Need advice: wife of 10 years wants out (2)

[BL42]

PeterB,

I have stopped communicating with them completely actually. What did you mean by "and a lot of good that did"? What kind of good or bad?

You might have been sarcastic there . My bad.

Just meant I ended up in divorced anyway so "playing nice" and "pretending" didn't help. Honestly, I'm not sure it impacted the end result either way - that was probably already determined.

As an example, post-BD and during IHS my now-ExW would invite my parents over for Sunday dinner and cook a great meal. My parents and I knew she was having an affair. In fact, I knew from snooping she was just doing it to "keep the peace" while being mean and vicious behind my/our backs in communications with AP and her friends/family. However, she didn't know we knew. She was putting on a fake face with the dinner invites and my parents and I were pretending out of fear in hopes to keep the family together. Both sides were being fake. In the end the same result happened regardless. With hindsight, it probably would've been better to stand up and say "I know what you're doing. I'm not interested in family dinner while you're doing that.", if not a different result at least for my confidence and reclaiming my power.

Now, that's different than saying "congrats" or not for a job - just an example to demonstrate why you shouldn't "fake it" and try to "nice them back". I think you're right not to engage her family, especially the ones who are being deceitful.