wife won't admit PA with OM

[Accuray]

Jake,

What you're going through is terrible and painful in the extreme. As lostinscared pointed out you are lucky compared to many folks who find themselves here because your W is willing to work with you and has not shut you out.

Your W has moved away from you emotionally -- she did this BEFORE the OM came along. Her detaching from you created a void that was available for OM to fill. He is NOT the cause of your problems, he is a symptom.

You're now in a precarious position -- anything you do has the potential to push your W farther away. You need to know that is as serious as a heart attack. The balance of power in your relationship has shifted, and you do not have the power to make the demands you may have once been able to make. Everything you do right now has to be measured against the yardstick of "Will this make my W resent me? Will this push W farther away?"

Thoughts of OM will absolutely dominate your thoughts right now, that's normal, and there's really not much you can do about it except to cope. The telephone coaches on this site can help you with that, they are a tremendous asset.

You need to look at what you want, this may include:

1) Getting your W back in a committed relationship with you and moving the marriage forward

2) Finding out everything that happened between W and OM, and then getting W to apologize and demonstrate remorse.

Unfortunately, #2 is almost always 100% opposed to #1, so which one is more important to you? That's the gut-check you need to do right now, because you can't have both.

There will be time to talk about OM later when the relationship has had time to heal and you're both committed. Right now there is a rift between you and focusing on #2 will make that rift wider and deeper, and you will need to painfully recover every inch of that lost ground in pursuit of #1.

Let me give you a preview of what to expect:

When your W engaged in her relationship with OM, it altered her brain chemistry, she felt "in love", which is a wonderful feeling. It literally gives you a high like drugs or alcohol. That high is addicting, and people smitten by it will often do anything to keep it going, including lying to their spouse. The other thing this chemical reaction does is reduce our capacity for rational thought. She put OM on a pedestal and was unable to see his flaws. The relationship was based on fantasy, and deep down she may realize that.

When your W finds herself in this position, she knows it is wrong. She doesn't want to be the kind of person who has affairs, but having it feels so good, she needs to construct a rationalization in her mind. The most attractive rationalization is that you pushed her into it! You weren't meeting her needs, you weren't attentive, etc. That allows her to feel better about what she's doing. Just as she will ignore OM's faults, she will amplify yours and convince herself that what she's doing is justified. That makes you "the bad guy" even though you've done nothing different than what you were doing before.

Now that said, it takes two to make things go wrong, so there are undoubtedly problems that you did cause and issues you brought to the relationship. You need to focus on fixing those now, and do it with all the focus you can muster.

When your W's affair ends (and it may not be over yet), W will go through a period of grief. She will not tell you that's what's going on, but she will be irritable, distant, and will once again be eager to find fault.

YOU will expect an apology, you will expect to see remorse, and you will not get it. The more you walk around looking sad, the more you try to make her feel guilty, the more she will resent you. She does not want to feel responsible for your happiness, and she does not want your condemnation of her behavior, she feels you deserved it, because that makes her feel better about it!

Buy and read "Divorce Busting" and "The Divorce Remedy", do it right away. You have a golden opportunity to stabilize things before they get worse. If you follow your intuition and do what instinct tells you to do, you will blow it. It's now time to "do the opposite" of what you think you should do.

Tread lightly Jake, be careful with everything you say / ask / expect right now.

Good luck!

Accuray