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Terrible advise.NOTHING good will come from you saying something. Keep your mouth shut, and if the sh!t hits the fan, pretend like you didn't know anything. You have plausible deniability.
Didn't I just read your husband did this to you? How can you justify watching this "friend" do it to someone else when you know how it feels? I just don't get it. Sorry, just being a shoulder to cry on would be too much enablement for me.I have found out that a friend is cheating on his spouse. A ONS and now (because the affair partner is far away) a long distance emotional affair. I’ve known him for years. I don’t know his wife that well, but I would classify them as “couple friends” of my husband and I. Except that they are currently far away in another country, so we don’t see them very often. They have young kids. (I know via another friend. Who didn’t want to break the confidence, but doesn’t know what to do, so asked for my advice because of my own recent experience.)
I do know that their marriage has been unhappy, at least from his side, for a while. He is HD and she is LD, he is physically affectionate and she is not. He has previously tried to change things to create more intimacy, but apparently there was no success/willingness or energy on her part to change. I know he did try, repeatedly to express dissatisfaction. And he didn’t feel like he got anywhere. I also suspect that he is crap at having the necessary conversations around sexual and emotional intimacy. That said, they are currently in a country where access to marriage counselling in their home language is nigh on impossible. His loneliness in this country where he doesn’t speak the language (he is a very social animal) has also contributed to his state of mind.
I feel some sympathy for him. (But not for his choices.) He can be very selfish in some respects and is not very good at seeing things from her perspective. But I get that he tried to fix his marriage before doing what he did. (I don’t think that this makes his behaviour OK.)
The problem is that the friend he confided in is worried that his feelings for the OW are growing. And he seems to be feeling more and more entitled to behave the way he is. Apparently he initially felt guilty, but now, not so much. I cannot see how the relationship with the OW could ever work out – he has kids in another hemisphere, for heaven’s sake. I think he is currently in the lala-land of “what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her/me”. If I project forward, I can only see bad endings. Unless it fizzles out by itself. In which case, I’m worried about the precedent that has been set. And surely secrets like this are bad for any marriage?
So what do I do? Should I do anything?
If I were his wife, I’d want to know. But several people that I’ve spoken to since finding out about my husband’s affair have said that they’d prefer not to know if their spouse was being unfaithful. Just that when the affair was over, their spouse came back to them. Then I think, maybe she does know/suspect already? And she’s chosen to let it go because she actually prefers not to be bothered by his demands for intimacy (an unspoken open marriage). If I interfere, might I end up precipitating a situation that wouldn’t otherwise have happened?
And how much of my gut response is being decided by my own painful recent experiences?
Part of me wants to threaten him with disclosure if he doesn’t stop. But I don’t think that this will help. He’s geographically far away, so he’d probably just take the relationship underground. Not that I have any way of following up on things (and he’d stop confiding in our mutual friend who is possibly the only sane voice in his life at the moment.) And if I do discuss anything with him, I want him to be open and listening, not resentful because he knows I’m judging him.
Or should I just shut the hell up, because it's none of my business? And I’m not supposed to know, anyway. Sigh.
It's actually entirely possible that this guy's wife is a great spouse, that their sex life is normal or better, and that she is being completely hoodwinked and has done nothing to worsen the marriage.In this case, she's low drive, he's high drive, he's tried to some extent to fix things, now he's given up on her and getting it elsewhere but staying married probably because it's cheaper to keep her, the marriage is in the skids and they both know it, I'd be more inclined to stay out of it as compared to, say a marriage that the betrayed spouse is being completely hoodwinked and hasn't done anything to worsen the situation (mainly denying their spouse regular sex).