Husband gone for second time - 4

[SteveLW]

Hi Nicole, you have gone through this twice unlike most here. Your H came back before and left again so its a reopened wound for you will take time to heal. Just put your Ds and your own needs at the top of the list right now, especially with your H just taking off as and when he sees fit you should be least accommodating of him. It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your M and be a single mom. Hope your D is well adjusted to the new place.

This is a good point. Nicole, is it safe to say that after the first time you guys didn't deal with the root causes properly? I also am in my second go around. As I've documented in my threads, my wife had an online EA with a guy that lived about 45 minutes away from us in 2005. While we stayed together (she was insistent that she wanted to save the MR from the minute I confronted her), we didn't work on the root causes. Thus we found ourselves in the same position (with a few differences) just over 12 years later.

This time she was insistent that she wanted a D. Slowly she backed down from that, but this time we are doing the work to truly fix the root causes through counseling.

I implore anyone reading this going through this for the first time, if you move to R DO NOT SETTLE BACK INTO BUSINESS AS USUAL. Work to improve the new MR, and make sure it doesn't happen again in a few years.