Quote: I think it was my mean emails and the stuff I told her husband that did cool the whole thing down.
Yeah, amazing what happens to the dark stuff when it's brought into the light. I know there's a lot of disagreement about this exposing the affair stuff. Some experts say it's the best way to end it, others say it really hurts any chances you have of reconciling with an unfaithful S.
In my case, I decided that my W was a lousy mother for having shuttled the kids hither and yon so she could go be an adultress, so I didn't really care early on whether we ever got back together again because I didn't think she was capable of it. In fact, I caught her in a couple lies the day after the bomb and I was in the process of giving her my vehicle, taking her van keys, and heading to our parents with my boys when she came completely clean.
I mean, I was truly done with this and I think she saw that.
I'm sure everyone has to do what's best for them. I immediately exposed my wife's A to our parents. Those were my pre-DB days but I believed that, since we had just moved to a new town where we didn't know anyone, if my W, myself, and the OM were the only three who did know, then the chances of her backsliding and continuing some kind of involvement with him were great...but if she had someplace else she could go if she needed space from me, and if that someone was her parents who I knew would take her in no matter what, then I figured that would be the best way to keep ongoing damage minimal because the most important thing to her it seems, even more important than her R with the OM, was not being exposed for who she was.
In short, I believe that exposure to a limited group of people we could trust forced her out of her fairytale mindset and forced her to confront what she had become. Maybe I'm wrong, but that was even one of the things she put in her farewell email to the OM...that our parents now knew.
Furthermore, and I know I shouldn't have done this either, but, hey, what can I say...I sent the OM exactly one very short email after it started looking like my W and I had a chance of turning this thing around which essentially told him that if he ever contacted my W or came near my family, we would file a restraining order against him, and someone would notify select members of his family, and our former church family, in order to help him do the right thing and stay out of our life for good, and, hopefully, help him seek forgiveness and restore his relationship with God. Now, I don't think that's the reason he hasn't tried to contact my wife...I think that knowing the person I was before, he was probably afraid I'd cave his skull...but I did and do think that since their entire relationship was carried on for so many years completely in the dark, then either they wanted each other enough to be willing to choose to take it completely in the open with everyone having full knowledge of who and what they were, or it was truly a house of straw that couldn't take that kind of test at all.
Again, I'm not saying what I did was right or that I'd even do it the same way again.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. -- Inigo Montoya, 'The Princess Bride'
