Better to see you over in Piecing than Infidelity. However, I do have to agree with the others' words of caution here.
This is one place, I'd like to believe, where misery *doesn't* like company. I think most people here would love to see every marriage work out. As such, I don't think that people are going to caution you to keep your eyes open just because they want to believe your W is having an A. Nobody wishes that on you.
People are cautioning you because they've been there. I've been there. And at some point in our process, we *all* said "S/He's not having an A, because I asked him and s/he said no." Guess what -- I said it, too, when I asked my H point-blank if he was with another woman. And he told me no. Meanwhile, OW was sitting 30 miles away, pregnant as hell.
Now, just because that was my experience doesn't mean your W is screwing around on you. God knows we all hope she's not. But by definition, an A is when your spouse is confiding -- emotionally and/OR physically -- in a person of the opposite sex who isn't you. You can soft-foot around it as much as you want to in an effort to try to avoid the painful truth. But the fact is, your W is -- by definition -- having an A.
And the way it's coming across here is that you're not only okay with her having such an A, you're condoning it in an effort to "put your W first," because that (another man) is precisely what your W says she "needs."
I think you're kinda caught between a rock and a hard place. You want to put your W first, which means bending over backwards to make her happy ... even if that means condoning an inappropriate relationship she has with a man you've never even met. Perhaps that's the way you want your M to be. Maybe it works in yours. It wouldn't work in mine. Why? Because here's the nasty underbelly of what your acceptance could be doing: Your W could very easily be perceiving your acceptance as indifference. In other words, it would be very easy for her to confuse your acceptance of this R as you actually not giving a sh!t about your M, regardless of what's coming out of your mouth. If she's not looking at it that way, the only other way I see that she could perceive your acceptance of her having a R with another man is that you're either dumber than a box of rocks or willing to let her do anything just in an effort to "keep" her. In the last scenario, you've just landed yourself squarely in the doormat category, which is where your W -- if I'm not mistaken -- has placed you many times before. That's extremely unhealthy, and if you do indeed reconcile with your W without making your M more healthy this go-round, you will have to tend to this same sh!t again down the road.
Your W has said to neutral parties (making this more credible than what she has said to you) that among her biggest problems with you is that you're indecisive, the two of you have nothing in common and therefore can't have real conversations, and that you think that everything that's important to her is stupid. She has never said -- at least to my knowledge -- that her feelings for you have changed because you didn't put her first. If anything, you've put her on a pedastal, and she doesn't like having to look "down" to see you. I hate to offend, but in her eyes, you haven't been "man" enough for her. And you blindly accepting a R she's having with OM isn't making you more of one.
She turned to OM for one reason, and it's not because you were not physically present. It's because you were not, at least in *her* eyes, emotionally present. Your W can say they're just friends all she wants, but no friend of mine has ever talked about me as obsessively as she talks about OM -- to every member of her family and every one of her friends ... even her real male friends.If nothing else is indicative of her having more-than-friend feelings for OM, that is.
You may have thought you were emotionally present to your W. But she didn't. So my suggestion is that you figure out exactly what it is that your M was lacking and fix it soon, because OM has been working on that the past two months.
