DB is premised on making the road home smooth, and having your spouse pissed off at you and other people pissed off at your spouse makes a harder transition to reconciliation. It's a nuclear option (I thinked I coined that phrase on these boards) and it complicates things.
On the other hand, it seems that people who REALLY want out, don't care if there is exposure or not.
Here are some interesting things I noticed in this discussion:
1. Exposure in some cases, to teenage kids, helped the situation. Having to face your kids is a whole different issue. Funny, most of our WAS claim the affair isn't wrong, yet they are in sheet terror of being exposed.
2. The affair, in all cases, thrives in secrecy. The unfaithful spouse will seek out "permission givers" to support their affair, or at least provide euphemistic "non-judgement, we are all on journey" rhetoric. Once it's public they will have to face people who might not think their affair is a good idea. They will face reality.
3. In my situation the affair exploded when the OM got outed. He ran with his tail between his legs back to his wife and dropped my wife like a hot potato. In retrospect, I wish it happened earlier. Turns out I didn't have the endurance to DB, and I used up all my energy too early in the crisis. If it got exposed earlier, I think I would have more energy to re-connect with my wife. It got exposed later in the game and by that time I was embittered and angry, which was not making me look like the better alternative.
Interestingly there is another "affair rescue" site that takes "protecting the heart" of the LBS seriously. They say that if the affair drags on too long the REAL danger to the marriage ending will come from the LBS. Unless you DB FLAWLESSLY (which is incredibly hard and lonely), it's too easy to slip into DB-Doormat mode which will lead to extreme anger and bitterness on the part of the LBS. That site also recommends EXTREME exposure and setting up "safe houses" for the LBS and/or their children to stay in so they can not be exposed to the affair and get embittered. They advocate NO contact until the WAS returnd to the marriage.
4. My wife, to this day, can't seem to admit the affair was wrong (it blew up over a year ago). The exposure was in a quasi Matthew 18 manner. It wasn't public. The church was discrete. I think, perhaps a more public exposure might have been more effective, but since she was no longer in the church they didn't go after her, they went after OM.
A friend once told me one of the reasons I am having discipline issues with my children is that I am living with an unrepentant adulterer and they have no idea what happened. The dark secret effects EVERYTHING. My children's desire to emulate their mom's free-wheeling non-Christian "self-actualization" is not informed by the fact that their mother cheated on me and tried to replace me with OM in her bed and in my children's life. They don't see the dark forces that lie beneath the "turkish delight" of new freedom.
