Steve85, thank you so much for your response. I love your ‘being full’ analogy (read it before in another post). So true.
I also appreciate your last statement about the length of it all. I am a bit confused as to why he hasn’t pulled the D trigger if he really is planning on doing it. Maybe you are right.
Two things that are making me feel absolutely crazy (my friends and family consider me to be a grounded, calm human, so this is out of the norm for me) are 1) whole re-writing of our history; and 2) denial of the EA, they are just friends, despite things I have read with my own eyes. I suppose even the most sane of us has our own path to madness; he may well have found mine.
Rewriting history is something almost all WAS do. If you read my threads you'll see my W had convinced herself that she wasn't happy a single second for the 18 years and 9 months that we had been married. On BD I even repeated to her "You were never happy?!? Not even for a minute." Her claim was that if she was she couldn't remember it. WHAT? Picture albums full of pictures of vacations, and events, and the birth of our daughter, and her growing up, and doing things as a family. And she was saying she was unhappy through all of that?!?
Remember though, at this point their perception is their reality. And to buck against that is to try to them that their reality is wrong. Something most people do not react well to. So just understand where he is coming from. He is convincing himself that he is justified in what he is doing. You don't disagree with him through words, you do it through actions. This is why we suggest kicking a cheating spouse out of the MBR. You can tell them you don't agree with what they are doing, but it is better to show them that.
As far as denial. Some folks will deny even in the face of incontrovertible evidence! After I found the nudes that my W had sent to her EA partner, she still denied that they were more than just friends. In fact, when I confronted her about the nude photos, since I didn't actually produce them, I think she still thought I was bluffing. Weeks later, while we were dealing with her final act of defiance towards Ring (she had been moving towards that slowly but was still resistant), I finally convinced her that I had seen them. She actually said "how awful for you". But remember, this was after weeks of diverting and denying attention from her online activities with other men (looking back I am guessing there were others though maybe not as intensely as the EA AP).
WSs are also notorious for gaslighting. If you are unfamiliar with that look it up. It is is a psychological manipulation where the target of it begins to question their own sanity. "I know you are sleeping with her! I saw the text message where she thanked you for last night!" Gaslighter: "No you didn't because that text doesn't exist! I can guarantee you I never ever received a text like that from her. Maybe you dreamt it?" And then you start to question if you really saw it or not. Gaslighters are master manipulators. The victim often thinks "surely they wouldn't be so insistent about this if it weren't true".
So your line: "I suppose even the most sane of us has our own path to madness; he may well have found mine." Yeah, you are being gaslit.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
