Post dh affair: More shit to come?

[holdtight]

I found out about my dh's alleged 6 month sexual affair with a female friend in November. Long story short - I have taken him back and we are at Relate. He has been sad, teary, guilt ridden and remorseful throughout, hence my decision to give things another try despite my reservations. I NEVER saw this coming - complete shock and out of the blue and otherwise a kind family man with a midlife crisis. We have 3 dc.

I have full access to his home email account/phone and nothing untoward on there but recently, due to a niggling feeling, I checked his work account and found numerous emails to and from ow SINCE November and as recent as last week. He had point blank ASSURED me he was NC. In the emails he is initially asking her if she's okay - he ended it suddenly and she was devastated. In her replies she asks him to meet her, to which he says he can't. Sometimes he says he misses her, but when she replies if he wants to meet, he always says no with a :(. I am sitting on these as I don't know what to think or do and I am curious to see where the fuck they are going with this. I feel like Relate was all a lie if he is still in contact and he has AGAIN lied to my face BUT he is only asking how she is/general stuff. Am I a mug? (Think i know the answer)

Support comes in many forms and sometimes it's not what you want to hear. That doesn't mean it isn't what you need to hear

Exactly. And that's the beauty of sites like mn. As you'll probably get advice that your friends may not be brave enough to tell you. Just saying what you want to hear isn't necessarily the best thing.

OP please come back!

He is still deceiving you. As long as he is still in contact with her and lying to you about it he is not working towards making your marriage work.

He cares too much about her to give her up completely, and doesn't care enough about you to give her up completely.

If he can't be totally honest with you and completely give up the OW then the only future you will have with him is a future full of lies, distrust and pain, and there's no guarantee that he still won't go to her in the future as he obviously can't give her up completely.

by telling the OW 'I can't' he is saying

I want to, but someone else won't let me.

He wants to see her. He has told her that he has to lie low and stop contact with her till some future point when he CAN find a way to see her again.

Even if he won't eventually see her again, in his mind he is not over her. He had an affair with someone for 6 months and the shock of potentially losing his family did not make him see that he had to go, and stay, no contact with OW.

I feel sorry for both of the women in this. One has been strung along with all sorts of drivel from him and then gets dumped suddenly.
The other was lied to for at least 6 months, is now having to reevaluate her whole relationship to some counsellor, all the while he is still lying.

As in all these situations, the only person who really knows what is going on, is the lying cheating scumbag in the middle.

You didn't throw him out, he didn't experience any 'loss', his life is just as it was before, whereas now instead of meeting up with her he is just thinking about her. She is not gone from his life. You need him gone from yours.

I think you need to be honest with yourself over this. What advice would you give a friend if she told you this?

Flibberty, that is what I was thinking.

Saying: "I don't want to see you again" would be what is required here.

This would be something I would need to discuss if I were the wife.

The semantics are irrelevant. The fact is he is still in touch with the other woman

oh and for a man, no contact probably means 'no meeting for sex'. He I probably doesn't even view a few emails as 'contact'.

So he's convinced himself that he is telling the truth when he says he has no contact with her.

Projecting a bit here but I think one outcome when he is confronted with this, would be to project it back, accuse the OP of snooping, ask how on earth he can rebuild the marriage if she won't trust him......

and we all know why they do that.

AnonyMuse, You already know that he is a liar and a cheat. Also that you can never trust him completely again. Whether his other qualities make it worth continuing to try again is a question only you can answer

This

Sorry MNers - I haven't gone AWOL, you haven't scared me off - i've had a really busy day.

Thank you all very much for taking the time to comment, some of it is a very painful read. I know from the outside I look like a delusional doormat. I'm really not. I know in my heart that dh has lied (when it mattered to me most - as we were repairing things and I took him at his word) and that will take some getting over, and maybe I never will.

I don't believe that dh is waiting for the dust to settle so that he can pick up where he left off with ow, nor do I think he loves her and is only staying with me for the dc - i do believe he has 'chosen' us.

For what it's worth, the emails are more frequent from him in the beginning (November time) and are now only every few weeks, usually instigated by her, and except from the occasional 'miss you' sign off from him, are conversational/worky. He has refused all attempts by her to meet up/speak on the phone.

At the moment I am still sat on the emails and would not feel comfortable doing a 'big reveal' at Relate, but would rather have it out with dh just the two of us. I am building myself up to do this, this week, and see what he has to say. It's not a done deal and i'm not ready to forgive everything at any cost.

I didn't mean to downplay the enormity of OP's DH lying to her again. FWIW in my case I found the lying and the deception in which my DH engaged to enable him to conduct his affair more painful and harder to handle than the sexual and emotional infidelity, it seemed to me an even more fundamental breach of my trust in him. And he too contacted the OW days after discovery to find out if she was OK, despite my having told him categorically that if he wanted to remain married he was to have no further contact with her.

I think we are all probably agreed that men who have affairs are immensely selfish, entitled and lacking in empathy. They are also all liars. It seems to me, however, that whether the marriage can be saved depends on addressing how and why it was that the straying husband could justify his betrayal (of all types) and whether he can and wants to change enough to make attempting reconciliation worthwhile. Some very wise MNetters suggested I should focus on that when I started my own thread a month or so post-discovery but I wasn't ready to see that then.

I also think that, several months down the road, it is important that both partners feel they can be honest to each other about their feelings. I know that my DH misses the OW. I suspect that he may do so for a long time to come (heavens, a tiny part of me still misses a boyfriend from nearly 20 years ago). But I also know that he does love me, that he has gained a new respect for me and appreciation of me. He is looking at himself with a very critical eye and I think he is doing his very best to overcome the narcissistic tendencies which enabled him to give himself permission to have the affair and to lie to me.

OP, I posted that before I saw your last post. I'm glad you're back. I don't think you're a "delusional doormat" (or that I am either). Good luck in whatever you choose to do....

I suspect the OP wont raise the emails at their Relate sessions because she knows exactly what will be made of it.

As for the 'miss you'as the sign off in the emails they really dont matter because there's not as many emails as there were previously and the ones there are - the OW sends them first.

I find it really sad that someone can be reduced to grasping at straws in this way.

OP, already during the course of this thread you have minimised the nature of their continued secret contact. I am afraid you are letting yourself in for very much more shit and this time with your eyes wide open.

Glad you came back OP!

You do need to tell him you know about the emails, but be prepared for the excuses when you do it. How he didn't want to hurt her etc (but hurting you is ok). How he wanted to make sure she was ok, but in the meantime was lying to you and pretending he was 100% working on your marriage.

He will do this.

I hate the term he's 'chosen' you? Like you should be grateful, you're lucky. Like you've 'won'.

As he's married he never should have chosen someone else.

OP, you got the booby prize. You "won" the cheating liar who is still lying.

Why do you want to stay with him?

I mean, what is it about him that makes you want to accept this and think it's the best you can do? The most you deserve?

If you don't tell him that you know he is still cheating, he will carry on and keep lying to you.

If you do tell him that you know he's still cheating, he will swear to you that he will end it properly, go no contact and never have anything to do with her again. He will cry and plead and beg. Oh wait, he did that already.

So it's a no win situation for you. You will never be able to trust him.

Ask him if he's had any contact with her since November. If he says no, ask him to swear on your dcs' lives. Then watch him do it. It will destroy any hope you have remaining that he might be honest with you.

This is so sad. It is staring you in the face. He is is not committed to saving your marriage at all - how you can argue otherwise I don't know. He has you sussed - if he shagged the OW again you probably will find a reason to excuse it, I bet he knows this.

At the very least you should confront him with what you know. You are attending Relate to try and save your marriage but both of you are holding back vital information. This makes no sense at all.

OP, I am really, really sorry for you. I hope you find a way but I suspect this man will continue to make you miserable. He is lying and you are accepting that.

OP I would be livid if my husband sent emails to another woman saying 'miss you', particularly one he'd had an affair with and had told me he'd stopped contact with. The regularity doesn't matter. He should tell her to stop emailing him personal things and keep it strictly to work if they do still have to communicate.

Those are just the ones you saw. What about the ones that would have been deleted?

I hope you manage an upfront conversation with him this week for your sake. It is a lot to process and things must be tough for you right now

Holdtight, why are you reluctant to confront him about your discovery of the emails?

Sounds like he's still holding onto some kind of relationship with her , and doesn't think you will kick him out.

I too am reading this and just feel so sorry that you're willing to accept his continuing betrays and to make excuses for him. All this fucking time you're trying to work on your relationship and he's still in touch with her and leading her on.

OP you are making excuses for him and grasping at straws. I can almost feel how much you want to make this right and make it work, just from the tone of your last post. It's made me really sad on your behalf, and reminded me how I made excuses for my stbxh, even when his actions blatently belied his words.

I know it looks like I am clutching at straws and trying to find excuses. I know what the facts are - what he has promised me and that he has lied, again. If I thought giving it another go was going to be plain sailing then I wouldn't have agreed to it. I suppose I am hoping the contact will fizzle out and it is just a stupid knee jerk reaction on dh's part.

I had intended to keep an eye on the emails to see if a) it fizzles out (which it looks like) or b) he cranks it up a notch, in which case he is gone. But based on the advice here, i do intend to confront him once I know what i am going to say and do based on his reaction.

OP - my husband had an affair last year. He told me about it and said it was over. He actually hadn't officially ended it but when I said he had to and that I wanted to see his email to her, he did. initially he made a number of mistakes which could easily have made people say: LTB. In fact on here they did.

But I made the decision to stick with him and work through it. He opened up all his communications to me so I could monitor them. Everytime he got a work email from her or even if her name was mentioned in a work email, he showed it to me. She eventually (very underhandedly) wrote him a letter and sent it to the club she knows he stays at when he works in London - saying she wanted to get back together with him. She suspected I was monitoring his emails so thought she'd try this route. He could have kept it secret, but he brought it home and showed me, even though he was terrified it would make me freak out.

We then jointly wrote an email saying that he had received her letter, he had shown it to me and that he never wanted to hear from her again.

He hasn't. He still shows me any work emails that mention her. When he had to travel abroad he called me regularly, emailed me, checked that I was ok with him not being around.

In short, he is doing everything he can to fix things.

I think you need to say to your husband that if he is genuinely committed to your marriage, that all communication with this woman has to stop. That you understand he may still have feelings for her - but that if he genuinely loves you and your family - he needs to go to counselling on his own/see a therapist to get over it.

My point is: it is easy post affair for people to make mistakes. It doesn't necessarily mean they are being calculating and malicious. Often they are just being human. And humans can be hurtful and stupid, without meaning to be. If you really want to save your marriage you must tell him know about these emails, talk about them at relate and ask him whether he can stop communication with her. If he can't, you have your answer.

Hang in there. x

I think that's very wise, thinking about different outcomes and how you might react.