Tonight when I get home I want to say " W, I do not think your actions of leaving our home in the morning to spend time with OW are healthy for our marriage or our child. I do not appreciate the amount of time you have been gone in the last week/month/year from our marriage and our child and....." and then I am lost. If I say "therefore I am letting you know that if you continue with the OP" I am giving an ultimatum and will be told I am controlling. If I say " therefore I am letting you know I am filing for divorce tomorrow on my day off" it seems very final (which I accept if that is what is necessary but it is not what I truly want, I want to save the marriage) I read the action based requests in DR or solution based thought process and I get what it is talking about but my new-to-this brain does simply not grasp what is the right thing to do. I want to approach her and let her know I do not appreciate her actions but I am missing the link between what I want and what is the right action to take.
How about if you said "Look, regardless of where our marriage stands right now, I think we both want the same for (daughter's first name). This isn't her fault, and we both need to be here for her. Marriage counseling is a waste of time for us at this point; why don't we invest that time and money into a good family counselor who can give us some tools to help (daughter's first name) and us navigate through this?"
If she refuses, then I would go ahead and set up your own individual meeting with a FT and talk about your situation, and then look to bring your daughter to the subsequent meeting, and request that your wife join you. When she sees you taking ACTIONS, with or without her approval, then she will begin to take you seriously.
When my wife was having her affair, she came home very late one night (about 11:45, as I remember it) from being with a group of people that included her OM, after telling me she'd be home by 10:00 as I recall. I told her that night when she came home "the next time you're going to be late, I'd appreciate you letting me know so me and the kids don't worry about you." She promised she would. Well a couple of weeks later, she again went out, said she "wouldn't be late," and came home at 1:15am.
She came home to a completely dark house, inside and out, and the security system armed (she disarmed it as she came in and set the sirens off). I told her the next morning "Our family home isn't a hotel; the next time you come home after midnight don't bother coming home at all -- it's very disrespectful to me, our marriage and our children."
