Should I stay in my marriage for the kids?

[GeorgeBaker]

Hi,

I am a 36 y/old man. I recently had a very brief, very intence affair with someone, it has all ended very messily, in that my wife found out and its become a painful situation all round, involving lots of people.

Please feel free at this stage to direct any verbal abuse at me, I'm kinda getting used to it, although I totally deserve it.

My wife and I have 2 kids together and I love my kids more than anything in the world. I know though that I don't love my wife anymore. She is a wonderful person, attractive, good fun, great mother and is great in so many ways. However, I have fallen out of love with her and have for a while.

My question though is should we stay together for the sake of the kids? Is it better to have 2 parents who love their kids but are apart, than have 2 parents who live under the same roof but the love has gone?

Hope there is some sense out there, cause right now i don't know whether I am coming or going.

George

[GeorgeBaker]

WhenwillIfeelnormal, well we've been together for 10 years and its only the last year or so really that the love has waned alot for me. Before that there were no issues.
For the record, the affair started because this women 'set out to have me' as she told people. So the other woman started it, but I certainly am not trying to exonerate myself in all this.
Your comments on the role model part are very true and the crux of my dilemma - I've always thought it was best to be a role model by being there all the time, but maybe there is a better way.
Has anyone has experience of staying together for the kids and its all worked out? Did the love come back?

[GeorgeBaker]

LC - i have moved out and I will never withhold a penny from my wife and kids.
My aim in all this is to whatever happens to continue to be a good father to my kids and be in their lives as fully as possible.

[skidoodly]

So you loved this woman for 9 years and then you just stopped loving her.

Why?

Also, why are you so weak that just because a woman sets out to have you means she gets you?

Aren't you disgusted with yourself for being so completely lame?

"Did the love come back"?

Don't you get it?

YOU killed the love.

The love won't just magically come back.

The woman you are married to, the mother of your children, who you loved for 9 years of your life deserves to be happy. She deserves to be with someone who loves her and adores her and cherishes her.

If you can't be that person, surely you still have enough regard for her to free her up to find the man who will give her that.

You are still acting like a completely selfish twat.

You've caused a whole world of pain to 3 innocent victims and all you're concerned about is yourself.

[Dione]

George, while I admire your sentiments, I feel that you and your wife need to go deeper indepth.

I once again would repeat: Try couple counselling. I get the feeling that you think that your family are important, so go with that.
It will be best for all of you. And they are not going to make you go back to a relationship that wasn't working. However you say you have 80% love for your wife. That's a lot more than many have after this length of time. My only advice is to be honest.

[GeorgeBaker]

Skidoodly, yes of course I'm disgusted.
There were all sorts of reasons why I was weak in this situation, but the fact was of course I had a choice and made the wrong choice.

Do you not think that love can just go then?
And the question is does it come back?

The rest of what you say is true though.
Except, I'm not being selfish, my reason for posting here is to get advice on what is best for the kids.

[GeorgeBaker]

Dione, thanks.
I've suggested couple counselling, but its still too raw for my wife, as in "it's you that need sorting, not me". Fair enough.
Yes, family is very important. I am surrounded by stable families, lots of long-term marriages {grandparents, nearly 60 years married}.
Perhaps counselling is better for when the situation isn't so raw.

[Gonesouth]

I don't have any answers for this situation ut what I can say that the love which brings you together in the early days of a relationship does change, and through the ups and downs of life its the one single thing which gets you through the tough bits.

When you have kids, it changes; when life throws all sorts of shit at you and you wonder what it is that you like about this person, you have to dig deep to hang on to your love for each other.

I've felt all sort of different kinds of love in the time I have been with my DH (many, many years) and that's part of the secret of a good relationship.

However, for me the moment that you made the choice to have an affair was the moment that you stamped all over the relationsip that was your marriage. You betrayed your DW and yout DCs in one fell swoop. Will you get the love back?

You broke the spell the moment you chose the OW.

No, you may get some kind of relationship back, but the love? Sadly thats the thing you've lost for ever.

[gingerwig]

George, can you elaborate on how the other woman set out to have you?
I am baffled by this notion
Do you mind me asking if alcohol was involved?

I do, sadly think the love CAN just go. And yes I do think it can return. If you really work at it

All credit to you for not blaming your wife for any of this.
Your situation does sound a little different from the usual scenario.

[GeorgeBaker]

this is my first time on mumsnet, sorry to be dumb but can someone just let me know what DH, DW, DC and OW are abbreviations for?

[Fortheverylasttime]

Dear husband, wife, children. Other woman.

[GeorgeBaker]

gingerwig, turns out she is a bit of a maneater, so more fool me hey. She is married aswell, but he seems to be the VERY forgiving type.
No alcohol was involved, it was a friendship that started as our kids go to the same school, which towards the end of the school year developed very quickly into a brief fling.
Without sounding trite, for me it was just sex not love.
Yes my wife is totally innocent in all this, she is a good woman and mother. She has been very angry and pissed off with me for a while {before all this}, but still she should shoulder no blame in this.

[helicopterview]

You didn't confess your affair, your wife found it out. Which suggests no guilt or remorse.

When you say 'stay together for the sake of the kids', what you mean is so that you can see the kids all the time. Nothing to do with your wife, and how she might feel with you in the home, despite your clear disrespect and disregard for her.

You are selfish, and weak.

Give her her freedom. Leave her well alone.

[GeorgeBaker]

gingerwig, as in i am not going to use the excuse used by so many mean i think that "my wife drove me to it".
The OW set out to get me, at a point in my life where I was low about life, very stressed in other aspects of my life and things in general and more vunerable. Saying that sounds shit I know, but it wouldn't have happened before, this is a first for me, i'm not a serial cheat.

[gingerwig]

I don't think that being found out necessarily rules out feeling guilt and remorse.

Does your wife want you to work things out?

[GeorgeBaker]

gingerwig, too early to tell really, its still too raw.

and yes, of course i feel guilty and remorseful, even before i was caught out.
not all cheats are complete and utter bastards

[thenamehaschanged]

yes they are

[GeorgeBaker]

Can I turn this around and ask, does any one have experience of a seperation/divorce happening and its amicable {to a point} and the kids have benefitted from having two loving parents, but who aren't together?

[elastamum]

You are at best a complete and utter fool at worst a complete and utter bastard.

My ex did this to me after 9 years and eventually left us. Did the love return, no, I dont hate him anymore but have little respect for him and the way he treated me and our children.

Have my children's lives been improved by the split, I doubt it. They live with me, I work full time to support us, they see their dad every other weekend, he has remarried - there is a certain irony in that as I have little chance of forming a meaningful new relationship as I spend 99% of my time bringing up our children. They have new step siblings, who they dont particularly like and a step mum who is pushing my ex to reduce his child support.

If you want to see what your wife and childrens lives might be like in future take a tour through the threads on lone parents and see how it makes you feel.

I suspect its too late. You have already wrecked their childhood. Congratulations, you stupid, stupid man

[Dione]

GB, counselling can help you both make sense of the raw feelings you're experiencing at this time. You speak about rawness, like it is something wrong, but it isn't. Your desire to be there for your kids and wife may be described as raw. Your wife's anger(?) may be described as raw. Does it make it wrong? I don't think so. I do think that marriage is worth fighting for.
As you said, you love your wife 80%, if that is true then you deserve to give everything a chance, even if you think it will not work.

Give it a go. What do you have to lose except your rationality and that is something that is arbitery.

[thenamehaschanged]

well said elastamum. there's not much come back to that is there george?

Did you know what you were doing when you got married and had kids or was that out of your control as well?

Nobody is saying you have to stay in a marriage that is making you unhappy - but there are ways of trying to fix things and there are ways of ending things amicably if the fixing doesn't work.

When you go out shagging behind the mother of your children's back then you have just made the whole last ten years of your marriage a sham, as your wife is quite rightly feeling right now.

[blueshoes]

George, this is my perspective as a child where the love had gone out of my parents' marriage.

My father had (many) affairs but I never noticed until my mother told me. I never noticed she was unhappy in her marriage until she told me. I was 12 then.

My mother said that no matter what, my father would never leave her or us, his children. She was right. Much as I hated my father for his betrayal of our family with his affairs, the one thing I was always hold to his credit is he stayed by us while we were growing up and neither he nor my mother broke up the marriage.

It must have involved a lot of sacrifice on both their parts. I will always be grateful.

They are now in their seventies and still together. I think they have made their peace and found a compromise after the stress of bringing up a young family long over. My mother just nursed my father through a near fatal heart attack. I think there is still love, but again, I won't know.

[gingerwig]

I have to say that shagging behind your wife's back is not smart but to say it makes your whole marriage a sham - utter bollocks.

"All cheats are complete and utter bastards"
also bollocks.

George in answer to your last question, yes I know of two families in my own circle of friends who divorced and all are happy now including the children. But there was a huge lot of unhappiness in between

[gingerwig]

George, puting the affair to one side for a minute, were you heading in the direction of contemplating ending your marriage?

[Dione]

My son has benefitted from having two parents who are apart.

That is not to say that it did not rip me apart to make that decision. In the end I had to do what was best for me and DS. His dad had NPD and was psychotic. He still is emotionally abusive (but I'm dealing with that), but I did my best (with Relate's help) to maintain a relationship with him and his dad. Maybe in the longterm it won't work, but in the meantime his dad follows my lead and he says of his dad and his housemate "I really love them and they are important people to me".

No matter what went on with me and Ex, I chose to have a child and my son deserves to have his mom and dad act in a decent, adult way around him and I will always strive for that(until my EP has that car accident I'm praying for).

[WhenwillIfeelnormal]

When your wife says that you need sorting out, not you as a couple, what she means is that you need some therapy to find out what it was about you that chose infidelity.

I'm intrigued by what you really feel for your wife. In one post, you say you don't love her at all, in another you claim to love her 80% and thank you for answering the question about when your feelings for her changed. About a year ago you say? Did this coincide with starting this friendship with the OW, by any chance?

Please be honest here - it is so important. Cross-match whether you started to distance yourself from your wife and convince yourself that your feelings for her were diminishing after you'd started your friendship with the OW. It's very common in affairs for the parties to start distancing themselves from their spouses before an affair starts, because they realise that they have no justification whatsoever for an affair, so they go on to create a problem, by distancing theselves and reducing the connection with their spouse.

I really think you would find therapy useful and helpful, because what you are describing here is very common, but you do need to have a perspective about it and not delude yourself. You said for example that at the time of your affair, you were feeling low and dissatisfied with other things in your life. You certainly wouldn't be the first spouse in the world to find that the flattering attention of another person made those other bad things recede and you then got sucked into something.

I do think it's pretty relevant here that the OW pursued you. Not because you are any less responsible - and you could and should have said "No thanks", but you don't sound as though at that time in your life, you went looking for an affair. I think you might have been one of those people who would never have had an affair at all if someone hadn't offered, but this is behaviour you're going to need to analyse, both if your wife gives you another chance, or in future relationships.

No-one who has a relationship with you will want the fidelity governed by the actions of a third party and to feel that you cannot pass up a cast-iron opportunity. So you need to acknowledge perhaps that you are someone who can't say no, especially when you need an ego boost. I'm assuming you don't want to be like that?

I would really spend a lot of time working out your true feelings for your wife. Love can come back stronger if both parties are willing to work at a marriage and people can fall in love again even after years of marriage; it is something I've managed to do myself.