Sorry for the long post that follows, but I feel I need to give some context for my questions at the end.
My wife and I have been married for over 27 years. It hasn’t always been the easiest of marriages (on either side), but I believed that we loved each other and we have two wonderful daughters on whom we both dote. On July 26 of this year I came home to find my wife’s email open on the office computer. She had been in a rush to leave the house for a meeting that evening. I normally don’t snoop. I have always respected her privacy and tried to give her space. I knew she spent a lot of time on Facebook, catching up mostly with family and old friends. I also knew that she had kept in touch with a couple of old boyfriends—guys with whom she had shared a lot of history before our relationship started.
I decided to search her account for emails to/from both of these guys. In one case I found a handful of messages. Most were chatty and a wee bit nostalgic, but nothing too threatening. When searching the other guy’s name, however, I found about 150 different conversations, some containing several emails in exchange, dating back to 2007. The most recent message had been about four months earlier and it did not seem overtly inappropriate. Yet, I came across exchanges from February that referenced their disappointment at not having “consummated” their relationship at the “hotel.” That exchange was followed by messages from her to him a couple weeks later saying how she was driving to work and the song “I Need You Now” came on the radio and she thought of him the rest of the way in to work.
I then went back and read as many messages as I could, forwarding some of the most offensive ones to my email as evidence and for later review to see if I had misunderstood. When I got to the end of the list, in 2007, it was clear that the communication predated those messages. That evening I confronted her about what I’d found.
She turned ashen, said she was sorry that I got hurt, but then launched into a monologue about how frustrated she was with our relationship—essentially suggesting it was my fault. We stayed up very late talking that evening and she answered many of my questions, but each answer seemed to create more questions from me. Several hours and Martinis later we were both exhausted and she was drunk, so I helped her into our bed. I couldn’t sleep so I went into the kitchen with her laptop and loaded spyware on her computer. I just had to know the extent of her contact with him and when/how it started. Within a couple of days I had passwords to her email accounts and her Facebook account. What I saw sickened and saddened me.
He was an old love who found her on the Internet in late 2005 after more than a decade of no contact. She apparently was very happy to hear from him and things progressed quickly into a pretty intense EA, but not a PA, as he lived 300+ miles away. There was one meeting, in 2006, but all communication indicated that things never progressed to actual sexual activity. There were also several phone calls and some scattered text messages. From what I could tell, it appeared that the EA pretty much petered out in 2007, though they still maintained contact with communication that occasionally crossed lines for the next 3-1/2 years. Their last communication was in April of this year, so things were more or less cooled down or even over by then. During the most intense periods, my wife would frequently bring up her guilt and concerns that they were being untrue to their spouses. They even took “breaks” from each other, but never for very long. It was like they (especially she) couldn’t control themselves—they needed that contact.
We had some heart- and gut-wrenching days in the aftermath of my discovery, but she and I have agreed to work on our marriage and have made a lot of progress in the past four months. There has been NC since the spring as far as I know, but definitely not since July, unless she has gone completely underground. (Call me naïve, but I don’t have any reason to believe that is the case.) I did drive the five-plus hours to confront the OM back in October and he corroborated both the NC and that things had died down several months earlier. I threatened to expose him to his wife if I discovered any other contact and he seemed to take my threat seriously (smart of him to do so).
My wife has apologized for the hurt she caused and tells me that she wants to rebuild our relationship; that she didn’t marry him for good reason—she married me and knows that I am best for her. She suggested marriage counseling, which we will start after the holidays. I resisted marriage counseling initially because I needed to get my head around my own feelings and my desire to stay married.
I believe she is sincere and that she loves me. Still, the images of some of her words to him haunt me and there are many days that I am not sure what to feel. I’ve loved her in all senses of the word during the entirety of our marriage. She still makes my heart jump when I hear her voice or she enters a room. What is gnawing at me is whether she, in turn, loves me only in the comfortable/practical sense; the he’s such a good man and my love for him has matured over time, etc. If that is the case, I’d rather find a way to end things amicably than to live out the next 25 years in a marriage where I’m still “in love” with her, but it is not reciprocal.
She knows I have seen the emails and have copies of most of them. She tells me I shouldn’t read them—implying that I am being unfair to her and that reading them serves only to dredge up the past. Her position is that if she had engaged in a “real” (her word) affair, that I wouldn’t have recordings of their conversations. I maintained that I needed to see the exchanges to understand what this EA really was and put it into the context of our marriage and lives at the time. I needed to see how she referred to our relationship, how she felt about him, and then I could decide if we could recover from the EA. I don’t go back to read them often, but when I do, it is usually to see what was going on in our relationship and our lives and what they were communicating about. Reading them almost always saddens and/or angers me.
She believes that we need to focus on the future. I agree, but I can’t stop thinking of what happened and how blind I was to it all. I acknowledged my contribution to the state our relationship was in and I have been working hard to re-commit to her and our girls. She recognizes the effort I am making, being more attentive at home, being less distracted by work and other things. But I am not sure what she is doing other than not contacting him, to help make things better. We have shared some get-away time together, regular time to talk during the week, and have planned some activities that we will both enjoy. I worry, however, that these activities won’t be enough to sustain us into the future.
There is a lot more to the story, but four months out things are better. I am less anxious, but my confidence is beaten down and I go through frequent periods when I feel like I am going to burst with sadness or with sheer anger—mainly felt toward her. Many times I’ve wanted to tell her I am leaving and I might have done that if it weren’t for our youngest, still in Jr. high. Our break up would literally devastate her. I want to believe that we will make things work, but I have frequent feelings that I need to move on. Not solely because of this EA, but more because of how it fits into the context of our nearly three-decade relationship.
So, I plan to hang on to my copies of the messages. They are both an insurance policy and a reminder of my naivete in trusting that something like this couldn't happen without my knowing it. The question is whether you all think I should follow my wife’s request and quit looking back at them so we can focus on the future? Is re-reading them simply asking for heartache and doubt or is it a healthy part of my recovery?
My wife and I have been married for over 27 years. It hasn’t always been the easiest of marriages (on either side), but I believed that we loved each other and we have two wonderful daughters on whom we both dote. On July 26 of this year I came home to find my wife’s email open on the office computer. She had been in a rush to leave the house for a meeting that evening. I normally don’t snoop. I have always respected her privacy and tried to give her space. I knew she spent a lot of time on Facebook, catching up mostly with family and old friends. I also knew that she had kept in touch with a couple of old boyfriends—guys with whom she had shared a lot of history before our relationship started.
I decided to search her account for emails to/from both of these guys. In one case I found a handful of messages. Most were chatty and a wee bit nostalgic, but nothing too threatening. When searching the other guy’s name, however, I found about 150 different conversations, some containing several emails in exchange, dating back to 2007. The most recent message had been about four months earlier and it did not seem overtly inappropriate. Yet, I came across exchanges from February that referenced their disappointment at not having “consummated” their relationship at the “hotel.” That exchange was followed by messages from her to him a couple weeks later saying how she was driving to work and the song “I Need You Now” came on the radio and she thought of him the rest of the way in to work.
I then went back and read as many messages as I could, forwarding some of the most offensive ones to my email as evidence and for later review to see if I had misunderstood. When I got to the end of the list, in 2007, it was clear that the communication predated those messages. That evening I confronted her about what I’d found.
She turned ashen, said she was sorry that I got hurt, but then launched into a monologue about how frustrated she was with our relationship—essentially suggesting it was my fault. We stayed up very late talking that evening and she answered many of my questions, but each answer seemed to create more questions from me. Several hours and Martinis later we were both exhausted and she was drunk, so I helped her into our bed. I couldn’t sleep so I went into the kitchen with her laptop and loaded spyware on her computer. I just had to know the extent of her contact with him and when/how it started. Within a couple of days I had passwords to her email accounts and her Facebook account. What I saw sickened and saddened me.
He was an old love who found her on the Internet in late 2005 after more than a decade of no contact. She apparently was very happy to hear from him and things progressed quickly into a pretty intense EA, but not a PA, as he lived 300+ miles away. There was one meeting, in 2006, but all communication indicated that things never progressed to actual sexual activity. There were also several phone calls and some scattered text messages. From what I could tell, it appeared that the EA pretty much petered out in 2007, though they still maintained contact with communication that occasionally crossed lines for the next 3-1/2 years. Their last communication was in April of this year, so things were more or less cooled down or even over by then. During the most intense periods, my wife would frequently bring up her guilt and concerns that they were being untrue to their spouses. They even took “breaks” from each other, but never for very long. It was like they (especially she) couldn’t control themselves—they needed that contact.
We had some heart- and gut-wrenching days in the aftermath of my discovery, but she and I have agreed to work on our marriage and have made a lot of progress in the past four months. There has been NC since the spring as far as I know, but definitely not since July, unless she has gone completely underground. (Call me naïve, but I don’t have any reason to believe that is the case.) I did drive the five-plus hours to confront the OM back in October and he corroborated both the NC and that things had died down several months earlier. I threatened to expose him to his wife if I discovered any other contact and he seemed to take my threat seriously (smart of him to do so).
My wife has apologized for the hurt she caused and tells me that she wants to rebuild our relationship; that she didn’t marry him for good reason—she married me and knows that I am best for her. She suggested marriage counseling, which we will start after the holidays. I resisted marriage counseling initially because I needed to get my head around my own feelings and my desire to stay married.
I believe she is sincere and that she loves me. Still, the images of some of her words to him haunt me and there are many days that I am not sure what to feel. I’ve loved her in all senses of the word during the entirety of our marriage. She still makes my heart jump when I hear her voice or she enters a room. What is gnawing at me is whether she, in turn, loves me only in the comfortable/practical sense; the he’s such a good man and my love for him has matured over time, etc. If that is the case, I’d rather find a way to end things amicably than to live out the next 25 years in a marriage where I’m still “in love” with her, but it is not reciprocal.
She knows I have seen the emails and have copies of most of them. She tells me I shouldn’t read them—implying that I am being unfair to her and that reading them serves only to dredge up the past. Her position is that if she had engaged in a “real” (her word) affair, that I wouldn’t have recordings of their conversations. I maintained that I needed to see the exchanges to understand what this EA really was and put it into the context of our marriage and lives at the time. I needed to see how she referred to our relationship, how she felt about him, and then I could decide if we could recover from the EA. I don’t go back to read them often, but when I do, it is usually to see what was going on in our relationship and our lives and what they were communicating about. Reading them almost always saddens and/or angers me.
She believes that we need to focus on the future. I agree, but I can’t stop thinking of what happened and how blind I was to it all. I acknowledged my contribution to the state our relationship was in and I have been working hard to re-commit to her and our girls. She recognizes the effort I am making, being more attentive at home, being less distracted by work and other things. But I am not sure what she is doing other than not contacting him, to help make things better. We have shared some get-away time together, regular time to talk during the week, and have planned some activities that we will both enjoy. I worry, however, that these activities won’t be enough to sustain us into the future.
There is a lot more to the story, but four months out things are better. I am less anxious, but my confidence is beaten down and I go through frequent periods when I feel like I am going to burst with sadness or with sheer anger—mainly felt toward her. Many times I’ve wanted to tell her I am leaving and I might have done that if it weren’t for our youngest, still in Jr. high. Our break up would literally devastate her. I want to believe that we will make things work, but I have frequent feelings that I need to move on. Not solely because of this EA, but more because of how it fits into the context of our nearly three-decade relationship.
So, I plan to hang on to my copies of the messages. They are both an insurance policy and a reminder of my naivete in trusting that something like this couldn't happen without my knowing it. The question is whether you all think I should follow my wife’s request and quit looking back at them so we can focus on the future? Is re-reading them simply asking for heartache and doubt or is it a healthy part of my recovery?