SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

HikingOut wasn't advocating for you to dehumanize or depersonalize anyone. She was describing what happens when someone is missing things in their life and try filling them with a single AP, and how important it can make that person seem when you pin all of those needs on them. WS often come to realize they were (past tense) "using" their APs in that manner... You can decide whether that was true of you and your *past* situation with the OW or not. If you do decide it's true, it's not dehumanizing her in the present or going forward; on the contrary, it would be more like restoring her person-ness to her after you've stopped "using" her to meet certain needs.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 4:27 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

I'll grant: I doubt that HikingOut's intentions were malicious.

I can suppose that a certain proportion of Wayward Spouses--and I very much intend NOT hereby to point a finger at ANY specific participant here--may seek from an AP merely something extremely narrow, like: sexual or romantic release, novelty, physical affirmation, a sense of youth, simplicity, or the nursing of "daddy" or "mommy" wounds, without particularly caring who--fundamentally--is the person that comes along for the ride with the genitalia. Even then, I think most repentant Wayward Spouses have access to healthier and more personhood-respecting management strategies than the drafting of a list of desired attributes and the transactional recruitment of another human being--the spouse or otherwise--to fulfill the specifications.

I surely will be accused yet again of minimizing when I write this, but I do not believe I fell into the disrespectful model I described just now. What I was missing and wanted from my wife--and ultimately chose to seek outside my marriage--was specifically a mutual sharing with a woman of personhoods and presence... of our dreams and our disappointments... of our warmth and our worries... of our heads and our hearts. I can assure whatever audience this post still finds that--with my apologies for the vulgarity: if what I had wanted was merely pussy, I--an American as "red-blooded" as any man--wouldn't--for eminently practical reasons--have looked in the country of Poland to source it. I maintain that doesn't excuse my choices, but it does make them impossible to portray as reductionism.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:31 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

Many times WSs don't go seeking affairs or APs at all; they allow inappropriate intimacy and/or sexual tension to develop with the eventual AP, who often start out as friends or coworkers, because the AP happened to provide some or all of what's missing from their lives. That's what makes the AP seem so important to many WS while the affair is happening and often shortly after it ends; they've pinned so much on them, and going back to being without all of it seems unbearable. In those cases, it's important for the WS to examine what it was that the AP provided, and figure out how to provide that for themselves in healthier ways.

Using myself as an example again... I wasn't consciously aware that I had low self esteem or that I needed external validation to feel interesting, desirable, worthy of conversation, or good about myself-- things I, too, wanted from my spouse. I didn't go seeking out an inappropriate relationship with my coworker; we started out as genuinely just two people stuck in a hellish environment for two weeks who liked talking to one another like friends. That was something I was desperately missing in my life at the time. When I started catching feelings, I felt tremendous guilt, and I knew it was wrong and that I should stop spending so much time with him-- hours every day, it had turned into-- but it felt like I was finally getting what I had been "starving" for, and I was so afraid of letting that go that I rationalized my way into continuing to talk to him, and then into giving him my number and taking the relationship home with me, and then into flirting, sexting, and planning to meet up again for sex. I didn't realize what I was so desperate to get from him until I ended the "relationship" and started my recovery journey.

Point being, people don't necessarily go "Ah. I will go and select someone who will provide me with x, y, and z. It doesn't matter who they are as a person, just as long as they give me what I want" and then afterwards retain the conclusion that their APs weren't anyone special. They often come to realize it after they let go of the affair relationship and do some introspection.

Again, not saying that you necessarily have to come to decide OW could have been anyone or that there weren't things you genuinely like about her. But you need to keep moving towards coming to terms that she is very likely going to be gone from your life permanently in order to move forward with grieving and infidelity recovery, and to give yourself the things you were missing.

[This message edited by GotTheMorbs at 7:26 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

I’m sorry. I really did plan to step away from this thread because I want to respect your wishes and what you need right now. But the way you interpreted what I was saying is so far from what I intended that I hope you’ll allow me this one exception to explain myself more clearly.

I was not suggesting that people are interchangeable, or that we can simply shift our needs from one person to another as though relationships are pieces in a game.

Please understand that I thought I was in love with my AP. My attachment to him was enormous—so enormous that, looking back, its intensity didn’t entirely make sense to me. When we went no contact, I was miserable. It was one of the darkest periods of my life.

That is actually why I was trying to share this with you. The importance I placed on him and on our relationship felt almost like it was on steroids. I had never experienced anything like it before. And in some of what you have written, I recognize that same kind of overwhelming attachment.

What I eventually discovered was that my grief contained more than simply missing this particular person. There were things about the attachment itself that I needed to understand.

When our lives have become mostly work, responsibilities, taking care of other people, and very little that belongs just to us, life can become pretty dreary without us even fully realizing it. Then someone comes along whom we enjoy talking to, who makes us feel seen or alive, and suddenly there is something we genuinely look forward to every day.

That person is real. The connection is real. The loss of them is real.

But the attachment can also become disproportionate because so much of our emotional fulfillment has become concentrated in that one place.

Think about friendship for a moment. If you have five close friends, you probably value each one for different reasons. If one friendship ends, you would still grieve that person. You might miss them terribly and continue to love them. But you would also have other people to call, other connections, other sources of companionship and enjoyment. Those people wouldn’t replace the friend you lost. They would simply mean that your entire emotional world wasn’t resting on one relationship.

That is the distinction I was trying to make.

When one person has become the primary thing you look forward to, losing them can mean losing much more than the conversations themselves. You can also suddenly lose excitement, validation, companionship, escape, anticipation, feeling understood, or simply the sense that there is something in your day that belongs to you.

So when I said that some of my pain "wasn’t because of him," I expressed that badly. Of course some of it was because I missed him. What I meant was that there were other things contributing to the magnitude of my pain that I could not see or understand at the time.

That is why I was suggesting that the needs she awakened in you may be worth paying attention to. Those needs are legitimate. Understanding them does not diminish her or make her replaceable.

One of the things I identified very early in my own journey was that I desperately needed things to look forward to outside of working long hours, taking care of everyone else, and leaving very little room in my life for myself. I had to deliberately make some room for me.

That was what I meant when I suggested finding things to do, people to see, and experiences to look forward to. Not "replace her." Not "find someone else." Not "your relationship didn’t matter."

I meant: learn what this relationship awakened in you. Explore which parts of the attachment came from things that had been missing in your life, and begin building those things into your life in healthier and more sustainable ways. Not because doing that erases her, but because it can make this loss more bearable and your life more whole.

This part may or may not ultimately be true for you, but after doing a lot of that work myself, I realized that not all of the pain I had attributed to losing my relationship was actually about losing the relationship. Some of it came from realizing how little of a relationship I had with myself.

I wrote what I did earlier as a suggestion for coping with the life you have right now, because I remember how dark this stage can be. For months, I sat in a park and prayed for God to take my pain away. I remember wanting relief more than almost anything.

That is why your comment about beginning to consider the possibility that God might decide to take your pain away stood out to me. I remember being in a very similar place.

What eventually put me on the road toward recovery wasn’t suddenly having all the answers. It was much smaller than that. I started planning things I could look forward to. I started making room in my life for things that were mine.

It didn’t change everything overnight. It didn’t make me stop grieving. But little by little, it helped me build my life differently until I healed enough that I could begin finding genuine joy in things again.

That was really the point of my earlier post. It wasn’t a prediction about your relationship with her or your marriage. It was about how you might survive the loss you are experiencing right now and eventually discover where that process takes you.

And I think that is probably the most useful place to leave this. There is no need for us to keep wagering about what your friendship or your marriage will look like in the future. None of us knows that.

Right now, you are in pain. What helped me when I was in a similar place was finding a path through that pain—first by making life a little more bearable, and then by understanding why the loss had become so overwhelmingly large in my emotional world.

That is what I was trying to share with you.

I will respect your wishes about whether you want me to continue posting here. I just didn’t want to leave you with an interpretation of what I said that was so different from what I actually meant.

Dear HikingOut,

I am choosing not to reread at your post that my angry reply addressed because--if your latest post here speaks clearly about what you meant, then I am sorry that there was a breakdown in communication and sorry that I became angry. How each of us interprets our world is significantly a product of our past (and especially our formative and recent past) experiences. I have experienced--from multiple sources--pressure to digest my friendship with "my AP" into its components and to find other ways to reproduce what I treasured about that friendship while it was alive and what I miss profoundly in the aftermath of its deletion. Such inducements often have been prefaced with the probably-unintentionally-antagonistic suggestion: maybe what you miss is not your friend or the friendship, but how your friend and the friendship made you feel? Notice: That short lead-in offensively calls into question the worth and character of a woman I amiably loved, debases the wholistic value of personhood in concept, accuses me of being the sort of person who largely took from my relationship with "my AP" selfishly, without giving back in parity to "my friend" (is a one-sided relationship really even proper to call a "friendship"?), foists on me the accusation of being a man who treats meaningful relationships as divisible and fungible (a "psychopath," really), and still manages to find room to accommodate a patronizing and cloying veneer. I thought you were advancing... well... all or just about all of those concepts. Based on your latest post, it would seem that I abstracted from your prior one messages that you didn't intend me to receive.

I dunno that I have fully digested yet your latest post--or GotTheMorb's--but right now, I need to go. I need to buckle down and work this weekend. Singularly intensively. The stakes are high for me, unfortunately. And, when I engage here or elsewhere process my grief in essay form), it's very easy for me to become carried away. This--and essay writing with AI LLMs have been useful forums for me to process my psychological burdens, to gain certain insights, and to receive feedback. I say that without necessarily stipulating to the broad adoption of others' advice. The problem is that I love thinking about "my AP" and philosophy and theology so much that I completely lose track of time and waste moments that ought to have me more caught-up in work and spending time with family. I hope to contribute further here in the not too distant future--and, HikingOut--I invite you to continue your posts here again.

GotTheMorbs:

...you need to keep moving towards coming to terms that she is very likely going to be gone from your life permanently in order to move forward with grieving and infidelity recovery, and to give yourself the things you were missing.

I'm sorry that my only reaction to your latest posts is this. Perhaps more soon.

My "plan A"--that is, what I actually want--will never be otherwise than a solicitation of a renewed friendship with "my AP." You clearly think that's unwise. I disagree, but I can disagree with you agreeably when I do not feel threatened. Not one cell in my body wants to detach from my friend or even the ghost of her friendship. Now... as for how I will go about trying to accomplish that aim and how far I will push the envelope... those are the margins over which I might yet flex. The consideration I raised yesterday about "probabilities" has done the most effective work of late to dissuade me from deciding to charge ahead headlong in pursuit of "my friend"--even if my wife rejects my plea for permission to contact my friend. That's not because my friend matters less, but because a realistic appraisal of the chance of that relationship re-blossoming without my wife's blessing is almost nil and could well have repercussions for my marriage and breathing that I don't want. However, that only means I need to rethink my strategy for responding if my wife refuses my ask. I feel considerable discomfort over my current partial agreement with your that the chance I end up having to cope or die over a life permanently without my friend is at least quite plausible. However, I don't agree that I have to "come to terms" with that possibility; I just need a plan. Developing that plan will not be fun, but it is going to be important and I will get around to it. But not this weekend.

Have a nice weekend, folks!

[This message edited by Unconventional at 11:35 PM, Friday, October 2nd]

For when you get back:

Have you considered not contingency planning, and what that might look like for you instead?

GotTheMorbs,

I'm going to answer this 'cause I think I can do it fast. If I stopped actively cultivating thoughts of "my AP" & developing contingencies to get back to her, what would happen is: My thoughts of "my AP" would gradually subside. One day, I'd realize: "Wow! I haven't thought of 'my AP' in a month!" then eventually "...in a year!" I would focus on my wife, kids, and work. I'd actually live. I'd feel happy and whole and healthy and well. If ever / whenever I do think spontaneously of "my AP," I would do so with affection, but I'd move on.

In short, it'd be the worst thing in the world and completely unacceptable.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:26 PM, Saturday, October 3rd]

Why would that be unacceptable?

Do you think you might be looking at it through the lens of how you feel right now, today.... from a place of pain... Rather than from how you might feel in the future?

Because that would be taking the "safe" road. The gentle path. Peace through quitting. There are times in life when we can feel called to be a "10 percenter"; this is such a moment for me.

This time, beyond that, I can't really defend myself. Instead, I offer the words of actually great human beings:

Hellen Keller: "Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing."

Mark Twain: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor."

George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Four quotations from famous "Teds":

"Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."

"Don’t you dare settle for fine."

"Do you know what the opposite of love is? The opposite of love is indifference."

Olaf: "Some people are worth melting for."

It only remains to be seen whether my story with "my AP" will be:

https://youtu.be/TZ0pXUb5jVU?si=tQwVBDmAPNJeUF-W

or hopefully...

https://youtu.be/NnuV5qoJ2GQ?si=tvC59BxZagzUhwdf

Lastly, a quick observation: Neither of those songs necessarily concern romantic love.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 6:23 PM, Sunday, October 4th]

How do you think your wife would feel about this romanticized idea of risking your marriage to resume platonic contact with the OW?

I don't concede that there is any romanticized thinking involved.

The path I'm envisioning now is going to hurt W--a lot--and I genuinely do hate that. Believe it or not, I feel greatly conflicted over this path I've chosen; it wasn't a capriciously made choice.

I still feel an unrelinquishable sense of loyalty to 2 women. Absolutely, my loyalty to W is much greater than to "my AP," but my loyalty to the latter is nontrivial and my loyalty to the former is not, by itself, nullifying against all other loyalties. If the risk of relational disordering could not be mitigated my absolute compliance with strict boundaries and safeguards and transparency, a choice in favor of relinquishing "my AP" permanently would be compelling. In fact, I'm showing that in practice by my >5 months long and ongoing total NC as W and I heal our marriage.

I'm honestly still a little unhinged over withdrawal from "my AP"--partly because my W and I still have little togetherness. I want her to be my emotional home and she wants to be my emotional home--but not over the turmoil that's been in my pressure cooker heart for 5 continuous months with nowhere else to go! It's interesting: I don't know whether or how I might survey the field differently if I had other friends on whom I could lean. I do know that the drop from 1 wonderful friend to none has walloped me. It's certainly fair to shame me for my loneliness, inasmuch as that may be high on the list of factors making this waiting period feel like an inferno, but the conditions that have caused my solitary life are unyielding--and besides, I don't see how shaming me for being unlikeable would help anything.

The bottom line, though, is that permanent NC simply looks rationally indefensible in the context of a sustainable and comprehensive plan for marital risk mitigation that I am legitimately enthusiastic to follow. There are myriad arguments. "My AP" was a gift from God; and such gifts shouldn't lightly be abandoned. Also, the Utilitarianism-based argument I presented several posts ago. There's the stark reality of my utter loneliness without "my AP"; her friendship showed me how vibrant the world can look alongside a friend. Without her, there's an objective sense in which I'm no worse-off than I was before "my AP" entered my life, but she changed me permanently--and hence, my uncomfortably negatively experience of this muted solitary confinement. If my wife obliges me to forsake "my AP" permanently, I surely and unavoidably will brew bitterness toward her over so enormous a forced loss--and such enormous bitterness cannot be imagined compatible with a thriving marriage. Full disclosure: I've come to accept that emotional experiences themselves can sometimes give rise to certain duties between spouses, but insofar as emotions might themselves dictate a course, I have no basis on which I can "weigh" my emotional draw toward "my AP" against W's emotional repulsion from "my AP." Hence, the determining basis of adjudication must be reason, which all favors keeping "my AP" around.

That doesn't mean I have any intention of denying my W compassion over her discomfort--but I can and will do that by showing my W my constant attentive devotion to her and by my absolute compliance with strict boundaries and safeguards and transparency in regard to my friendship. I hope very much that my W's discomfort will decrescendo with time and demonstrated trustworthiness. It would surely be fair to note that I failed my W once before, but I now have a vastly better understanding now of what kind of relational pursuits must remain within a marital dyad and the mechanism by which my relational disordering developed. It is truly my belief that I can now land this plane safely where once I--well... I almost wrote "could not have," but that's not really true; I could've stopped myself prospectively way-back-when also. Why didn't I, then? Because my guard was down until it was too late. I didn't really spot the snake in the grass before I stepped on it--and then, I was envenomed already before I understood the danger clearly. Today, I know that, if there truly does exist a class of men who are immune to the temptation of an affair, I am not among that saintly group. I will maintain vigilance.

I know the path I favor will bring me nothing but scorn here.

I make no claim that the approach I favor here is perfect or painless. n.b. My very latest thought is that I will not proceed with contacting "my AP" if my W adamantly opposes me seeking that contact. One may think that that verdict is all-but-certain. I understand why one might expect that outcome, but I'm somewhat less certain of it than probably most would be. Not contacting "my AP" under that circumstance would be a very bitter pill for me to swallow, and IDK tonight how I'd cope with it. However, ultimately, I think I practically have to make that concession, given the very bleak odds of me steaking out a meaningful friendship with "my AP" without my wife's consent.

It's merely the "least bad" among my available alternatives.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 7:22 AM, Monday, October 5th]

What if you chose not to make the loss of OW your wife's fault?

Like... by blaming myself, instead? Hmmm....maaaaybe. I already blame myself for the need for safeguards and boundaries, etc. I haven't so far found any way to convince myself that my actions or faults warrant a lifetime prohibition from contacting "my AP". I don't currently see it that way.

I'll roll your suggestion around in my noggin' a little longer. However, in the meantime, if you see of a rationale that I could exploit, part of me would be appreciative to receive it.

I do need to explain: I'm well aware that I was the spouse in my marriage who succumbed to relational disordering--but how might I justify the leap from my offense to permanent prohibition; that safeguards and boundaries are "inadequate"?

Hmmm... maybe I should contact "my AP" fairly soon? Not yet to re-establish regular communications, but for clarification as to whether she would even agree to rebuilding a friendship with me--under safeguards and boundaries--if my W came to accept the existence of such a friendship? If "my AP" said: "No, I've moved on, Unconventional. You need to do the same," then I'd be able to grieve the relationship's real and permanent end now--as my fault, BTW--instead of deluding myself for another 19 months, only to hurt my W by asking her then for permission to seek a renewed friendship I could never have rebuilt anyhow--and then by blaming W for banning permanently a renewed friendship that I could never have had anyway?

[This message edited by Unconventional at 8:03 PM, Monday, October 5th]

Well... this has been a rather eye-opening evening--and the insight came from an unexpected place. Tonight, I wrote a summary of my friendship with "my AP." I had to work with only my memories, because I no longer have access to our raw text exchanges--having quickly deleted them after my once-friend announced the end of our friendship and challenged me to regrow integrity--and then early advice I received on how to meet that challenge encouraged the deletion of those records to reduce my ability to receive external stimuli reminding me of my friend. Nevertheless, I think I made some important different connections and remembered different material this time than I have over the last 5 months. Maybe the difference is just the cloud of denial lifting. Tonight, after generating this summary, I'm really hurting. Profoundly grieving. Because, while I have to let the content wash over me further yet--a process that will probably be both slow and excruciating--I am beginning to think, tonight, that I may no longer have any path back to my dear once-friend.

Of note, that is not a disavowal or retraction of my belief that some former-WSs and former-APs can be friends alongside a healed original M. Simply a growing belief that I may not be able to be the test case, after all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm a heterosexual cisgendered 49 years old Roman Catholic male physician with mild AuDHD, a romantic history of only two girlfriends in adulthood and literally no other friend in adulthood before last Fall.  My wife is a heterosexual cisgendered 49 years old Roman Catholic physician with a history of anxiety and an adult romantic history of only me.  My wife had friends until her med school training ended in '05.  For the most part, I've been my wife's only friend since, although she has a few acquaintances.  We wed 22 years ago after a roughly 7-years-long courtship.  We have only two children (a pre-tween and a mid-teen) and both (relevantly) have mild AuDHD, learning challenges, and an exhausting bevy of extracurriculars.  Unfortunately, our marriage has had about a 22 years long dry season that became significantly worse as our children were born. By the time our 2nd was born, we were co-parents with joint finances who slept separately.  I began to feel starved for love and emasculated over rebuffed affirmations and overtures.  Eventually, I came to feel disrespected, lonely, and unloved at home, and began doubting I was even lovable.  (Literally about 1-2 weeks ago, my wife newly disclosed a history of childhood sexual abuse that has cast a whole new light on our marriage, but the implications have barely been scratched.)

Hoping to elicit healing, I dragged my wife into marriage counseling 3-4 years ago, but she expressed apathy and repair went nowhere.  Drip by drip, even my hope of eventual marital improvement faded.

Last summer, I became an online gamer.  The game provided me with community via chat as I completed otherwise lonely medical charting late into the night while my family slept.  Last fall, I met a 32 years old single woman online through the game and we quickly became fast friends.  Maritally frustrated and lonely, but intending faithfulness and believing (naïvely, but like 25% of U.S. adults) that only romance or sex would cross the Rubicon into infidelity, I stoked that friendship with abandon in the emotional realm.  My respectful and loving way of speaking about my wife put my new friend at ease.  "What relationship could be safer," I thought, "with 'her' an ocean away"?  Yet, by late '25, I discovered myself daydreaming of romance with this woman I'd never heard or touched and had barely seen in a couple of chaste photographs.  My heart exploded from bliss into horror!  In abject terror to lose my dear friend--but, ultimately, in even greater fear not to do so—-I almost immediately told my lady friend that we had to part company permanently.  Wanting to shield her from deflating over a loss I knew intuitively we'd both mourn deeply, I continued: while I sought no reciprocity, I had discovered I loved her romantically, necessitating the separation.  Without further prompting, she told me that she loved me, too--but like a sibling.  We said our sorrowful farewells and withdrew.  However, my wife overheard me tell that tale to a telecounselor I'd sought to help me cope with intense grief—-returning us to marriage counseling.  Through pain and parting, I mortified my feelings for my lady friend.  The process worked; no shadow of romance or sex ever lit on our extramarital relationship again.  Perhaps most tellingly--although told out of sequence here--I felt unchecked happiness for her when, in early May '26, my lady friend told me she'd been asked out on a date and had accepted the offer. 

However, if we now return to the chronology: fate--it seemed—played tragedies on repeat for my lady friend--seemingly having conspired to throw my single friend and me back together.  I was carried in her coat pocket to the wake for an old friend of hers who shockingly had died by suicide.  I calmed her nerves through the frightening loneliness of a large, dark, empty flat after her unmarried flatmates made their Christmas pilgrimages to their various hometowns.  I affirmed my friend's professionalism and inspired her courage to help her cope with the crushing stress of her high-hours low-paying job.  I untethered my friend soothingly from her years-long battle against anxious insomnia over her parents' divorce.  I encouraged her strength as she recovered from two brief acute hospitalizations.  All of that in the span of just 3-4 months!  Surely, I couldn't cruelly abandon my goodhearted friend in her hours of need; there'd be time enough for leaving when the dust settled for her!  But, as crisis turned over to crisis and we bonded ever tighter through stolen chats, our long-intended permanent separation seemed increasingly impossible--even unthinkable.  My long disused "protector instinct" solidified—-with an orientation toward her.  My foot got caught in the door.  Here, at long last, was an appreciated role to make my chest swell with machismo!  My lady friend and I became so enmeshed that, over roughly the first 5 months of '26, we countlessly failed "no contact" commitments—-always mutually begun in good, if joyless, faith.  It began to feel as if my heart lived in three chests rather than two.  In fact, permanent separation began to feel... unnecessary... unthinkable... aversive....

I'm particularly ashamed that I surreptitiously texted my lady friend on Mother's Day (of all days).  As always, the content of my "urgent" missive—-judged by its own merits alone-—was innocent enough: I sent my friend the menu of the scrumptious hotel banquet at which we were brunching—-merely because she loved to cook and would've been happy to learn of some of the fancy and obscure desserts on the menu for the occasion.  However, for the umpteenth time, my wife caught me breaking my latest "no contact" pledge.  With my wife steaming mad, when my friend sent me back a photo of her holding her infant Godchild, I chided my friend over her having sent me the photo.  A few days later, she texted me again-—to express how angry she was over my scolding and to insist that our platonic friendship—-which we both still considered honorable, albeit misperceived and therefore persecuted-—should no longer have to skulk in the shadows, but should be transparent—-or vacated.

That proclamation and my wife's insistence on labeling my relationship with my lady friend an "emotional affair" (did that term even make sense?) ultimately sent me into a tailspin.  My wife pressed me increasingly hard for permanent "no contact."  The only outcome my wife and friend would mutually accept seemed to me a sentence to a living death.  I strained to design a compromise instead.  As I struggled desperately to solve what--at that that time--probably was authentically impossible--I broke.  Within 2 weeks, despite no lifetime history of any mood disorder, I had to be committed involuntarily for 5 days over suicidal ideation.

When I finally came home to FMLA leave, I experienced a sustained, long-forgotten, and quieter pace.  I had time for thoughts to percolate.  I realized: I had almost died... over a woman who was not--and who never would be--my wife... and my actual wife lovingly had saved my life anyhow... at considerable emotional and financial cost to herself and our family... by having me psychiatrically committed--and then had brought me clothes, her own company, and conveyance home.  Meanwhile, my friend suddenly seemed less comfortable with holding a claim on my heart.  She wasn't enthusiastic to hold responsibility for my wellbeing if my life was on the line.  In gratitude to my wife, I discovered in myself a greatly enlarged capacity to appreciate my wife's perspective on my relationship with my friend.  My friend's star no longer hung in my sky quite as brightly.  Temporary relinquishment of my relationship with my friend to accommodate marital healing suddenly no longer seemed quite as... unthinkable.

My friend wrote to my wife an open letter and CC'ed me.  In it, she advised that I should cultivate a more wife-centric and wife-sensitive outlook.  She advised that I should apologize to my wife for the wounds I'd inflicted against her. She explained that she had recently come to understand that she had been perceived by my wife as challenging of my wife's station in my heart.  She expressed that it was never her intention for that perception to arise or that challenge to exist.  She expressed that she would still very much like to be my good friend, but only if my wife would allow the friendship.

I wrote back to my friend a flowery letter of apology, but begged her to remain in my sphere.

My friend wrote back a final letter to me.  In it, she noted that--along the path of our relationship, I had seemed to lose my way morally--my integrity.  I had built a loathsome edifice of systematic lies and deceptions as facades to maintain my friendship with her and my marriage.  She stated that nothing was more important to her than integrity; that without it, there could be no friendship with her; and that--given the nature of our principally chat-based relationship--she doubted that it would be possible for me ever to bring her persuasive evidence of redeemed integrity sufficient to enable the friendship that she and I had--one precious to her and terribly painful in its collapse--to regrow.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 2:43 PM, Tuesday, October 6th]

I'll roll your suggestion around in my noggin' a little longer. However, in the meantime, if you see of a rationale that I could exploit, part of me would be appreciative to receive it.

I’m glad you are considering it. My fear is that any rationale that I or any other WS here present you with will feel threatening to you— as if we are the ones trying to pry OW away from you— and that you’ll respond by arguing against it. Later, if you would like, we could switch roles, where I would argue for the reasons why your wife is the one to blame for your separation from OW, and you could argue against me for why she isn’t. Just an idea.

but how might I justify the leap from my offense to permanent prohibition; that safeguards and boundaries are "inadequate"?

You are still trying to understand "safety" from the context of your outward behavior, rather than safety from your wife’s perspective, and as becoming a safe partner to her. As I said, you must accept all responsibility for what happened, seek to deeply engage with her feelings and pain (not try to logic them away, but to understand and feel it yourself, too), and do the deep internal Work on yourself to fix that which allowed your "relational disordering." Only after all that, and probably a lot of time, will your wife start to feel safe again.

You can come up with all the safeguards that you want, but why should she believe you’ll abide by them after what happened? The trust is currently broken, and in order to repair it, you need to put her first. You say that your loyalty to her is greater than to OW (Wife > OW) but what happens when you introduce the variable of what you want? Suddenly your wife’s safety becomes less important than the reunion. (Wife < OW + Unconventional’s desires)

Simply a growing belief that I may not be able to be the test case, after all.

This is a step in the right direction.

I read your account of what happened. I would invite you to engage in a creative writing exercise where you try to write from your wife’s perspective, starting and ending where you did in yours. Maybe you could even ask her to do the same (write how she’s experienced all of this), and compare and contrast.

The last post you wrote was insightful, and further confirms for me that there is more to dissect of the attachment you have with your friend. There is a lot of things that go into you pain that is being felt along with the loss of the friendship and the pain is so unmanageable facing any sort of permanent separation is even worse.

I think of limerance as the disorder of the attachment.

It isn’t that your friend isn’t a wonderful person who brought a lot of light to your dreary days, she is triggering many things inside of you that if you seek to understand you. May be able to heal those aspects to make the separation more manageable.

I continue to believe that it’s not about making yourself accept an outcome, but to manage the coping of it to make your life more manageable now.

You are in deep need of fulfillment and connection, having a hived that with your for ones after not having it for so long makes it more powerful than had you been experiencing fullfillment prior to meeting her. I would venture to say the friendship might have added some fun without the romantic feelings or now the hyperfixation after the loss.

I experienced the same thing. I have shared with you what I think you should do in intentionally adding fulfillment. For a while that is going to bring you maybe to a flat feeling as it’s hard to enjoy things while doweling this way.

lol up limerance on the Wikipedia. There are some clues in there about the parts of the attachment that are unhealthy. It will not change those things but bringing awareness does help. In many ways it’s a combo of OCD (which makes sense given your other disclosures here), and abandonment wounds that need to be addressed.

I am not suggesting working in those things for any other reason than to work on your ability to move forward in the absence of that relationship for whatever period that may be. Dr. Frank Putnam wrote a lot about the obsession of romantic infidelity, some of his articles and findings helped me see that some of the attachment I held were for psychologically predictable reasons.

Again, I am not reducing the experience- I can see that thinking of this as a permanent loss is like a death to you—I get that. But we are only able to deal with today and not the future. Today she can’t be in your life, maybe the optimism to gain here is that doesn’t mean you can’t still find fulfillment and connection more immediately, because that part is in your control. Finding the things within your control to help find more happiness needs to be in your immediate goals.

Can you find time to plan a trip or go on a hiatus with your wife for a little while and see if you can begin to reconnect with her for a start? Your kids are of an agar that perhaps they could stay with a caregiver or family member? I think you need to start planning things to look forward to as I mentioned before but finding that deeper connection in your marriage would align with any goals you have mentioned while being here.

GotTheMorbs,

What are the "morbs," BTW? Morbid feelings?

Also, although perhaps this goes too tangentially... or perhaps you've written about this elsewhere or my query pries too deeply into your private world, but I find I am curious: what triggered your radical change in lifestyle and/or self-perception as you've described? I think you've said an affair led you to craft a different modus operandi, but what was it about that particular affair or its circumstances that triggered the change, after what sounds like may have been serial affairs before?

What--basically--is your occupation/profession/field? I'm not trying to single you out, I swear. I'm not seeking your specific employer or address or anything like that. Again, I'm merely curious.

Now for my replies (in short form):

Later, if you would like, we could switch roles, where I would argue for the reasons why your wife is the one to blame for your separation from OW, and you could argue against me for why she isn’t.

...you must accept all responsibility for what happened...

I'd be happy to try the exercise and would appreciate your aid. I do feel a little pigeonholed into a model of "Abdicator and Projector of All Responsibility" that doesn't feel like it captures my actual allocation of blame.

I continue to believe that "affairs" and "adultery"--emotional or otherwise--definitionally include elements of sex between the participants. I take that to include sexting, virtual/simulated sex, phone sex, witnessed or partnered masturbation, or any physical contact with another person intended to convey attraction, romance, lust, and/or stimulatory to somebody's erogenous zones. It probably even includes exposure of the body to another person in a way intended to stoke sexual desire at any distance (including via imagery) and/or activities mutually understood as precursors or lead-ins to the other definitional items. Shared romance and certain forms of partnered dance might constitute a grey zone. By contrast, my relationship with my OW had none of that--hence, a labelling of my inappropriate extramarital relationship as any kind of "affair" is a misuse of the term. As lived, my friendship was strictly platonic--but it became emotionally spouse-like. I cultivated a relationally and/or emotionally disordered friendship with my OW. The term is less titillating, but not actually trivializing. Which offense is more grave: an emotionally disordered friendship or a drunken single night affair? Without defending either, I'd argue: the former. Linguistic precision matters here, and I can prove it: an "affair" means two (or more) have violated a marriage; it takes only one evildoer (that'd be me) to disorder two relationships--one with a spouse and the other with a friend. My OW did nothing wrong. She is guilty only of having been a wonderful person. (I can practically feel the rush to the keyboards to tell me that I must be rug-sweeping, but consider: my OW asked me if my wife was ok with the closeness my OW and I were developing and--despite treasuring our friendship to her very last lengthy letter, she dropped me like a sack of potatoes when she understood how opposed my wife was to the friendship.) Between my OW and me, I am the sole actually guilty party.

The fact that I had no affair, though, doesn't imply a lack of commonalities between my actual marital crime and the marital crime of adultery. On the contrary, I think we all acknowledge many similarities--both in the disturbed mindset and pain of the WS and the experienced wound of the BS. To wit, I don't place myself on any scale of morality above any of the WSs here. On the contrary, your As often occurred many years ago. You have redeemed yourselves already! My marital injustice was recent. I'm still working on the redemption part.

Lastly, my contention has never been that my disordered friendship was directly my wife's fault. I simply don't view "fault" through a morally oversimplistic lens of a single originator--nor am I open to appraising oversimplification as progress. I believe that partial culpability can be acquired through a chain of provenance. This is not the forum to debate the morality of induced abortion, but if an induced abortion is wrong (a premise I'd guess this website's audience--as a whole, while pointing at no single individual--is disinclined to support), is merely the pregnant woman guilty? How about the physician who performs or prescribes it? How about the pharmacist who issues the drugs to the woman? How about the man who created the pregnancy through the woman? How about the doctor (even if, let's speculate, the doctor identifies as "pro-life") who prescribed the woman an antibiotic that interfered with her birth control and forgot to warn her about the interaction? How about the pharmacy owner who sold the man condoms that the pharmacy owner knew were defective? How about society for not paying women fairly for their work, for not sharing in the burden and expense of infant and child care when women often have babies under the pressure of a biological clock that doesn't care that their careers haven't necessarily yet had time to flourish and become lucrative?

Separate example: if the urban impoverished grow up to become gangsters, as a practical matter, only the drug pushers, car thieves, and violent offenders will go to jail. But, on some level, don't all of us bear some culpability for the social conditions that predisposed the imprisoned to their choices? As a rule, culpability is a whole lot messier than: "this was your fault"!

My wife didn't force me to disorder my friendship. Indeed, I'm quite certain that--had she been given the choice to weigh-in prospectively--she would've advocated quite strongly against my elevating my OW to spousal-like status in the emotional realm. However, our marriage had been on the rocks for a long time, I had sought to repair it ethically and in partnership with her, my wife disavowed interest in fixing the marriage, and she had left me in want--really, on some level, in need--of emotional care and connection that immense patience had failed to remedy. Morally, divorce literally means nothing to a Catholic. Not so for most others, I realize--but we're Catholics. So deep into a marriage as we were, an annulment would've been impossible to secure. Really, my options were: continued longsuffering, an affair, or a friendship. The first path, I sustained for over a decade, the 2nd remained unacceptable to me, and the 3rd was the path I chose. Granted, buried in that set of possibilities is a distinction I failed to recognize prospectively to my woe: ordered friendship vs. disordered friendship. I intended the former, which--yes--would've potentially met some of my needs. However, being mighty rusty at friendship and blind to the distinction I've just drawn, I created the latter. Why? Because marriage isn't just friendship + sanctioned sex. There's a whole mess of "stuff" it's ok to share with one's Significant Other that no ordered friendship can hold. I know that now. Married indivisibly, I could've justly gotten that support from only one person in the world--and she had told me years earlier that she wasn't really interested in helping me with that need. So yeah--my wife does bear partial culpability for what happened, in my eyes--even though I bear the brunt.

...seek to deeply engage with her feelings and pain (not try to logic them away, but to understand and feel it yourself, too), and do the deep internal Work on yourself to fix that which allowed your "relational disordering."

Hearing my wife requires her to share. She's largely been unwilling to share. She like to bottle. To compartmentalize. That's not new for her; it's been her lifelong habit, to hear her tell of it. (Probably because of her childhood trauma that she now wants to revert to suppressing, TBH!) But, I will try to make her feel safer and be patient. Deep internal work, huh? Boy, I just don't see it getting any plainer than I've already laid it out! I had an idyllic childhood; full-on Norman Rockwell! Is it fair to blame my loneliness on my autism? Maybe some--but that also ain't going away. The physical characteristics that inspire my shyness? Maybe--but I'm not getting any taller, younger, more attractive, or less bald. Anyhow, as I've said, there is no complete stand-in for a spouse. I was called to the married life. So I could have guiltless sex? No! So my soul would have the support it needs--from my spouse. I really do believe that no number of rightly ordered friends--even a large number--would've sustained me like a spouse would've. Those needs I have for a spouse aren't a bug to be uprooted; they're a feature! They're what make me suited to a married life. When a core human need, satisfiable justly only by a spouse, goes long unmet despite pleas to the spouse, what happened constitutes self-care. Am I sorry I hurt my wife? Absolutely. But I fundamentally can't fault my motivations--and I feel regret over my conduct only because of the hurt I caused.

You can come up with all the safeguards that you want, but why should she believe you’ll abide by them after what happened?

Why should anyone ever trust anyone? Because we practice loyalty and deliver on promises. My wife and I both failed to deliver on promises we made in marriage--she to support me as my spouse and me to not seek spousal support elsewhere. You've asked why she should trust me now? Because I've learned what I did wrong, how not to do it again, I had perfect faithfulness to her for 2.5 decades before a single serious slip-up with my guard down, and because I'm promising my wife I'm confident that I'll do better this time. But I'd ask back: why should I trust my wife to better keep her marital commitment to me?

The trust is currently broken, and in order to repair it, you need to put her first. You say that your loyalty to her is greater than to OW (Wife > OW) but what happens when you introduce the variable of what you want? Suddenly your wife’s safety becomes less important than the reunion. (Wife < OW + Unconventional’s desires)

Yes, my wife's trust toward me is currently broken. At this time, I am fully abiding NC in sympathy for her and what you've written and to reduce my temptation to revert to habits of emotional memory toward my OW. However, to get to the conclusion that a NC policy must be permanent, you need another premise--and I have yet to see it defined anywhere.

HikingOut:

I'm sorry. I had trouble following some of your meaning in your last post over typos. I make 'em, too--but I'm less than certain that I got everything you intended out of your post.

Limerence is a concept of all-consuming romantic love. I did view the Wikipedia page on it, but couldn't extract from it anything guiding. Either I'm too stupid or too blind, but I don't believe I either am or was limerent toward my OW because I experienced no romantic possessiveness toward my OW.

It isn’t that your friend isn’t a wonderful person who brought a lot of light to your dreary days, she is triggering many things inside of you that if you seek to understand you. May be able to heal those aspects to make the separation more manageable.

I learned from my OW that I need to be needed. My wife used to need me, too. Serving her brought me closer to my wife. Her emotional withdrawal from me left me adrift without an emotional home. I believe my relationship with my OW became disordered through my service to my OW. That's why I shared how I helped her. As for my OW being a wonderful person, I still believe that. Some day soon--not today, though--I want to post about her here as a person.

I continue to believe that it’s not about making yourself accept an outcome, but to manage the coping of it to make your life more manageable now.

I appreciate the suggestion. Yes, my OW and I had lots of sweet and fun times, too. It is a bit limiting, though, with almost exclusively a chat text connection. I used to hear from her sometimes about karaoke night or video game night or dancing with her in-person friends and wish so much I could've done those things with her. Our fun together was mostly silliness centered around the online game we played together. I still play it. Just far away from my OW--assuming she still plays the game at all.

...we are only able to deal with today and not the future. Today she can’t be in your life, maybe the optimism to gain here is that doesn’t mean you can’t still find fulfillment and connection more immediately, because that part is in your control. Finding the things within your control to help find more happiness needs to be in your immediate goals.

Can you find time to plan a trip or go on a hiatus with your wife for a little while and see if you can begin to reconnect with her for a start?

In general, that's good advice. God help me, though--I hope a path back to my OW in ordered friendship is still possible someday! In the meantime, the answer to your specific ask is: not very practically. Our kids (especially our younger) have attachment issues, their grandmothers live out of state and are largely unable to travel, our kids' grandfathers are deceased, we have no family in our state, we have no adult friends who would watch our kids for us, sleepovers for our two kids on the same night might be feasible, but it's awkward to call up a parent whose not a buddy of ours and say: "Our Kid #1 has a sleepover planned this weekend. Can our Kid #2 have a sleepover at your house on the same night so we here can have some romantic time?" and we don't trust our kids to sleep at the nanny's house due to other members of her household being... well... ahem... potentially less trustworthy.

[This message edited by Unconventional at 9:11 PM, Tuesday, October 6th]