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FunHouseMirror’s answer is perfect.
Don’t give up. You need EMDR for your trauma from war and regular IC for help shoring up your strengths.
I know there are experiences that your wife had that impacted her ability to say "no" to herself but you cannot fix them. You will only have your happiness erode to nothing trying to prop her up.
Being the best person you can be is what you should aim for. Being a friend to her after a divorce will only work if you are healthy.

Marine - You keep trying to forgive that she never reconciled. She didn't want to get caught, she simply slipped up. People make mistakes when they get complacent.
Now, your wife isn't the woman who stood by you before. She stopped caring about you and your pain entirely. You were going through hell trying to make yourself reconcile. You were thrashing about angry, threatening to leave, which is exactly what she did, she left your marriage multiple times.

Let's talk through how this happened. She starts flirting and she goes too far. She rationalizes that it isn't sex and while this will hurt Marine, I deserve this. She then proceeds to text more. He wants naked pictures and thinks she is sexy. It goes further again. She again rationalizes that it isn't hurting you and she deserves this in the marriage. Then comes having sex with him. Again she decides she can have sex with him. Marine doesn't need to know and she deserves this life.
You can say she didn't know how badly this would hurt you. Again and again putting her needs above yours. Then you catch her and it rips your heart out. You are more confused and hurt than ever. She watches all this pain she caused.
Then she starts to talk to him again. She tells herself again she deserves this and Marine is doing better so she can have both again. See she only thought of herself. She may have used to care about you, but that person isn't who she is now. You need to leave.
My mother in law is an addict as well. She liked adderall and vicodin. She didn't snort it, but she took it by the handful and had 4-8 scripts going at a time. My father in law was cheated on by her when she went drug seeking. He took her back and thought he needed to take care of her. She would go into rehab and promise she would be better if he would let her out early, then she would turn around and do it again. Rock bottom isn't something you determine. She needs to find her rock bottom on her own. It is probably going to be somewhere scary where she knows you won't be around to save her. She will have to feel alone and see what she has done to her life. If you take her back, you will be letting her know you care more about her than yourself. That your needs aren't valuable in the relationship. Divorce her or at least file. Then hopefully seeing the train on the tracks will wake her up to the fact that you are getting on that train. It worked in my situation. My wife would have never thought I was leaving, then when she saw that there were other women waiting and that I wasn't going to be waiting, she started really chasing me. Not the placating me with sex, attention, and love until I shut up, then paying attention to herself 100% again. No she really got scared and changed. You need that fear. It will be the rock bottom you are hoping it will be. If you stay as her net, she will never hit that bottom because you keep protecting her from it.

I've decided to file for divorce, which in my state requires a year long separation due to the kids. I've told her that, and she's maintaining that over the course of this year I'll see the work she puts in to save our marriage. I hold out hope that's true, but the last thing I want is to not file and have a year of separation in front of me if something goes awry again or if there's just no work being done at all. I'm going to start the clock, and if by the Grace of God I see some sincere change, then I can stop the process at the end. We'll see how that goes.

This is a great first step. One thing that I strongly advise you is that, while you're in "wait-and-see mode," you do not have sex with her. The first reason is that you don't know who she's sleeping with or has slept with, and not all STDs can show up immediately. You should get tested now (if you haven't already) and then again in 6 months.

The second reason you want to hold off is that you don't want your judgement clouded by "hysterical bonding," which is super common in the early stages follow Dday. If you're not familiar with the term, it's a period of hyper-closeness and tons of sex, which tends to happen when the BS is trying to reclaim and reconnect with their WS. Hysterical bonding can provide the illusion of rekindled love and intimacy, and it's usually fleeting.

Also, WSs--particularly women-- tend to use sex as a means of placating their spouse in lieu of doing the work. Considering what you've told us about your wife's personality and behavior, as well as her desperate need for sexual validation, she totally seems like the type who would give you tons of sex and expect everything to be fine afterward.

One of the requirements that was suggested here, that I think is incredible advice, is to have her inform the AP's wife. Confused, you're not very confused on that one. That's great. That is a condition that needs to happen very soon, in addition to a lot of others that I'm still mulling in my mind.

There are 2 possible outcomes to this. The first and most likely outcome is that AP will drop your wife like a hot potato and go into damage control to save his marriage, in which case you won't have to worry about him sniffing around you wife (at least in the short-term). The second and less likely outcome is that his wife divorces him or he decides it's too much trouble to work it out with her, and tries to run off with your wife. I don't necessarily think the second outcome is a bad thing. Sometimes it's best to let the trash take itself out.

Just make sure you're prepared for either possibility.

Also, what does anyone make of her trying to get caught in the affair to start with? She maintains that for a month and half she was very sincere and all in on us. I am CERTAIN that she intended to get caught and end it with her AP. She left an unprotected, unlocked phone out with a file on it that had the paramour's name and all their text messages. She says that he reached out a month and half into "reconciliation" and that she just faltered.

First, I wouldn't take it at face value that she was out of contact or didn't initiate contact with him, unless you have hard proof.

Second, I don't believe that your wife was trying to get caught, even subconsciously. I think that she was simply being careless and indiscreet because she's a reckless and foolish person driven completely by base impulses.

On the slim chance that she actually deliberately left her phone out, I don't think she did it because she wanted to end her affair; she did it because she wanted to end your marriage. I believe this because each time she was presented with an opportunity to choose between you and AP, she chose him.

She was lonely, had given up almost all of her friends over the two and a half years with him, and all she had was me and I was ready to leave and threatening to leave regularly. I was raging and going through the ocean of emotion that I'm sure so many here have been through and can relate to. And she gave in.

Boo hoo. She's blaming your justified anger and trauma for her piss-poor choices. Her sadness and loneliness were her own doing. If she was committed to reconciling with you, she would've weathered the storm. She would've focused on on fighting tooth and nail to keep her marriage.

And on a final note, her relationship with you isn't the only thing she's severely damaged. She's clearly been an emotionally and mentally absent mother. There's no way that a woman who juggling multiple paramours is fully engaged in her children's lives. She was sexting a guy at sporting events and chatting with her AP while in your daughters' presence. When she's not out sleeping around, she probably has her head buried into her phone.

If she was lonely, instead of calling her AP, she could've spent more time talking with and emotionally engaging with her daughters, and doing everything she could to repair her relationship with them. Instead, she chose AP over them... again.

I'm not telling you these things to hurt and antagonize you, but to prevent you from getting sucked into your wife's bottomless well of self pity. The only women in your life at the moment who are victims in need of your love, compassion, and emotional support are your daughters.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 3:29 PM, Wednesday, October 12th]

Was it always a lie? I know the answer, and despite what some on here may believe, the answer is a resounding no. There indeed was a different time, and she is the woman who stood by me through all the demons I brought home after combat. The past where she was with me and my rock as my mother died is true. It's not a lie. She really was my rock as I walked that incredibly painful time.

In hindsight, I don't think it's anything nearly as dramatic as that. I remember the almost constant thought in the early days after dday that it was like my WH had been "body-snatched", like there were two people living inside him, one this horrible duplicitous cheater and the other, the sweet boy I'd married. It seemed like I'd get flashes of one or the other and that when I'd spot what I thought of as my "real" husband, it would hurt my heart because underneath it all, I believed he was in there and that he needed my help. That "body-snatcher", "pod-person" analogy is a familiar one among BS's. So many of us have felt that way.

Here's the thing though... in the very vast majority of cases, there's no "split personality" like you see on soap operas, no psychotic break with reality. Sure, we might see a larger than average sampling of NPD's and BPD's, but garden-variety cheating is much simpler than that. The roots of it are dormant and even the cheater isn't always aware of their propensity for infidelity. We don't spend a lot of time really thinking about what our true values are. We think we know. We make our vows believing that our values are written in stone. We all want to think of ourselves as good people, not as selfish and entitled people. It's not until there's stress or opportunity that this failure to adhere to one's principles becomes visible. While it's not true of all cheaters, sometimes people just don't know themselves until the chips are really down.

I think the "experts" would like us to believe that cheating can happen to anyone. Attraction happens. Crushes can be involuntary. But it takes something special to actually cross that line. I got drunk with some other kids back when I was a teenager and we all thought it would be fun to jump off this bridge into the water below. Even inebriated though, I can tell you that there's a moment when you're standing there looking down and wondering if the water's deep enough or if there's a rock you can't see, and the moment when you decide to step into the void and give your fate to gravity. There is CHOICE and that choice MUST be made in order for an event like this to happen. Cheaters like to tell us they got carried away, and they did to a degree. But that moment of choice happened. It cannot have NOT happened in order for us to see the result we've seen.

The fact is that not everyone is capable of making that leap. When we truly BELIEVE in the values we espouse, we build boundaries around them. Those boundaries are organic. We typically don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about them. The spring up like an invisible fence, surrounding our core values. They're impediments we put in our own way to remind us. We protect what we value and this is how we do it. Cheaters have a "but..." in their core value of Fidelity. ie. "She believes in Fidelity, but... not if she feels the need for validation, or if she gets lonely, or if she meets someone attractive, etc." You see how that works, right? You don't have a "but..." in your values system. You've got a "so...". ie. "You believe in Fidelity, so... you don't put yourself in risky situations with attractive women, or you count your blessings, or you look at your wedding ring, etc."

We're not always talking about Frankenstein monsters. Cheating is very often much more simple and much less dramatic, more of a perfect storm of less integrity than was assumed, weak and permeable boundaries, and a dearth of coping skills, etc. People can go for decades before the right ingredients come together. It's latent, something that was always there, and not necessarily evil in its parts, but as a whole amounts to disaster.

Also, what does anyone make of her trying to get caught in the affair to start with? She maintains that for a month and half she was very sincere and all in on us. I am CERTAIN that she intended to get caught and end it with her AP. She left an unprotected, unlocked phone out with a file on it that had the paramour's name and all their text messages.

I'm not saying it's impossible that she "wanted to get caught". I will say that lots of cheaters claim they wanted to get caught after dday and most of them are bullshitting us because they think it sounds good. If I were guessing, I'd say nine times out of ten, they just got careless. Simple rather than dramatic. Cheaters have to keep their compartments separate, right. Carelessness is a relatively simple matter of failing to switch boxes at the right time. There's no telling how many times I walked by my fWH's phone when all I had to do was pick it up and look. He hadn't even bothered to change the passcode and by the time I was suspicious enough to look at that phone, I didn't because it never occurred to me that he wouldn't change his password.

Whether or not your WW wanted to get caught isn't nearly so interesting a question as why you seem to need it to be so. I think that's a better question to ponder upon. Why is this important to you? What does it represent? I think maybe what you're looking for is confirmation that she was looking for help and that she need you to step in and rescue her. Think on that for a bit, and then maybe go online and do a little research on what we call KISA tendencies, or "Knight in Shining Armor" syndrome. I think it's possible that you are looking for mitigating circumstances which might still allow you to think of your WW as needing you (and only you) in order to be safe and whole. Believe me, KISA behavior isn't limited to men. Many of us women also tend to feature our WH's a "damsels in distress" when you get right down to it. Not a pretty mental picture, a burly, bearded dude done up princess style, but it amounts to the same thing.

Anyway, long post made shorter, I do think stepping back and getting some emotional distance will put you in a better position to observe whether or not your WW is capable of doing the work and making real change. Don't be drawn in though by expectations that the change would be in how she treats you. The cheating was never about you. It's about her. BS's like to set up certain hoops and then convince themselves that the better treatment they're getting is the change they seek. But your WW treated you well in the beginnings of your relationship and it was probably satisfactory to you right up until the cheating. Cheaters are quite capable of pleasing us. If they weren't, we wouldn't be married to them. So, no amount of sex, or date nights, or favorite meals, or even deep conversations will mean anything. Changes are observed over time and are about remediating the broken character which allowed the cheating to happen.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:28 PM, Wednesday, October 12th]

So she was all in and very sincere..but sneaking off to have sex..but she wanted to get caught sneaking off to have sex, so she continued sneaking off but she wanted to get caught..but snuck off..

Ok