Talk About Marriage - View Single Post - Question for those who survived an affair

aberrant · 11-09-2009, 04:40 AM

OK. 10 days ago my wife left me, then revealed she had been having an affair. I feel this was partially my fault for not meeting all of her needs. She feels very guilty too (although at first she did not). Two of our issues were communication and closeness. She works 12 hour nights and I work 12 hour days so we never see each other. Looking back on it, we should have known this wouldn't work.

Since then we have talked a lot and been to counseling. Neither of us is 100% sure our relationship can work. I want it to, she is ambivalent. The counselor convinced us to both stay in the same house, but sleep in seperate bedrooms. My wife agreed to stop seeing the other man until we have things worked out. She told me she understood how I felt about that and that she understands I am going to have some trust issues for a while. She said the other guy agreed to give her space.

Problem is, she works with him. Tonight was her first night back at work since everything happened. He wasn't there, but they share work schedules so he knew she was. Make a long story short a number I don't recognize sent her 7 text messages. We have an iphone app that lets us monitor our text usage so we don't go over, and after seeing hers jump 7 texts while she was at work, I looked at our online billing and saw they were all "received" from a number I don't know. At least she wasn't sending them.

Here are the two problems I need advice with:

1. How do I ask her about the text messages in a fair and mature way? I feel that even if the love is gone in our relationship that I deserve some level of respect. I thought she had asked him to leave her alone, and either she lied to me about that or he is not respecting her request.

2. How do I ask her to switch off of night shift? It is going to be hard to reconcile if we continue to not see each other. It is also going to be very hard if she sees more of the other man than she sees of me (which will probably be true over the course of the next month looking at her schedule). If she was giving it 100% to get our relationship back on track, I don't think this would be a problem but she is still unsure it can work between us.

11-09-2009, 04:40 AM	#1 (permalink)
aberrant Registered User Join Date: Oct 2009 Posts: 11	Question for those who survived an affair OK. 10 days ago my wife left me, then revealed she had been having an affair. I feel this was partially my fault for not meeting all of her needs. She feels very guilty too (although at first she did not). Two of our issues were communication and closeness. She works 12 hour nights and I work 12 hour days so we never see each other. Looking back on it, we should have known this wouldn't work. Since then we have talked a lot and been to counseling. Neither of us is 100% sure our relationship can work. I want it to, she is ambivalent. The counselor convinced us to both stay in the same house, but sleep in seperate bedrooms. My wife agreed to stop seeing the other man until we have things worked out. She told me she understood how I felt about that and that she understands I am going to have some trust issues for a while. She said the other guy agreed to give her space. Problem is, she works with him. Tonight was her first night back at work since everything happened. He wasn't there, but they share work schedules so he knew she was. Make a long story short a number I don't recognize sent her 7 text messages. We have an iphone app that lets us monitor our text usage so we don't go over, and after seeing hers jump 7 texts while she was at work, I looked at our online billing and saw they were all "received" from a number I don't know. At least she wasn't sending them. Here are the two problems I need advice with: 1. How do I ask her about the text messages in a fair and mature way? I feel that even if the love is gone in our relationship that I deserve some level of respect. I thought she had asked him to leave her alone, and either she lied to me about that or he is not respecting her request. 2. How do I ask her to switch off of night shift? It is going to be hard to reconcile if we continue to not see each other. It is also going to be very hard if she sees more of the other man than she sees of me (which will probably be true over the course of the next month looking at her schedule). If she was giving it 100% to get our relationship back on track, I don't think this would be a problem but she is still unsure it can work between us.