My Story - the circular nature of causality

[CWOL]

At that moment they felt suicidal. Their fantasy exploded all over them. They lost their spouses, families, and careers in the blink of an eye. All for what? What I observed was guilt, shame, humiliation. Expected reactions. It was pretty ugly but the upside was the fantasy was blown away. Everyone, and I mean everyone, knew what they had been doing. There was no possible way for it to continue. The ugly dark secret that affairs are had been drug into the light of day and put on to display for all to see. When you drag an affair into the light of day where all the friends, family, etc. can see the pain that is being inflicted by a spouse then it becomes almost impossible for the affair to continue. Affairs absolutely thrive on secrecy. They have to have secrecy to survive. Without secrecy they can't survive. Once you get them out of the affair then the affair fog dissipates very quickly. That fog where all us betrayed spouses say "we don't even recognize him/her anymore". I see most of BS's on this site say that very thing. You want that behavior to stop? Then blow the fantasy up.

My WW had a similar reaction when I exposed her. She had been denying that she had any type of affair with OM to me. She kept saying that she wanted to separate because "we've grown apart." I sat on it for three weeks then I decided to blow it up by exposing her to our friends and family. Her reaction was terrible and she filed for D a month later.

She said she is leaving me because of the exposure, but she told me when I confronted her about the EA that she wanted to separate. So I don't think it made any difference, maybe just the timing of things. But in a sense I feel better about myself afterwards because at least all of our friends now know the truth. She was about to tell everyone we just weren't compatible, etc. but now they all know the REAL reason.