Ok so here goes, advice sought re my wife and her emotional affairs, apologies in advance for length, probably far too much detail too.
Married 10 years ago aged 20 due to her as my girlfriend's unplanned pregnancy. She is a speaker of English as a second language.
Came back to England after son was born and had to strive to make money and she found it very isolated at first but got on with it. Gradually financial situation improved, she made friends mostly from her own country.
I am a computer programmer and not the most emotionally demonstrative/romantic type but she always gave me her love and showed her love and respect for me although there were times when we got stale, we were always reinvigorated when she returned from time in her home country.
I spent over the years a lot of time on the computer and we didn't really have much 'quality time' at home as I'm a bit of an internet addict/also quite often working on the computer. However I always pushed to go out with the kids on the weekend as its healthier out of the house away from the computer.
I used to work in the office but my work ended in 2008 and since then I've worked from home on the computer, which has given me more time to pick up the kids, take them to the park, etc. I make a lot of money from my business and we have several foreign holidays per year etc.
For about the last two years my wife's discovered Facebook which has grown to occupy all of her free time at home.
We had a second child before I left my job and as she's got older my wife has become more short-tempered, whereas I've probably got more chilled out as I've matured (I think also she's also become more Europeanized). Also we send our children to a private school and my wife doesn't really feel she fits in.
Anyway the last time she came back from her country, which was last year, we didn't really feel any spark as we had done before.
Subsequently she went to a birthday party of her friend from her country, in Frankfurt, late last year and while she was there she made a connection with a man there that she previously knew but was only friends. I wasn't aware of this at the time, but when she returned she was calling him daily and they were sending 'love chats' on facebook (not sexual, more romantic). I paid no regard to her facebook activities but on the night of our wedding anniversary after a meal at a very posh restaurant we went back to my parent's house briefly and she sat on a chair chatting on facebook on her iphone. We remarked on the way home that we were quite cold with each other but we got home late and she went straight to bed while I went to the toilet and took the laptop.
When I opened the laptop she'd left her facebook logged in from earlier in the day and there were all the chats that she had been making to one of her female friends basically revealing how she was having this emotional affair with this man.
I didn't say anything immediately but tried to gather more evidence before confronting her. After a day or two I did so and burst in on her in the middle of chatting on facebook with him, she tried to deny it all, so I showed her the print out of the chat with the friend. I insisted she broke it off but she said she wanted to stop it gently so as to avoid future bad feeling with him. I said that she must stop but about a week later she called him, her excuse was that she was trying to wind it down. This was bollocks, I later found out she had SMSed him immediately upon my finding out. Anyway we repeated this charade about three times in total.
Eventually I think the other man decided it wasn't a good idea or I'm not sure but anyway it came to an end. So we continued without any real spark of romance although we did make an effort to do some things together basically we spent all our time at home on our respective computers.
We went back to her country again recently and spent six weeks there. We basically spent our time apart from each other and were not really happy in each other's company as we both had plenty of other people to spend time with. However on leaving it was just going to be the four of us again. In the airport my wife made three calls to a name I didn't recognise at some expense, and also refused to spend the family time my daughter wanted, because she wanted to go onto the internet.
When we got back to the UK, I should at this point mention that after the emotional affair previously I ended up secretly installing spyware on the computer to track what she was doing (I don't know what the rights and wrongs of this are but I should add that I previously always trusted my wife 100% and she spent a lot of time with male friends, who I understood to be just that - friends, and when we had been apart I never had any doubt that she was faithful to me nor ever questioned her with regard to men prior to the episode on our wedding anniversary night). So when she came back I found out very quickly, thanks to the spyware, that she was doing the same kind of thing, conducting an emotional affair by phone/facebook, and I was able to put a real name to the fake name she had assigned to the number she had called from her phone.
She is not as computer adept as I, but obviously having returned and wanting to pursue this emotional affair she was now quite paranoid (having been repeatedly caught previously by me on the basis of phonebill entries etc. but in fact due to the spyware), so she changed all her passwords for facebook, email, etc. A few days after returning I confronted her and told her that because of her behaviour I knew she was up to the same things again. She tried playing the same game as before where she would not admit to anything unless I accused her of it directly. I told her I would not go through that again and that she should just leave because she was lying to me over and over and that there was no trust.
So at this point she came back at me with my faults and we said 'we have to change, you need to stop contacting this guy, I need to be more helpful in the house with the children/cleaning up'. But nothing really changed. I drove her to an event on the Sunday (we had this discussion on the Friday), I was driving home and she was playing with her phone and uploaded an old picture of him onto facebook. She thought I only knew that she was contacting someone, but didn't realise I knew the identity, but of course me seeing her doing this made me feel quite bitter.
The next day I went out to run some errands and pick up the kids from school. She was mowing the grass. When I came back she was on facebook exchanging smalltalk with the man. I was quite fed up with this and after she went to bed I called him (as well as several friends of his/ours as he was hanging up the phone and playing silly games) and told him to back off and leave her alone as she was a married woman.
She found out that I had done this in the morning and we didn't speak for several days but she agreed (by SMS) to go to a Relate session with me. We did this and went to the session and I detailed what I have said above and then she said that she didn't love me and hadn't done for some time and that she was fed up with me being at home, and basically the session was quite angry, but we said we wanted to try 'for the children'.
After this we went and talked for quite a while in a coffee shop, something we noted we'd failed to do previously, and this time things were more serious than the previous attempt. We went home, and my wife having just failed to get on a local college course, (to get her a career and some self-respect) partly because she was still chatting on facebook to the boyfriend when she was supposed to be preparing for her interview, we basically signed her up for a (very expensive) private course, which will keep her busy five days a week and is also quite fulfilling.
I'd said that I would try to be more considerate, wash the dishes, etc., that she would try to stop spending all her time on facebook, and that we would both speak to each other in softer more loving tones (rather than being brusque), that we would both correct each other's negative behaviours (rather than having us both reinforce each others laziness), and I think we tried this for about a week before I went away this weekend to visit friends.
So I came back from the trip and I come home and I'm thinking 'hmm I don't really miss my wife' (or have any feelings for her). I get home quite late she's already asleep, tired from her course, so I check what she's been up to while I've been away, and basically she's contacted the boyfriend on facebook several times and also spent an hour and a half on the phone to him (although she called to his friend's mobile in an effort to avoid detection by me). She's also making more effort to cover her tracks with 'Firefox private browsing' and also deleting history (she doesn't realise that this is completely futile due to the spyware).
So here I am having resolved to myself last week to try just a little bit harder and keep trying to love her, even if she rebuffs me or is a little short with me (which in the recent past we have both been, on a regular basis, with each other), but the continued contact with this guy is something I find hard to accept (btw she has always tried the line (with the previous man too) that she's only talking, she's not having sex with them, to which I've pointed out that she speaks to plenty of men but she doesn't send 'I love you' 'no I love you more' to these men).
So..... I can just keep going trying to rekindle things by whatever means possible and overlook this (I've no doubt it will continue in the short term at least), or I can ask her in accusing terms about the hour-and-a-half phone call to the best friend of the boyfriend which will of course only heighten her paranoia and bitterness.
In the ideal world she's a nice, attractive woman who is the mother of my two children and a third of my life so far, and we'd both love each other very much, having worked through the struggles to get to a position where we are extremely comfortable and should be very happy, with me having time + money to be a better husband/father than was possible when we were striving to get ahead. But of course the reality is there's no spark or affection between each other and while I tolerated a loveless sexless marriage for a long time, the unfaithfulness is a dealbreaker (but hopefully an incentive to resolve the lovelessness and sexlessness???).