Should I accept proposal if I've never met his daughters?

I think it’s likely he doesn’t want them to meet because it might come out that he wasn’t sleeping on the floor for a year.

OP has let him move into her home with her young kids and yet he’s not pushing for a divorce and a financial agreement with his STBX. OP claims they have a joint account which is madness when he’s still married to someone else.

Call me cynical but I’m not sure this is the together forever love story OP thinks it is

@HeadDeskHeadDesk "There simply isn't a nice, painless way to leave someone who doesn't want it and never saw it coming. Regardless of the reason, it's always going to hurt."

If you know that what you are doing will hurt someone, and you do it anyway, you are intentionally hurting that person. Even though hurting that person is not your goal, you know it will happen if you act, and you act anyway, so you intend the result.
It isn't an accident, because it isn't a sudden surprise.

So can we cut out all the crap about "it wasn't done deliberately" as if that is a justification?
To maintain that he didn’t actually try to hurt his wife but was in a position where he had no choice, is a cruel, selfish, gutless, pathetic crock of shit.

I could be completely wrong here but I will confess to not having read the full thread .
Is there a possibility he's living a double life?
I fing it odd his grown up daughters haven't wanted to meet you if only out of curiosity.
Three and a half years to get a divorce is unheard of now, .
Is he a lorry driver? Works on rigs,taxi driver. I'm sorry ,I dont think he's being 100% honest with you.
My neighbour lived a double life for over 30 years ,he died and had four kids with his mistress

lol! As if it’s the wife (not ex) saying this and not the young women themselves who don’t want to meet the women who in their eyes broke up their parents marriage. Are you from the same school of ‘believe everything a man who’s had an affair with you and needs a place to live tells you’?

I can tell you now (I was the DD on that situation), they'll never want you to be in their lives. They'll probably soften when your dad moves onto the next woman after you (I did).

I really hate women who had a role in destroying lives and has the fucking temerity to call the ex “bitter”. Have a word with yourself.

Who knows if that’s true as the OP has only heard one very biased side of the story - and let’s be honest most of what he’s told her according to her updates sounds like the usual married man’s script.

The daughters are adults - if they wanted to meet the OP then it’s their choice but so far they don’t appear interested.

I mean this is a man who claimed to sheep on the floor for a year and 3.5 years in still hasn’t managed to get divorced. Not sure I’d set too much by his version

What a silly comment!

this man had an affair - cheated on his wife. While these women were teens. It is more likely that these now adult women have assessed the situation themselves and decided there don’t want to meet the woman who their dad cheated with.

they might come round in time / but to suggest their dad ‘mans up’ and demands his wife who he is in the process of divorcing force her adult daughters to meet the woman he cheated with is preposterous, and a bit sexist!

i was the adult child in this situation and had absolutely no wish to meet the other woman, ever.
if really your IH and his ex had happily been trying to separate then ex would not be encouraging her children to not meet you, or for the divorce to be drawn out this long.
so by all means - accept the proposal, but don’t expect the daughters to be happy, wishing to meet you, or have anything to do with your children.
in their eyes you are the homewrecker., and getting married is not going to change that.

Well, she isn't his ex wife for a start. He hasn't decided to divorce her yet !
If she was, maybe this whole mess wouldn't be occurring.

Is suggest honesty as a baseline. If someone is capable of lying to the person they have promised to be faithful too forever, why would I trust that they would be honest about anything else?

Well that's all very well but it does nothing to answer my question. Like I said, my husband was honest with his ex-wife pretty much immediately after he and I were physical for the first time. Did his honestly lessen her pain any? No, it didn't. Would it have been any easier for her if he'd said 'Look, I won't lie to you, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to not sleep with HeadDesk, I think I might love her, so I'm going to have to leave you. Sorry.'

That would have been completely honest, right? No lies, no cheating, so I'm sure she'd have found that so much less painful when he was ending the marriage just the same. 🙄

There simply isn't a nice, painless way to leave someone who doesn't want it and never saw it coming. Regardless of the reason, it's always going to hurt.

I'm glad it had worked out for you, but you can't deny the huge cost that someone else has paid.

And I have never once tried to.

What right does his ex-wife have to dictate what their adult children do and who they see? I’ll be slightly concerned that he doesn’t man up to her and that his adult children don’t tell their mum that they are interested to meet you and be a part (however small) of their dads life.

When relationships break down people get hurt, and that is very sad. There is no way to avoid that.
Sometimes it's no-one's fault.

The better way to deal with it is to say that you're not happy any more/don't feel the same way about them/ etc. and you want to leave. Then leave and ask for a divorce.

Bringing another person into the mix is just rubbing someone's nose in it.
The hurt is incalculable, something a cheating spouse will never understand because they are selfish and have little empathy.

Is suggest honesty as a baseline. If someone is capable of lying to the person they have promised to be faithful too forever, why would I trust that they would be honest about anything else?
Your actions, freely chosen, were the direct cause of another person's pain.
I'm glad it had worked out for you, but you can't deny the huge cost that someone else has paid.

So what, exactly, do you suggest we should have done about it? I mean not caving in to the urge to have sex is obviously a given. We failed there. But what else? What then?

When someone's feelings change are they entitled to change their lives and leave their marriage or not? Or should they just stay where they are forever, knowing that they no longer want to be there? If that's what you think, then just say it.

But assuming you are a realist and you accept that people should be able to leave relationships they are no longer happy in, so long as they are not unfaithful first, what way do you recommend someone should set about removing themselves from their marriage in a way that leaves them blameless and above reproach and that guarantees their spouse won't get hurt? And how long should they take to get it over with? How soon is too soon, once that realisation hits that they love someone else and that feeling isn't going away?

You may never meet his daughters, they may never accept you. So regardless of all the chatter of who said and did what that’s the reality. It’s your decision if you as an individual feel this is something you can live with.

@HeadDeskHeadDesk "The pain wasn't deliberately inflicted. That's a very loaded way of describing it. We didn't have an affair as a way to hurt his wife. That would be deliberate. His wife got hurt, but that was a by-product of our actions, not the chief reason for doing it."

Do you honestly think that the betrayed party gives a rat's arse about whether it was deliberate or not ? The pain is the same.

Have a look at the Conflict in the Middle East board. The Israelis are trying to rid Gaza of a despotic regime with a homicidal intent against the Nation of Israel. Gazan civilians are (unfortunately) being killed in the process.
But when the IDF says "we don't aim to kill civilians they are collateral damage" there is an outcry.

So, IYO the wife's feelings were just "collateral damage" caused by two selfish people wanting what they wanted and are irrelevent?

Nice (sarcasm)

I didn't say it was accidental. I said hurting her was not a deliberate action. And it wasn't. We could have had a brief affair, ended it, and she'd have been none the wiser. Our actions would have been deliberate but they wouldn't have caused her hurt if she hadn't known about them.

Him telling her he loved me and was leaving her was the reason she was hurt. Would she honestly have been any less hurt if we'd managed to resist having sex twice, until after he'd left her? It wouldn't have changed the reason he was leaving, would it?

In the perfect, straightforward world that some of you inhabit, where everything is very binary, you can leave your wife and remain completely decent and blameless, providing you didn't sleep with another person first. Even if acknowledging that you've developed feelings for that other person were THE only reason you were leaving your wife. That's technically not punishable.

So at the point you realise you want to have an affair with this other person, and you don't want to have to resist the urge, or lie about it, you can leave your wife and you haven't done a single thing wrong.

Yet the second you allow yourself to act on those feelings without leaving first, you become the devil incarnate. Even if you come clean about it almost immediately afterwards, it's no good. You are clearly just a liar and a cheat who can never be trusted in a relationship again.🤔

You and your now partner made a series of deliberate choices that hurt someone. It was not accidental, it was a choice.

Yes. It's very peaceful. The pain wasn't deliberately inflicted. That's a very loaded way of describing it. We didn't have an affair as a way to hurt his wife. That would be deliberate. His wife got hurt, but that was a by-product of our actions, not the chief reason for doing it.

When we started the affair my husband could have chosen to lie and keep it quiet for ages. She'd possibly never have known and it might have run its course and ended.

As it was, our affair moved very, very quickly. We were already very good friends and I suppose with hindsight there had been an emotional affair brewing for quite some time before it suddenly became a physical one. So once it became technically 'an affair' that we couldn't be in denial about, we both knew straight away that it was going to be serious.

He chose to tell her almost immediately. So that did hurt her, obviously. But he did what he felt was the best thing to do under the circumstances, not drag it out and sneak around and lie for months on end. Once he knew he wanted to be with me and not her, he just got on with making it happen as quickly as possible.

Obviously anything could have happened and we could have split up a year later, but we didn't. 36 years together, three children, very happy thank you.

Do you think that it can ever be truly peaceful though? Knowing the devastation that starting that relationship caused and the pain that was deliberately inflicted on others?

Exactly this, didn't leave until he lined up the replacement. Just go ahead and marry him OP. Create a gap for the new mistress.

And others are with the love of their loves, living a peaceful, drama free and contented existence well into their old age, and none of the above applies. 🙂

In the same way that not everyone cheats in the same way or for the exact same reasons, not every cheater's new relationship is bound to end up miserable, or to involve more cheating on a loop, or to end eventually, or to be something they feel 'stuck with' because they are too proud to admit they blew their previous life up for someone who turned out to not be worth it.

Life is way more complex than that.

I would tend to agree with that broadly.

Some cheaters stick with their affair partner because they have seen the mess that their cheating made the first time and don't want to repeat that.

Others that have a child with the AP (who is often younger, single and wants a child/children) don't have the money or emotional strength to go through another divorce and support 2 families, especially when the 2nd family has young children who will need support for years.

Other cheaters find that as they get older their options for finding a "younger model" are reduced, especially if they have gone bald and 'paunchy'.
They may have disappointments with the reality of the relationship when compared with the previous fantasy of the affair, but don't have the opportunity to do anything about it.
So they decide to "settle". 🙂

There you go with everything is black & white again !
It’s not .
If everyone made the right decisions all the time we’d be living in a perfect world .
It’s not fair to say “ Good people don’t have affairs “ as you have said .
Therefore that makes them a “ bad person “ .
We’re just going to go around in circles with this because our views are very different, & that’s fair enough too , each to their own 🤷🏻‍♀️