This current arrangement is very comfortable for her. She gets her family fix with you and passion/affair fix with OM. As I suspected, the affair is ongoing and she is still in contact with OM.
I know. I have been allowing her to cake eat that way, but I wanted to see how I felt about her before we moved toward divorce. I knew she wanted me around for the family fix, so I made sure we also have spent time alone just her and me. We have a great time, but you're right, she's reserving the passion for OM.
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Cutting off contact with your W is your choice, and probably the right one if done lovingly. It's not something you need to insist on or get her approval to do. By spending all of this time with her whilst the affair is ongoing, you are actually enabling her and making life very hard for yourself emotionally. It is highly unlikely that she'll end the A unless she actually experiences life without you, and OM has to meet all of her needs. The reason you're in her life so much is because you provide things that OM isn't able to. Going pitch black is what Dr. Willard Harley would call a Plan B.
Cutting off contact is definitely my choice. I did cut her off nearly entirely for the first six months of this year while her A was going strong, so she has experienced life without me. I GALed and got my head back on straight. As her A ramped down, I thought I'd test the waters a bit and see how I feel about her, and how we feel together, and I won't lie, I missed her. I don't know, maybe I should have held a hard line and insisted she gets nothing until she comes begging to me to take her back, but given what I know our M was, I knew that would never happen. She would maybe be sad, and maybe miss me, but unless she experienced me differently, she would never risk being with me again, and she would have no reason to end her A.
That's what I was trying to say in my first post of this thread. I couldn't hold myself up as the wonderful H she mercilessly betrayed. Our M had serious problems, and I failed her in many fundamental ways, so I had to let her go and let this play out. If she still had feelings for me, I hoped they would surface again, and they have. Are they enough to overcome our past? I don't know. I think it's great she has realized and expressed to me how she failed me too, and she says she still loves me.
My situation is includes betrayal on both our parts, which makes it difficult for me to follow one strategy here. I needed to rebuild trust before I could expect any change from her. Unfortunately, that required me to allow some cake eating. I didn't see another option.
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It's very improbable that she'll give up OM WITHOUT a period of no contact with her. Remember that affairs are a drug in the cheater's blood.
Your wife is actively in an affair and in my experience, the only thing they respond to is HARD CONSEQUENCES or more euphemistically put, LOSS.
Here's the real test. My W is acting waaaayyyy less drugged out now than she was 6-12 months ago. She is reaching out to me, and expressing regret about what happened to our M, and she seems to be telling me her honest feelings. I could see in her face that she doesn't want to lose OM, but I could also see that she knows she can't have us both.
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And forget about "lifeline". That's Affair Speak for "addiction/indulgence that I would suffer for if I were to give it up".
