep him in the background? Or to meet up next business trip?
Also can you move forward together whilst she is travelling with her or to just bump into her AP?
What are your needs?
I understand that she wants to remain but you can’t just sit back and rug sweep things. To help yourself you need to look at the big picture and to do that you need to understand your rights and her responsibilities.
Is she a great mother? Well what was she thinking about her family when she slept with him? No it was about her self validation and gratification.
Finally gather all information about her AP and tell his wife or significant other. They have the right to know that their relationship and heath has been put at risk by WW and POS actions.
I am not trying to kick you while you are down but think of yourself and your children first. Also you need to expose the affair to a close friends and her family so to ensure that she doesn’t gas light every one that the A and her actions are any one’s else’s fault but herself.
Also be careful of the Trickle Truth about this. There is more dig deeper.
One day at a time.

Sorry you found the need to be here but you will receive good support. Read in the healing library and get tested for STD’s.

So your WW had a ONS while traveling. She betrayed your trust and needs to do a lot of work to address her selfishness, and lack of integrity on the trip. She is broken and needs to dig deep.

She is continuing to Facebook message her AP? She must go no contact. Always value yourself. You did nothing to cause her to cheat. Take care of your health and your children. Eat healthy, exercise and stay off drugs and alcohol.

Cheaters often follow a familiar script. Cheaters tend to lie and minimize their actions. You need her to be honest and transparent. Was this her first A? She needs to answer your questions about all of it. Do not rugsweep her A. Take your time. Your emotions will be totally all over the place. Watch her actions not her words. Good luck.

I agree with buffer.

She met some random guy on the plane and they just happen to change all their plans and meet up wherever they were going?

Shes really brave to just have met someome completely random on a plane and slept with him. What if he was a complete psycho and a predator? she did not give a thought to the danger she put herself in or you (STIs) and family especially children (emotional breakdown).

Please do not rugsweep. Its the worst thing you could do at this point of time. You do need to process it otherwise 6 months down the line when a different kind of anger hits you the only person that you will be hurting is yourself.

I agree with buffer.

She met some random guy on the plane and they just happen to change all their plans and meet up wherever they were going?

Shes really brave to just have met someome completely random on a plane and slept with him. What if he was a complete psycho and a predator? she did not give a thought to the danger she put herself in or you (STIs) and family especially children (emotional breakdown).

Please do not rugsweep. Its the worst thing you could do at this point of time. You do need to process it otherwise 6 months down the line when a different kind of anger hits you the only person that you will be hurting is yourself.

Hi, welcome to SI, the best club no one wants to join.

Unfortunately, in 99.9999% of betrayals, there's always more to the story.

Do you know who he is? Where he lives? Is he married? Do they work together? Did she know him before they boarded that plane? Does he live in close proximity to your home? Did they plan this getaway prior to her trip? These are all reasonable questions you need to ask, and honestly, more than likely she is lying. Why is she still in contact with him if it was "just" a one-night stand?

Please be vigilant and whatever you do don't rugsweep her actions.

Do you have access to her phone records going back months?

Marriage counseling at this point is a waste of time and money, you need individual counseling to help you process this trauma, and she needs counseling to figure out why she cheated. The marriage is not broken, she is.

She is not a wonderful mother. A wonderful mother doesn't risk her children's fathers life by potentially exposing him to deadly stds. A wonderful mother doesn't cheat. A wonderful mother sets a good example.

It was more than a one night stand. If it were a ONS,it would have ended that night. You found messages between them. Clearly hey intended to stay in touch,and then they did. This is an emotional affair as well. One that only ended because you caught her.

What work is she doing to become a safe partner?

The continued communication with the AP disproves her claim of a one night stand. I know you would prefer to move ahead toward a reconciliation however there are unanswered questions. Please don’t sweep this under the rug. Too many have returned heartbroken because they have never received full honesty and the opportunity to deal with the underlying reasons for her cheating. She chose to do this and continued a relationship while pretending to be a good wife and mother. She needs to address her issues with a therapist before you continue onto any marriage counseling.

I so sorry she has done this. There are some red flags in her story. She was gone 3 months and had 1 ONS. I’m not buying it.

Calling sex and continued contact a ONS is minimizing, sanitizing the story. She had an affair and until she comes completely clean you cannot consider R.

It doesn’t matter whether this was one time or not. You have decided to Reconcile as you don’t want to break up the family.

That’s your decision now. Please know you will have a range of emotions including rage, anger, deep sadness, trauma, maybe depression etc.

Point is you don’t know how you will feel 6 days from now or 6 months from now.

I hope you get some counseling for yourself. And your wife should do the same.

pantheruspardus,

I am sorry that you were given a reason to search for a forum like this. You said:

I want to make the marriage work and we start counselling in a week.

I am saying this gently, but one person cannot make a marriage work. It takes two, who are fully committed, and who protect the relationship and their partner. The issue here is that your wife was not doing her part, so there was bound to be trouble, regardless of whether or not you were working 24/7 and ploughing 100% of your energy into the relationship. So please do not wear yourself out thinking it is your task to move mountains. It is your wife's task to do that, to convince you why you should remain with her, and why she is a 'safe' life partner for you after doing something as risky as she did with a complete stranger (unless there was more to this than she has revealed so far).

The general thinking here is that after infidelity occurs, it is better for the person who cheated, and sometimes for their betrayed partner too (if they are struggling) to have individual counseling, to work through their issues, before going to marriage counseling. People need to be 'fixed' as individuals before they can think about rebuilding a relationship damaged by betrayal, and two broken people are unlikely to combine to create a great relationship.

It’s never happened before but she was away, curious (we met so young and never had ‘loads of fun’), she had company and one thing led to another.

Given what has just happened, you need to ratchet back on your certainty that your wife has not done something like this before. This could be the first time, but it might also be the first time she got caught. Whatever the case, the fact that your wife drifted into something like this so quickly and easily, simply because she was apart from you, suggests that this was something that she had been thinking about for longer than just a plane ride. That is something she needs to explore and explain to you.

She is not a bad person, she is a wonderful mother and has been a good wife but she has broken my heart.

Again, I am saying this gently, and with compassion, but if you are going to rebuild any kind of new relationship with your wife, you need to take her off the pedestal you have put her on. We can all try to whitewash or airbrush something that a spouse, relative, or child has done, in an attempt to make it less bad or more palatable, but if the next stage of your relationship with your wife is going to survive, it has to have a sold foundation, based on the reality of who both of you are.

Erecting a stature to your wife and singing her praises after she cheats - and plenty here have done the same - is a form of denial. We do not want to accept that our perfect angel is actually a flawed person, with feet of clay, but we have to move towards that reality if we are going to remain with them. Your wife has a lot of investigating work to do about why her boundaries were poor, and why she was open to do what she did. If lack of experience was a valid justification, you would have done the same, but you did not. So why was it such a strong motivation for her? This is what she has to work on.

PLEASE NO JUDGING

I would hope no-one here who has been hit by the same bus that has just hit you would judge you. You are reeling in the aftermath of a recent revelation that has left you trying desperately to save everything that you thought was safe and guaranteed. Nobody has a right to judge you; we all reacted the way we did, and frankly, nobody knows how to deal with something like this when they feel like they are plummeting down a lift shaft. That is why this forum has tens of thousands of members, who all came here wanting help, answers, or just a sympathetic hearing.

I am sure we all had times we wished for a quick fix, a magic bullet, or some kind of shortcut back to something like the life we thought we had before everything changed. Nobody has found those. Reconciliation can be a long and bumpy road, and there is no way around that. All any of us can do is take things one day at a time, and make use of the resources that are out there.

Please take good care of yourself. If you find you have no appetite, and that you are not eating, pick yourself up the kinds of nutritional supplements and protein bars that dieters use. If your sleep is affected, go and talk to your doctor. If you have anyone around you that can offer support, open up to them. If you feel like you cannot do that, because you do not want those around you to know, you can post here, where you are anonymous, but in the company of many, many people who have walked down the same path you are on.

You are not alone.

[This message edited by M1965 at 7:41 PM, Saturday, October 22nd]

Betrayal causes heartbreak. Sorry you are here.

Here are a few books you should buy and both read: Not Just Friends by Shirley Glass and How to Help Your Spouse Heal after an Affair by Linda McDonald. They have helped many couples.

I agree with everyone else that rugsweeping is to be avoided. And that tgere is usually more to the story. How long was she on the trip? Its likely the saw each other multiple times,mparticularly if they are still talking on facebook which indicates a continued relationship and for your WW an emotional connection. Demand his name and where he lives. Look i to his facebook account to find his wife's contact info so you can inform her. That will help put an end to this fantasy your wife is having.

Dont do the pick me dance. Instead, look at the 180 process here in the healing library and in a sticky thread in the just found out forum. Take elements of that and start using them.

There is no good news here and I think there is more to the story you need to know. However, a few things are not as bad as they could be. Your WW showed some remorse right away instead of being in a fog of indecision for months. And it is likely you caught this fairly early which makes it easier to get through. I would not assure her of R until you know the whole story and you have time to see her reaction... does she work to fix herself and heal the marriage in a sustained, earnest way? If she does, then you can decide if R is what you truly want to do. In the meantime, you can work on healing with the hope of R but realizing that D is an option. Believe it or not, D being a real option she realizes could happen will help her get her head focused on what's important. Without D being a possibility, rugsweeping tends to happen. And that will backfire on you, sometimes years later.

My reco is to take M1965's words to heart.

I understand wanting R; I certainly did, from the moment my W revealed her A. But as M1965 wrote, R takes 2. In fact, both R and D can be good outcomes, and I recommend as strongly as I can that you not actually commit to R until and unless your W commits herself to doing the work she needs to do. My grandson suffered from my son's D - but I'm as sure as I can be that he would be suffering much more if his parents had stayed together the way they were, and they weren't going to change as long as they stayed together.

WRT counseling, MC treats your M, and your M didn't fail. Your W failed, and IC for her with a good IC will help her change from betrayer to good partner. You're in pain, and a good IC can help you process the pain out of your body if you want help. MC, with a good MC, may be a good idea once you both commit to doing the work of R, but perhaps not before then.

If you start with MC, make sure the C starts with the A and sticks with the A as long as you want. Make sure the MC does not think the A was a result of your W thinking she had unmet needs. Make sure the C thinks your W cheated because. for whatever reasons, she chose to cheat.

Not having loads of fun as a kid seems like a type of unmet-needs thinking. She made her choice at 15 to be exclusive with you. That has consequences, like ...oh... forsaking all others. She rewrote the rules without consulting her supposed partner.

R is eminently possible, but it takes a lot of work. My reco is to force yourself to see both D & R as potentially honorable outcomes. If you force yourself to R, R may still be possible, but I think it's a LOT easier if you choose it freely, because it's what you want - not because you should stay together for your kids. Staying together for the kids seems like a straight route directly to resentment and taking on a Victim role in life - not a good model for the kids....

She made you promise not to leave her... well isn't that rather convenient for her. I imagine that she promised to be faithful to you when you married.

You are early on in this journey and are reacting like many if not most victims of infidelity. You just want your life back and are still in shock. You will eventually get to the anger stage. That is a good stage because it forces you to demand things for yourself. None of us prepared to be betrayed, so you must learn how to navigate this. The aggregate wisdom in this place has been earned at great cost and is immeasurably valuable.

Do not offer R (reconciliation) yet. You need to approach this with wisdom and patience, a very difficult ask in the midst of trauma. Most likely, your WW is lying to you. It will come out and she will use the usual excuses from the cheater's handbook: I didn't want to hurt you. I didn't want to break up the family, I thought you would leave if you knew. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It's all based on self preservation and you will eventually learn how to see through it in real time. That's one of the real values of this place... we have finely tuned bullshit meters. Run it past the vets here and they will deconstruct it quickly.

You need to steel yourself against the possibility that this is either not her first time or that she had a months long A in Europe. How will you react? What is a bridge too far? One of the most common pieces of advice would be to get a detailed timeline confirmed by a polygraph. She will most likely agree to the polygraph betting that no one in their right mind would actually make her take it. Then, possibly the night before, she will confess to something more, hoping once again, you won't make her go through with it. And then there's the parking lot confession, telling you that you now know everything...swear to God, kids and her mother's grave. Wash rinse, repeat.

Remember, she is your adversary pretending to be your ally. To bastardize Reagan, don't trust AND verify everything.

The biggest conflict you will have is between the version of your WW that you were under the impression that you married, and the actual person in ront of you. Don't succumb to the temptation to get back to the pre-A "normal" you once had. It is gone forever. Do the work now or the work will do you later. If you rugsweep, you will slowly destroy yourself, your M and your family. You cannot pour from a broken, empty cup.

[This message edited by Justsomeguy at 7:40 PM, Saturday, October 22nd]

Appreciate all the feedback but over-reaction assumptions made. W was not away for 3 months. It was 4 days overseas and the OM lives on another continent so no continued A. Checked his Facebook and he is single. The messages were only over 3 days 3 months ago. Was PS so no health risk. Definite ONS. Too many incorrect assumptions and judging. Trying to keep level head with feedback but difficult.

Sorry if anyone is jumping to conclusions.

To clarify… was this a physical affair? You said you found messages and there was no health risks… is "PS" phone sex?

Advice will be based less on assumptions if/when (and only when you’re comfortable) people know more about the circumstances.

One more to recommend reading M1965

Friend – You will get a lot of hard advice and possibly even judgmental advice. I don’t agree with all the advice offered but I can say that I think ALL OF IT is offered in good faith. I encourage you to stay despite hard words and to hang on and read. Question us on what you like and think might work, share information and use the tools on this site to find help.

It’s a very common occurrence that a freshly betrayed spouse comes here claiming to know all. It’s a very uncommon occurrence that that turns out to be true.
The relevance of this is that IF you want to reconcile that reconciliation can ONLY be from a base where your wife feels certain there is nothing she’s holding back, and you feel safe enough that you don’t have major questions holding you back. Experience has shown again and again that trickle-truth, half-truths, uncovered secrets… these things tend to do more long-term damage than the actual infidelity.

Your added information helps us a lot. Would you be willing to elaborate on it?
They met on the plane. Plane from place-of-origin? Why was an OM that you state lives in another continent flying from THAT point-of-origin to wherever your wife was going to? Are you 100% certain it’s pure coincidence.
[Please – I’m not saying it isn’t. It’s just a logical question IMHO]

She was away 4 days. Did they have dinner the first night? Sex first night? If so, then why not the next, third? Was this a ONS (as typically defined) or a short affair?

The contact you have on Facebook. Before or during those 4 days? After she got home? Why did it quit?

I’m not sure what you mean by PS. Protected sex? If every time a WS claims there was only protected sex was true I suggest we all invest in condom factories.
Even that statement should ring bells. Who had condoms? Why? OM looking for a wham-bam isn’t really concerned about conception. Your wife is at the age where it’s not the big issue. Why did one or the other bring the condoms?
Even IF they wore body-suits, condoms and disinfected themselves… A random man, single, other continent… There are STD’s that break all odds. A condom minimizes risk of STD’s but doesn’t eliminate that risk.

I’m not putting this out there to cause you pain. Each and every point is something you need to deal with moving forwards.
Like the PS issue… If you two reconcile (and you two definitely can!) then maybe 8 months from now you do NOT want to be thinking if it’s true or not. You want to clarify all doubt and have the truth NOW.

Appreciate all the feedback but over-reaction assumptions made. W was not away for 3 months. It was 4 days overseas and the OM lives on another continent so no continued A. Checked his Facebook and he is single. The messages were only over 3 days 3 months ago. Was PS so no health risk. Definite ONS. Too many incorrect assumptions and judging. Trying to keep level head with feedback but difficult.

People here can only go on the information provided, and on their own experiences. A phrase you will see repeated here many times is, "Take what you need, and leave the rest". There is more here than just assumptions and overreaction, and another thought occurred to me as I was re-reading your post and the replies. It was about this:

She asked me to promise her that I would not leave her if she told me the truth.

Honestly, pantheruspardus, this is not a time to be making any promises or guarantees to your wife. It can be very difficult to get ourselves into a kind of mental 'neutral' state when our emotions are in uproar, but we need to try to achieve that so we can make balanced decisions. And a prerequisite for that is not to be making any guarantees when you are so early on in the process. For your sake, if you can, it would be better to position yourself in an, "I'm not saying I'm going, but I'm not saying I'm staying either" situation, to give yourself the freedom to consider your options without having pre-signed a contract to remain.

The real issue of your wife's reasons for doing this are for her to dig into and explain to you, and nobody - us or you - should make any assumptions about them. And only you can be the judge of whether or not you accept them, and whether or not you feel secure that your wife will not do this again the next time she is away from you. It is up to her to convince you of that, and she needs to put some work and effort into doing that. If you guarantee that you are going nowhere, regardless of the infidelity, and regardless of whether or not she makes any effort to identify and neutralise the reasons for the infidelity, why should she doing anything?

[This message edited by M1965 at 8:30 PM, Saturday, October 22nd]

My bad on the length of the trip. Sorry.

Rug sweeping never works. Maybe not right now, but in the future this is going to eat at you. Daily. Like a sliver in your mind.

I would suggest not making any major decisions right now. Let your emotions cool down so that you can think about this logically.

Maybe get some physical and emotional distance from your wife, that can give you better clarity.