Complex

First off, my therapist likes to say there is no Hallmark card or guide for my situation.

Truth is I probably should just separate from my wife, but that is working out to be harder than it should be.

So, here's the deal in as short a story as I can put it.

I'm 42 and my wife is 39. We have been married 12 years, and we do not have children of our own because my wife was diagnosed with severe kidney disease during our 4th year of marriage. We tried to adopt kids and to that end we became foster adopt parents in 2007 for a couple of months. My wife couldn't handle it. She had a mental breakdown and bit one of the kids in an irrational fit of frustration and rage. The kids we were trying to adopt were taken away, she was arrested and we were blacklisted from all adoptive avenues.

Thankfully she was no-billed by a grand jury for the felony injury to a child, but our relationship was broken and I was so shell shocked I shut down for several years and just survived. We stayed married as I helped her with all the legal fall out and her new diagnosis of Bi Polar Type 2 disorder.

To add to the complexity, after the arrest, my wife started new job and made a friend with a female co-worker and we all became friends with her and her family. The co-worker was in a very poor marriage and about a year ago while my wife was on a bad combination of drugs to treat her condition she convinced myself and the friend to participate in a threesome.

My wife has various reasons why she pushed it from she wanted to ignite our failing sex life, she didn't want to work on her sex drive and brought in the friend, she wanted the friend to experience the love/compassion her husband didn't give, and she was just crazy. I fought the idea as bad for several months, but my own depression and lack of sex from my wife eventually wore me down and when we finally had sex (not really in a threesome but me doing each one and the other watching) it was pretty kinky and awesome.

However, it didn't go so well and the threesome didn't happen again.... but the friend and I wound up having a short lived affair that neither of us felt great about and the friend and I cooled the affair while she got the nerve to divorce her husband.

This spring my wife started stalking our old friend and she contacted me to talk about her behavior. Well things weren't truly cooled off between us, because she made an overt sexual pass at me one day. Though we didn't have sex, it didn't feel right to me. Come to find out she had a boyfriend that she found right after she filed for divorce, and though she came on to me, she didn't want to mess up the thing with her new boyfriend.

I was getting really anxious about being around her....I know now it was because I was horribly unhappy at home, I had a deep unresolved resentment for my wife over the loss of the kids, and I felt manipulated for being set up for an affair of her design, that I couldn't have then, and especially not now.

I've been trying to work it out with my wife for a few months now, but she is focusing on the affair I had as her place of hurting to heal from. Though, at times when we talk about it she seems to indicate that the affair could have grown and kept going if myself and her friend had just kept her in the loop and in control of our actions.

I've done a lot of work with my counselor on the layers and layers of relationship hurt and issues, and I've done some weird coping stuff like looking up and chatting up a divorced lover from before I was married. I've cut off the friend I had the actual physical affair with that my wife orchestrated, but that has been hard. Part of me wants to hook up with my old lover just to have an actual affair of my own design.

I'm not really working that hard on the old lover angle because the wife and I are in this euphoria sexual state because of all the tension, which is awesome. However, after several weeks that is starting to crack and the sex is still hot, but tapering off.

I'm coming to realize that the disappointment, hurt and problems in our past that I am finally dealing with may be too large and what should have happened almost 5 years ago is about to happen now.

I have yet to find a book or any advice where the affair was started and orchestrated by the wife. Now she is trying to act like the hurt spouse.

Just looking for some advice because several months of therapy and lots of relaxation and stress relief work still leaves me obsessing about all these problems.