Dear IRMAC, I am not in your sitch... but I do have a beloved friend of mine, whose mother was in a similar sitch...

in that sitch, he married my friends mother and had three kids and a seemingly happy m. but apparently he kept in close contact with his x gf that he'd had just before he married my best friends mother, the story goes he married my friends mother bc she got preg. so i guess a torch was held..

anyhow she married and went on to have her own fam and he had his fam but neither partner knew the two of them maintained some kind of contact all this time... 15 years later... one day, my best friend was at a friend of hers HOUSE, and noticed her dads car in the next door drive way so she was like.. who LIVES there.. and her friend told her who it was (the name meant nothing to my friend) and went on to say "if thats your fathers car hes there alll the time". concerned she went home and toldd her mother, who knew instantly who it was. she confronted her h, who confessed to an affair... both marriages broke up right then as a result... friends mother later told her she'd always suspected, and warned him that if ever her kids got hurt, it would be over... and so it was.

it appears to my best friend that her father kept going back and forth to this woman... thru sixteen years of marriage... imagine.

I cant tell you how her mother coped... she died a few years ago from cancer... but I do know she resented the sitch bitterly and never got over it and never once tolerated the OW (whom he married once she ended the M.) my best friend doesnt like her, and doesnt consider her to be GM to her kids, but tolerates her presence for the father.

All i can say to you is that it does happen, these long connections with OP's... but everyone ends up knowing and theres no respect there. My best friends father, when her mother was dying... asked to speak to her, to 'apologise'. She refused and said no its only for him not for me.. and went to her death without speaking to him ever again. He has to live with that shame.

some people just have no idea of moral right and wrong... but in the end... they have to live with it and more, have to live with their kids knowing too. my best friend doesnt respect her father, or his partner. I think its safe to say, he suffered. and continues.

When you're down to nothing, God is up to something.