I'm sorry Tostada, what I've been thinking on how it will go, on what she has been up to, on what she will need to do to convince me that she is serious about working on things?
I don't know how the conversation will go, but, I hope that she is in touch with her feelings and motivations enough that she can give me a relatively high level history of the last 6 months and explain to me from her point of view how it is that she could cheat on me and lie to my face about it. I hope for that followed by a brief discussion on where does that leave us and a somewhat longer discussion of where are we going. Those are the three topics, where are we, how did we get here, and where are we going.
What I think that she has been up to is that I believe that she has found herself caught between the self-image of a good mother and the inability to handle the stress and responsibility of being a wife and mother combined with watching her looks fade and realizing that she has done nothing of import with her life. I believe these are the pressures and being unable to reconcile competing thoughts, she escaped into multiple affairs because those other men made her feel good about herself. They still find her desirable. She rationalizes her guilt away by casting me as the author of all her problems and reinforces that belief by telling herself and others that I'm a horrible father and husband. Which is to say that I believe that she has had sexual encounters with perhaps as many as 5 different men in the last 5 months and ongoing affairs with two which I believe she has trimmed down to one that is also become an emotional affair.
As for what she will need to do to convince me that she is serious about working on a relationship with me, she will need to at a minimum meet the following criteria: - After a final go away letter, she will have no further contact with the people that she has met in the last year that is male and female. - She will become 100% transparent to me - She will enter into IC that I will at a general level help to direct and oversee. - She will continue in MC with me - She will move back into the family home - She will quit smoking - She will no longer engage is social time out at the bars except that we go out together.
