Living in Limbo

[hoosjim]

You go to marriage counseling to save the marriage, period. If both parties aren't committed to trying to save the marriage, and there is no point. And if one party is still seeing affair partner, by definition they are not interested in saving the marriage.

Until she comes to you, remorseful and contrite, and tells you she wants to put everything in the trying to save the marriage, all you are doing by going to counseling is enabling an easier exit for her. For a WW it is just a box-ticking exercise until they're over the waywardness and go NC with affair partner

Only possible exception here would be if you could find a definitively pro-marriage counselor, who was also well-versed in the addictiveness of affairs and wife is also willing to do IC with that same counselor. Even then, it is risky. My own WW and I seemingly made some progress with such a counselor in those circumstances, but there was no real breakthrough until my wife finally cut all contact with OM. Before that, we were mostly treading water in counseling and early on it was obvious she was just doing it as a box checking exercise. If my wife had not had such a strong grounding in faith and such a strong family-oriented upbringing, us being in counseling when we did may very well have backfired. I was also GAL-ing like a madman, got in best shape of my life, engaged in a lot of activities, drawing interest from other women. Which helped.

But the bottom line was that even in the beginning, my wife was making at least lips service to the idea of saving the marriage. you have to be convinced that your wife is at least interested in making a sincere effort, if not 100% committed to saving the marriage before you start counseling. at a bare minimum contact with the OM has to be cut off. That should be one of your boundaries