gnarlmen

Okay. So I’ve been lurking here for a few days and have gathered some insight. I wanted to share my story and where I was currently in hopes to seeing anything else that I don’t see and for encouragement. There have been a few times since DDay that I’ve felt very alone with a wide range of emotions but reading other people’s stories have helped me through.
Anyways, to my story. Throughout my marriage (married 7 years, 2 daughters) I have lied about finances. What bills were and were not paid and I took out a $1000 loan without notifying my wife. I’m sure there are other transgressions to that I can’t remember or are perceived different than I might have intended them to be. In short I haven’t been the ideal husband.
Back in February my wife and good friend started talking via text. My wife who was notorious for leaving her phone lying around suddenly couldn’t be separated from it. That should have been my first clue. Anyways because she was getting tired of my lies we decided to do a trial separation and cohabitate. I decided to go to my parents 2 hours away. Over that weekend I decided to see if my friend, we’ll call him X, was talking to WW via IM and they were. I thought the conversation then was too flirty and immediately called my WW’s dad to talk to her so I didn’t have to go home. She was furious. I then went into scramble mode and agreed to a separation that had me staying with my parents 2 hours away. I wanted to believe her that nothing was going on and that I had really overreacted. So much so that I saved a copy of the chat and gave it to my brother and told him not to give it back to me unless we were headed to court. Over the next two months I tried to work on improving myself for my marriage. I think depression set in during this because I realized I was losing everything and thought it was entirely my fault. During one of our one on one sessions where we talked about us, I agreed to send her out on vacation. The original plan had been for her to use his extra bedroom to save us hotel fees (I know stupid). But throughout this process I thought I had a chance. Sometimes she would be flirty with me etc and I thought I might be making some progress.
While she is out on vacation I decide that I couldn’t get over the facts not adding up. I decided to hack into her laptop and see what I found. I found some provocative poses that I had never seen before. I then was able to find that her iPhone backup all of her text messages. I restored those to my laptop and read through all of them. They were bad, real bad. This was a full blown EA that I had just helped turn into a PA. I let her sister and dad know since they suspected that something wasn’t right but was trying to have faith in her.

I found this a week before she was to return (she was out there for 10 days, I found this on day 5). Instead of confronting her while she out there I sat and stewed on it for the week until she returned. We started into at the airport and continued all the way home until late into the night. We picked up again the next morning. She never admitted to doing anything physical. In fact she rarely admits to anything now that I don’t have to pry out by reading one of the texts (I have them virtually memorized).
We sat down with her sister who confronted her but didn’t get much else revealed. Her sister did get us to commit to having an answer whether or not we would want to work on this within 48 hours. During the next 48 hours there was a range of emotions from her crying to flirting. At the end of the 48 hours I admitted to wanting to R and she decided that she wasn’t sure and was going to sit on the fence (not verbatim what she said). She agreed to go to counseling if I set it up. Over the next few days I watched as any flirting stopped and she became distant. No doubt now that it was because she knew for that moment anyways that she was secure for the time being.

Then I started doing research into this. First I thought about trying some of the alternatives to counseling that says it only takes one to fix the marriage (Mort Fertel’s system as an example). I then found this site and started reading through other people’s stories and felt a little more confident in putting a plan in place.

Last night I told her I didn’t want to try and work this out anymore (8 days after the original confrontation) and that we could do dissolution with the sticking being the kids. I didn’t want anything less than shared parenting and 50/50 time. She called me a few names said I was controlling stormed away. Came back a few minutes and I guess tried to see if this was a bluff by wanting to talk about dissolution more. She picked a few minors fights in there in which I didn’t really get into it and just kept my cool. She stormed out of the house to go call X and I went to bed.

Today I decided that I wanted to expose the A because that would give me the best chance of dealing with her in reality. I know some will say I should just go but I had dreams that I wasn’t ready to give up on yet. So I exposed to mutual friends of ours so they could talk to him or whatever and I exposed to his HR department (mostly because he spent a lot of time calling and texting my wife during work hours). I have a few of our mutual friends that will begin reaching out to her tonight too. My question is there anything that I should have done differently and anything that I can be doing differently now? Secretly, my goal would be to work on a R but as I’ve seen posted here a few times you have to be willing to lose it to save it. And I also realize that the A has to end before I can effectively attack any of the issues that we might try and work out.

Any help would/encouragement would be much appreciated.