You know what - at the core of the discrepancy between what I posted and what Allen posted is my confliction over how to proceed. I have a counselor/coach who's advocating the "nice" approach on the grounds that I have to give him a reason to choose me - says this is not the same as condoning the affair and that now that I've exposed to family, the family will be enough negative pressure. Says with family's disapproval of A and my playing nice, that will help push/pull him back to me. She says that if I am cold, etc., that will just reinforce his opinion that I'm a negative person. So that is in one of my ears. I also need to say that I've recently discovered beyondaffairs.com and the story/articles on that site seem to support what my counselor is telling me.
Then, I come onto this forum and hear a different story - and pieces of advice from this site have been VERY useful. The idea of exposing was certainly from here and quite useful (even though at this point I haven't exposed everywhere - the notable "saved" card is the work exposure). I read about people who tried the nice approach for long periods of time and found it useless - which makes me worried about the "catching flies with honey" approach above.
So, in the end, I'm toggling between two approaches here and I have no idea what will work. So, I guess I try to blend them and hope for the best - not necessarily the best strategy, but then again, I'm learning this game for the first time.
