First I realized that I didn't put a time context on the online things my wife did. Not to diminish what happened but this occured when she was pregnant and then in the year following that so that makes these events about 4 years ago. We actually moved to where we are now 2 1/2 years ago.
- GEL: I haven't had the talk. The main reason that I did this was that we have a huge amount of debt that has been accumulated and since I was in college and she was the one making the $ I didn't want to risk loosing everything. So I tried to get things into counseling and kept working on my degree and new career. Being several years into this mess I didn't want to loose it all at the end. My big priority I guess was to not rock the boat and get my degree so I would have something to fall back on. Now that I am close to getting my degree I need to have the talk but I am not even sure how to approach this. I tried to get us back into counseling at the begining of this semsester back that didn't work. Is there some "talk" tempelate somewhere that I could read? As for my W schedule she works all the time now. I can't be 100% certain that she is not having A but its hard for me to tell because we are leading two differant lives. The counselor last time a year ago described it as being like people living two parallel lives that never really intersected, kinda like 2 strangers I guess.
I think I went to the counselor 6 or 7 times. She went two or three times I think. The big thing for me with counselor was to reset the "affair clock" or whatever you wanna call it. It was good to talk to someone because before that I had gotten to the point where I was really close to doing something stupid out of physical and emotional desperation. We never even made it to joint counseling with the counselor but it did help me for awhile.
- Annette: good question. I suppose I love my wife as much as one could considering everything that has happened. When we where first married I was completelly in love with this woman but no so many things have happened and time doesn't heal all wounds.
- NOPkins: You make excellant points and please feel free to continue commenting. I think I hit bottom shortly after I moved when I had given up a career and I realized that my W probably had little intention of patching things up. Since then I have been planning and working on launching another career and its been a bit too successful. Which leads into one of your other points about not leaving the house. Now I have a number of job offers and all of them are in differant states from the one I live in now. Which means I move the whole family with all the problems going on or I literally move and abandon them by taking a job in another state! I have taken some steps to try and protect myself financially though probably not enough and it was important that I try and hang on until I got my degree so I didn't end up financially ruined.
- Karen: I think the biggest thing that keeps me going is worry about my son. I don't think you or NOP are being to harsh at all. I guess this is my last ditch attempt to save things.
- Liese: I agree with you on the online affairs thing. What still probably gets to me is that nothing really changed and W never wanted to do counseling as evident by the multiple false starts etc.
I guess my biggest dilmena is when to have the talk? And literally what should I say? My relationship and marriage have really turned into a sort of partneship. The whole dam thing feels like one giant business transaction. We don't fight about anything, we don't sleep together, we both have our own duties around the house and do them to keep things running smoothly, we don't really make plans for the future, we never talk about our relationship, we never go out by ourselves its always with our S. We handle the bills, talk about money decisions like investments and such. We do all the things that I thought regular couples would do its just that we don't feel like we are a couple.
I was thinking about trying to take one final shot at fixing this and getting back into counseling after the holidays as I don't to ruin them. I guess part of me is afraid that my wife will say lets just call it quits or say something to the effect that we allready live seperate lives so lets just keep pretending to be married and do our own thing. At this stage I don't even know what my wife would do if I had an affair (I see the value in not having one) and I worry that we have past the point of no return from an emotional standpoint where the loss of a spouse becomes akin to the loss of a roommate... you know things change and everyone is just moving on with their lives.
