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Frank- It does seem strange that I feel she’s semi-remorseful even with her suicide attempt. I feel that way because she says she wants to stay with me and reconcile but she makes no effort to examine why she had the affair or answer any other lingering questions. Then it occurs to me that the attempt could have been less about regret and more of an effort to avoid responsibility and the social scorn that she may have to deal with, if this becomes common knowledge.

It seems you’re right about affair-sex, based on everything I’m reading. Unfortunately, its also true that once you get burned by it, the idea of ruining someone else’s relationship with some hot, steamy affair-sex isn’t very appealing.

And yes, weekly for 4 1/2 to 5 years according to her latest guess. Sometimes 2x a week but not always for sex. Sometimes just a legitimate workout and some chit chat. There is no way she didn’t have some feelings for this dirt bag. Not admitting it makes me worried that she could still feel that way and who knows when it could crop up again.

Anyway, our next marriage therapy session I’m going to press for some answers. She seems to feel more obligated to discuss it in that setting.
Thanks for listening.

LTH. It is truly cruel, that behavior and her cutting words. Sex with a married man in his garage while his own wife and children are on the same property is her best sex? While the man who loves her and her own children are waiting for her at her home! Then a suicide attempt. It doesn't even all add up. If there is any way you can monitor her phone calls and activities - maybe you should try that. My world became a lot clearer after I started listening into my WX's telephone conversations.

Step aside and let her go live her best life in this guy's garage with his wife and kids nearby and call it done. As painful as it is for you and your kids - it is what it is.

Don't ever accept her lousy opinion of you. Don't ever.

She’s basically telling me that her whole five year affair was about sex and I was not providing sex that was satisfying to her so she went elsewhere. It is really getting to me and I’m trying to figure out if she is trying spare my feelings by saying it was not also an emotional affair or if she is telling me that our marriage meant so little that getting better sex from someone else was worth all the risks.
I’m sure additional therapy will help me understand her answer but she is sticking with the answer and I’m not sure anything will make that better. What a shitty feeling.

At this point, I cannot even imagine the amount of your soul that will die if you continue to stay with her. The fact that she is not incredibly remorseful given the scope of her treason is the true measure of her character.

She doesnt value you man. Not one iota. At most, you are a convenience. Please pick up what is left of your self esteem and identity and leave her to her debauchery.

Its only a short time since your wife’s solution to her situation (of her own creation) was attempted suicide. She’s still a far way off from being capable of explaining the why of the affair. Heck… might be months of IC before she finally get’s it.
"Just sex" is her way of minimizing or limiting pain. If she thought the emotional part was less harmful she would be claiming that, and that the sex had been bad.
I wouldn’t put too much value on her statements now.

What does concern me is that at first it was 2 years, then 3, then 3 ½ and now it’s 5…

Is she still trickle-truthing?

I like your comment on having a mental deadline (as I recommended). Set your goal for that deadline, and IMHO having a verifiable and believable timeline would be a great place to start, and if there is any hope of R that she has found and started treatment with an IC.

200 sex encounters over 5 years? That ain’t just sex and it ain’t an affair. It’s bigamy. Of course there were "feelings." Otherwise she is a sociopath.

Bigger- You seem very knowledgeable in this area. I hope you’re right about her not really even knowing what the reason was just yet. I suppose the real answer could be more or less hurtful, but this one seems like a silly reason to throw everything away and a good way to get a jab in at me at the same time. Why give me a jab? I’m not sure, she’s got nothing to be angry about, other than her own actions.

Good advice from Bigger. Pretty common for the cheater to jab at a BS or try and blameshift and minimize the affair.. It’s a way of shifting away from the shame and guilt rather than accept responsibility. I agree I would not put too much stock in her statements right now. Take care of you.

I’m sorry about everything you’re going through right now and wanted to add an additional thought on telling your kids.

Give some thought not only to when / how to tell them (you’ve gotten some great advice already), but also to what their reactions might be in the days / weeks / months after and how best you can support them. When I went through this with my young adult kids, I was open with them that for my own wellbeing, I needed to have minimal / no contact with their dad. I also explained that they each might have a variety of reactions, from wanting to maintain a relationship with their dad to NOT wanting a continued relationship with him…or things in between…and that their desire to have or not have contact with their dad could change over time.

Most importantly, I was open about the fact that each of us might make different choices. One kid might want to maintain a relationship with him and another might never want to see him again. And all of those choices are valid and ok…and we need to respect and support each other’s choices. The kids and I had a lot of conversations about how they were feeling with respect to their dad, for months after the affair was exposed, and I think that was a good thing.

I’m sure you don’t want any tension or rift happening between your kids if, for example, one wants to be very supportive of your wife while another is angry / doesn’t want to talk to her. One kid might find her suicide attempt emotionally unmooring and not be so focused on the affair, while another may be distraught about the affair and shrug off the suicide attempt. One of the kids deep down may want to find a way forward with his / her mom but also feel torn about being "disloyal" to you. It can get complicated and messy, fast.

Your wife may feel that the kids are adults and will be fine, but there is a web of relationships between all of you, and the change in the relationship between you and your wife will have an impact on all of those other relationships. Unfortunately I don’t think there is any way around that, so the best I can offer is to acknowledge this with your kids and invite them to share whatever is on their minds. They are adults, but they are still humans, and this news will still forever alter their sense of "family" and "parents". So talk, check in, stay connected, encourage them to talk to a therapist or trusted person, etc. and all of you will get through this, together.

Bigger- You seem very knowledgeable in this area. I hope you’re right about her not really even knowing what the reason was just yet. I suppose the real answer could be more or less hurtful, but this one seems like a silly reason to throw everything away and a good way to get a jab in at me at the same time. Why give me a jab? I’m not sure, she’s got nothing to be angry about, other than her own actions.

If you stay and reconcile, what has she actually lost?

Most people with a functional moral compass struggle to wrap their heads around the cheater’s math, but a story from my past might shed some light on the mindset you're dealing with.

Years ago, I had a colleague who was a traveling engineer—charming, good-looking, and fundamentally cynical. He had a child with an ex and had just started a family with a new partner. He’d constantly tell me he had to make this relationship work because he could not be the guy with two failed families. Yet, he cheated at every single opportunity while on the road.

When I asked him why he would risk everything he claimed to value for a few flings, his answer was chillingly pragmatic:

"If by some miracle she ever finds out—which she won't—so what? I spend a couple of weeks in the dog house, I do some performative couples therapy, I grovel, I shed some puppy dog tears, and then we’re back to normal. It’s a small price to pay for all the pussy I’m getting."

I will never forget that conversation. It really rang true how fundamentally different cheaters are to normal people. You have to be broken in such a fundamental way.

To that man, the thrill was worth the unrest because he was confident the consequences would be temporary. If you choose to stay, you have to ask yourself: Does she share that mindset? If there is no real cost to her betrayal, she may privately reflect that those hundreds of outside orgasms were well worth a few months of your unhappiness. Without a significant shift in the power dynamic or a true loss of comfort, she hasn't thrown away anything—she’s just successfully navigated the cost of doing business. This is conjecture, of course, but it’s a perspective you can't afford to ignore.

Also, she's saying she wasn't satisfied sexually during the affair? Can you note any change? Why is she now satisfied when then she was not?

Finally, to end on a analogy. If I embezzled millions of pounds to have the time of my life over a couple of years periods. Parties. Holidays. The lot. Would I regret it if I got caught only to get a slap on the wrist? Probably not. Would it be worth it if they locked me up for decades. Nope.

Now some may say that the suicide attempt may counter some of the arguments I presented but let's be honest, it wouldn't be the world's first performative suicide attempt.

Consequences.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 4:30 PM, Sunday, March 29th]

If you stay and reconcile, what has she actually lost?

I have never understood this Hammurabi, eye-for-an-eye mentality. Eye for an eye and soon the world will be full of blind people.
If this was all about causing the most pain or creating the biggest "loss" for your wife then I have the ultimate idea: Take out a page in the local newspaper and print her story, then go to a public garden, douse yourself in gas and set yourself on fire. Let your local tv station know beforehand. That will make all the papers and be the ultimate shame and loss for your wife. That way you "win", because if someone is meant to lose, then somebody needs to win.

There is IMHO no way you can "punish" your wife for the affair. If you decide to divorce then you decide on your own grounds because you truly believe that will be your path to a better life. Not because that would make her "lose". If you divorce, then five years from now, I don’t want you to have regret, nor to find happiness in hearing from your kids that she’s more miserable than you.
I’m fine with D, and if you were to tell us you were 90% committed to D then I would be guiding you on that path. You can see I post in the divorce forum, and it’s generally the down-to-earth, direct and hard tone I use here.
Once again: My biggest fear for you is limbo. Therefore, my suggestion you set yourself a deadline for whatever progress you want to make. At that point I hope you will be in a better mental-space yourself to decide on your own path.

Divorce or reconciliation neither mean the WS get’s away without punishment or pain. Only that pain is internal. Self inflicted.
If you divorce your wife might reflect on the marriage and regret her actions that led to the divorce.
If you reconcile she will look at you and regret the actions that created this pain for you.

When reading advice offered here it makes sense to read posters responses on other threads. Might notice patterns, and you can better evaluate if those patterns are apt for you.

LFH-
I think you, your WW, friends and family are focusing far too much time and attention on your WW's suicide attention, well at least you are. In life, you will find, if you don't already know, there are two types of guilt- earned guilt and unearned guilt. This is a scenario where you have no unearned guilt in any of this. Your WW-loads of it.

But look at it this way LFH, your WW (if her story is true which again who knows?) lived years after the affair was over and never attempted suicide...just how bad was her guilt in those intervening years? I'm willing to bet a significant amount of money she slept pretty soundly at night and you saw no manifestation of her guilt and shame (if any) during those years. Even after being confronted with the amount of texting she and the AP were doing, she just kept going about her days. She was happy going through life with you being a clueless husband while she hid her secret affair even after continuous questions from you and expressing your feelings that something wasn't quite right. She didn't care about you, she probably felt entitled to her affair and all the hot sex. She obviously wasn't willing to work with you to improve ya'lls sex life.

If she throws the "it was just sex" jab at you again either alone or in therapy. I would respond "I understand. Nothing is hotter than new sex with a new partner. Which is why I'm looking forward to all the hot sex as a single person or in a new serious relationship. I too, am tired, after 30 years of routine sex with a frigid, dead starfish. I'm entitled to better." Even if she wasn't technically frigid or a starfish... don't be afraid to let you know you are unsatisfied when you compared what the AP got versus what you got.

Have you thought more of the advice I gave you to get away for a bit? Make your plans and reservations for a solo vacation so it gives you a hard deadline and it doesn't become "maybe next month, ok well maybe next year and I'll do it." Make your plans, tell your kids and family (not your WW) that you plan to be away for a bit and it's not permanent, but they need to make arrangements to support WW during that time. Get away and think. Run your plans by your attorney and get the ok.

Also, just reread everything.. I know you confronted AP but still no word on whether the OBS knows or not. Please tell the OBS now that you have "everything" Let the AP live in misery, he's also earned his guilt.

Looking, mentally I want younto put yourself on a bench outside, with the birds chirping, and the flowers blooming, and just sit there. Let yourself relax for a few minutes before you have to go back inside your house and deal with what you’re dealing with. You need to make sure that you’re eating properly getting enough sleep and not using any sort of drugs or alcohol to get you through the day. That’s the worst thing you can do for yourself. Now while you’re sitting on that bench, I want you to just start thinking about the fact that for at least five years you were routinely lied to not necessarily by commission, but by omission. You were living one life and your wife was living another. Whatever she said to that man, however she behaved around him, whatever she did with him she got away with. She’s not in jail. You’ve not hit her. You’ve done nothing except probably cry. That’s the harsh reality that people who’ve been cheated on have to look at and accept. They got away with it. Human beings are terrible about wanting to take revenge but it gets you nowhere. Those stages of grief that we’ve all heard about are not done logically. You might be in shock, and then angry, and then grief stricken, and then shocked again. You are going to work your way through however you feel but accepting what is the truth of your life will help you get to a place of peace. That’s where you want to be because that’s where we all want to be. If you plan on remaining married, you’re going to have to accept the reality of what your wife did. It’s a really bitter pill to swallow, but you have to do it. You can’t use it as a weapon because all that does is set things up to go south again.

Bigger always has very logical ways to wade through this swamp of feelings. His suggestions are always based on logical outcomes. If you want to stay married, if you want a happy healthy relationship with your wife, you will do well to follow his suggestions.

[This message edited by Cooley2here at 12:29 AM, Monday, March 30th]

@Bigger

I generally appreciate your responses here but I feel you have fundamentally misinterpreted what I was saying in my post.

The comparison to Hammurabi’s Code misses the distinction between revenge and accountability. My argument isn't about blinding an eye to feel better; it’s about the basic psychological principle of "cost-benefit analysis."

Divorce or reconciliation neither mean the WS get’s away without punishment or pain. Only that pain is internal. Self inflicted.

To suggest that a cheater’s only punishment is their own internal guilt assumes they possess the same moral baseline as the person they betrayed. As my story about the engineer illustrates, many people view a partner’s pain not as a tragedy to be avoided, but as a manageable overhead cost for a lifestyle they enjoy. We aren't talking about a one time slip here, we are talking about 5 years. Countless orgasms. It was a lifestyle. You have as much authority to say she will be filled with guilt and regret as I do to suppose she could be privately laughing to herself that she got away with it.

When you remove the external consequences such as loss of status, loss of comfort, or a fundamental shift in the power dynamic, you aren't "taking the high road," you are simply lowering the price of admission for the next betrayal. If a person can "buy" 5 years of illicit pleasure for the price of six months of their spouse being "difficult" or "sad," then from a purely pragmatic standpoint, they have won. The analogy about setting oneself on fire is a distraction from the reality that in any other contract, a breach of this magnitude results in a total forfeiture of benefits. We don't call it "revenge" when an embezzler is stripped of their stolen assets; we call it justice. If reconciliation is built entirely on the betrayed partner’s willingness to absorb the blow while the wayward partner keeps their home, their family, and their secrets, then the "math" never changes. True remorse requires a person to face a loss that actually hurts them, not just a temporary period of being in the "dog house" while they wait for their spouse’s memory to fade. Without a real cost, you aren't reconciling; you are just successfully navigating the cost of doing business.

If you divorce your wife might reflect on the marriage and regret her actions that led to the divorce.

If you reconcile she will look at you and regret the actions that created this pain for you.

Yes, might... if. I cannot say with any fact that LookingforHonesty's wife has the same ethos as that of my former colleague, however its a perspective worth considering. She well might share his view. Unless you doubting these people don't exist at all.

[This message edited by DRSOOLERS at 8:44 AM, Monday, March 30th]

Thanks for the kind words Cooley2Here, but:

If you want to stay married, if you want a happy healthy relationship with your wife, you will do well to follow his suggestions.

Keep in mind that my advice isn’t focused on the OP remaining married. If he were to share that he wanted to reconcile I would probably be on a comparable trajectory because AS IS I don’t think he has what he needs to evaluate if R is open to him. To R both partners need to be online both with the wish to R, and the requirements to R.
My advice is focused on the OP reaching a stage where he is content with his decision – be it to divorce or to reconcile.

LFH, you asked she’d be taking jabs at you right now. I don’t know, but I was thinking about this and I thought I’d share my speculations in the remote chance they help clarify or inspire your own thinking.

1) Like Fareast said, blame-shifting. Nobody makes themselves the villains in their own stories. So she told herself she needed this in order to be the best spouse, mother, friend, whatever. Sure she loved you, and your family and all that, but she had an itch she needed scratched, and your deficiencies made it so she had to find it elsewhere.

2) She doesn’t want to talk about it. She took a fistful of pills to avoid talking about her A. That didn’t do it, so maybe on some level, conscious or otherwise, she’s making the answers hurt to get you to back off. She knows you the best, you’ve been together 40 years. She knows what your buttons are. She knows what you’re sensitive about, and she knows how you’ll react. So if you find yourself saying, to hell with it, these conversations aren’t worth it that might be a clue.

3) Maybe there are some deep-seated resentments behind all of this. Or maybe she doesn’t like it that you’re emerging as the long-suffering but nobly kind spouse. Taking care of her after her suicide attempt even though she treated you so horribly. Meanwhile, everyone will see her as the mentally unstable, lying, cheating wh*re. She feels bad about herself and to cope she takes it out on you.

None of these are mutually exclusive.

Arnold- thank you, my kids are the most important part of this puzzle. They may be adults but they’re not expecting to find out that their parents marriage was a sham, at least from their mother’s perspective.

Dr. Soolers- the fact that she’s lost nothing yet and that she is not acting particularly remorseful IS eating away at me. Sometimes I’m not sure she isn’t the soulless type of cheater that you describe. Obviously if I decide that is true, it’s the single life for me.

Nuke- my desire to hit back at her is limited because of her mental health issue, which does not seem to have gotten much better yet. For the same reason I’m trying not to leave her alone just yet. A solo vacation sounds great but there’s time for that and at that point, she’ll be someone else’s responsibility.

Frank- I’m sure this is a combination of those reasons. It is her desire to back me off and maintain control of this whole situation that I’ve never understood before and which scares me most. Since that is still there, I don’t see her changing.

The only way you will get the full truth about what happened (assuming you even need that at this point) is if she sees that divorce is really on the table. Right now, she thinks she can wait you out and only share what she wants and that you will eventually give in and move on and not divorce her. You won’t heal by doing that though because you will never trust her again. File for divorce, have her served and then when she comes clean knowing that you are serious, hopefully you will then have the truth and can make a decision if you can forgive her or not. You can always stop the divorce if she starts to show real remorse and starts doing the heavy lifting to earn your trust back.

Bigger, thanks for the heads up. I meant to say whether he stays married or divorced your logical thought process is what bs need.