Hi everyone, I'll give you fair warning before you read any further, this is a very long post.

Obviously I came here because I need some help. I'm a bit lost and confused at the moment and I don't know where to go from here. I need some good, honest advice.

Almost three weeks ago I found out my W was having an EA with a man 9 years younger than she is that she met in an online game called Second Life. I know the A isn't physical as he's in Europe, but I have read enough to know that an EA is probably harder to recover from than a PA. At first she told me it was innocent flirting (no such thing) and had only been going on a couple of weeks. Then she said it "turned romantic" about four weeks before that. I later found out it's actually been going on for about six months.

I won't pretend that I was the devoted and loving husband that I should have been. In fact, in many ways she and I have both been emotionally abusive with one another.

We have a 22 month old son and my W isn't willing to work on our marriage. She says she has felt indifferent toward me for the past six months and now she is in love with her online EA.

I took her and my son to her parents' house two weeks ago Monday (October 13th), they live almost four hours away, so I don't see her on a daily basis.

I did all the wrong things at first, crying, begging, pleading, making promises, of course to no avail. She says we've tried too many times to make it work, and it just doesn't work. But in all honesty, neither of have really ever tried to make it work.

I've been reading a bunch of different advice on how I should proceed. I do love her, and I would like for us to be together again, but I don't know how I can do this with the way she feels. I miss my little boy like crazy. I miss my family.

I've read lots of stuff that says have no contact with her to make her miss me, work on myself so she can see what she's missing, blah, blah, blah. No contact is not an option because of my son.

She says she wants us to be friends. I don't think I can do that. As I told her, I do have some dignity and I don't want her to think that I'll be sitting around waiting in the wings in case her affair falls apart with this guy, or the next guy or the guy after that. I also told her not to call me anymore unless it was about our son. She used to call me every night and just chit chat and it would usually last for more than an hour (Alleviating guilt?). So far she has complied. But the other night I had an anxiety attack and I ended up calling her. I didn't talk about the R, in fact I only talked to her long enough to ask her to put my son on the phone.

I also have a suspicion that she's taken up with an ex boyfriend since she's been back in her hometown. She never wanted to cut contact with him during our marriage, she said they were BFF.

I know she can't come back without there being major changes on her part as well as mine. The thing is, I have come to understand my role in all of this and in fact, I'm currently in IC to deal with a lot of my own issues as well as the break up of our M.

I won't say it is my fault, but I can see how my behavior helped get her to this point, and I can look back now (hindsight being 20/20) and see times where she did try to reach out to me about us.

I did have my own (sort of)EA when we had been married less than a year with an old online "friend" for which she says she never forgave me. I did cease all contact with this woman at the point where my W found out and put her email address in my blocked senders list as well as canceling and deleting my instant message accounts that I used to communicate with this woman. The reason I say sort of an EA is because I had no feelings for the woman and it was rather easy for me to cut the ties with her without feeling any sense of loss.

It hurts so badly that she can look at me now with no emotion at all , and she never asks how I'm doing. It's usually all about her, how she's moving on with life, but she's still very secretive where the OM/EA are concerned (not that I ask about it, because knowing would only make it worse I think). Up until I found out about the EA, she always pretended to love me. I wonder now if she really ever did.

What do I do? How should I proceed?

Thanks in advance for your help and guiding words.