# Never-ending emotional affair



## agreenbough (Oct 1, 2012)

This is a long story, but I'll try to make it short.
My husband and I went through a rough patch in our marriage, which was largely due to poor communication skills. He felt I was angry when the real issue, imo, was that I felt like he never listened to me and always put other people, like his parents, and even our neighbors, over me. I would try to explain things that were bothering me and he didn't seem to get any of it and thought I was just being difficult. So I pretty much stopped trying to discuss those things with him. 
On the surface we were doing okay. We didn't fight, went on "dates", had a normal home life. We just weren't talking about any issues. He works very long hours so there never seemed to be a good time to try to talk, on top of him being unreceptive to any kind of "serious" talk. 
He took me on a cruise in the fall of 2014 and we had a wonderful time. I thought maybe we had turned a corner and could put the past behind us. I was happy and thought he was, too. I honestly thought things had turned around for us.
Then in early 2015 he started acting odd. Very distant. Up late on his computer. Totally disinterested in me. Didn't want sex. We had our 30th anniversary, and it was barely mentioned. 
Well, I found out later that year that soon after our cruise, he had found a girl 30 years younger than him on a foreign dating site who barely even spoke English, and his disinterest in me was due to his infatuation with her. He'd been contacting her for 7 months by the time I found out. And I found out just days before he was planning to travel to eastern Europe to see her for ten days, letting me think he was at an annual sporting even in another state. He ended up not going, I think because he was afraid I'd tell his parents what he was up to. 
I should have left him right then, but I didn't. I hired a PI to look at his computer and found literally hundreds of emails and Skype sessions. He had talked to a dozen other women before settling on this one, and sent money to an interpreter so they could understand each other (all while acting like I was spending like a drunk sailor when I bought groceries). He has never called me by a pet name, but had pet names for her, and he said how he loved her letters and for her to tell him what was in her heart. When I wrote him letters, he wouldn't read them and rolled his eyes over what was in MY heart. 
Things just sort of broke down after that. He refused to stop contacting her. He sent her hundreds of dollars - paid for her to take "English lessons", bought her a phone, sent her gifts and flowers. In 2016 I told him if he didn't stop it I was moving into the guest room. He very enthusiastically helped me move into the guest room. He point blank said he would not give her up.
He doesn't talk about her which I consider to be lies of omission. I tried really hard to not be a ***** about things and, as usual, simply didn't talk about it. Whenever I tried to, he would turn everything back on me.
After seeing a picture of her on his phone about a year ago, I demanded that he end it and write her a goodbye letter. He gaslighted me, saying he had written the letter and had had me hit the send button - no such thing occurred. I also saw a message from her a couple of months after that - if he had actually written a goodbye letter, she would not still be emailing him. 
He now insists that he hasn't written to her since last February and has not heard from her. But he said he will not promise not to contact her anymore, as she is his friend, and keeping up with his friends is "who he is". 
Is it really so absurd to expect my husband not to be in contact with the woman he planned to leave me for? He's now acting like he loves me and wants to spend the rest of his life with me - but without giving her up. He thinks if he wants to contact her every now and then to see how she is, how her family is, how her job is going, that he is totally entitled to do that. He has told me how "nice" she is and thinks I have no empathy for expecting two "friends" to lose track of each other. 
Am I queen of the chumps?? This eats at me every day. He expects me to act like everything is fine, but any day could be a day that he is in a good mood or smiling at me because she smiled at him. He doesn't seem to grasp how this is destroying any chance of us restoring our marriage. If I bring it up, I'm "angry" (well, yes, I am) and "unempathetic" - a joke coming from a man who is unapologetically torturing his wife with a dating site girl the same age as our children. 
I don't want to live the rest of my life with her in the picture. But would I be a fool to give up on my marriage over a message here and there? Because that's what he thinks it is (or wants me to think it is) - merely an occasional message between "friends". I think it's a knife in my heart and that if he is fine with repeatedly hurting me, it is because she actually means more to him than he says.


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## toblerone (Oct 18, 2016)

> Is it really so absurd to expect my husband not to be in contact with the woman he planned to leave me for?


No. That is normal. Him saying he can't promise to cut her out completely ("but she's my friend!") is a way for him to weasel in another excuse down the line why he is still talking to her.



> He thinks if he wants to contact her every now and then to see how she is, how her family is, how her job is going, that he is totally entitled to do that.


Only after your divorce. If he still wants to be married to you, he has no choice.



> Am I queen of the chumps?


Not if you put your foot down.



> But would I be a fool to give up on my marriage over a message here and there?


No. That would be the normal thing to do. They weren't just messages. Time he has spent with her, even if virtual, is time stolen from you. Money he has spent on her, has taken away finances from your marriage. You said yourself, he planned to leave you for her- or at the very least steal more time and money away from your relationship to try to physically cheat on you.

I don't know if it can be salvaged. I don't really think it is worth it. He really went out of his way to try to make this affair happen.

And, here's the thing: you don't really know why he cancelled the trip. So, here's a possibility that you should consider: she's not really interested in him and is just using him for money and your husband is the biggest fool of them all.


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## badmemory (Jul 31, 2012)

Dear, moving out of the bedroom is not a consequence to him. It's just an inconvenience to you. It's tantamount to being in a gun fight with only a knife.

You've got to respect yourself enough to stop accepting his EA. You deserve better. The only way is to do this is by contacting an attorney, formulating an exit strategy, and starting the divorce process. You've got to be willing to end your marriage over this or just accept it.

If you do go the divorce route, you have some time to postpone it if he turns around. But with the total disrespect he's showing you, don't expect that to happen.


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## Edmund (Apr 1, 2017)

Yes, you are the queen of chumps.


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## MattMatt (May 19, 2012)

Divorce must be an option for you.


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## agreenbough (Oct 1, 2012)

I told him she was only using him for the money, and he shrugged and said, "You're probably right."
I know I'm right. The whole point of those foreign dating sites is to get men to send money. All in all, he has probably sent her thousands of dollars. (I have no access to his bank accounts or passwords.) And he is apparently so desperate for and excited by the attention of an attractive girl that he just let himself get sucked in. She gushed about the two of them being "best friends ever" - I asked him what he would think if our daughter, who is about the same age, was accepting money and gifts from a married man 30 years older than her, in exchange for photos of herself, some of them in lingerie. 
Blank stare. 
I saw in her own words that she was on the site looking for a husband and I saw "international marriage" forms in his briefcase. So even if the plan has changed, he WAS planning to leave me for her. And she knew he was married. And that did not deter her from taking the money and stringing him along.
He thinks sending her money for "English lessons" makes it okay, because he is "helping the less fortunate", and also that she helped to remind him how lucky he is to live in the US. I was actually starting to think he had developed some form of mental illness when he told me that. I mean, if I wanted to help the less fortunate, joining dating site would not even enter my mind as a way to do that. And if you want to feel fortunate that you live in the US, read a newspaper or go to WalMart.


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## badmemory (Jul 31, 2012)

You have three choices as I see it:

1) Start the divorce process and follow through with it unless he does a total 180.

2) Accept what he's doing, stop talking about it, try to not think about it - try to make peace with yourself and avoid the D. 

3) Continue to complain to him, vent on infidelity boards, resent him, get angry at him, and upset yourself - for the rest of your marriage; but avoid the D.

Of those three, ask yourself what the best option is. I won't tell you what I think accept to say that I think number 3 is by far the worst.


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## GusPolinski (Jan 21, 2014)

Time for divorce.

Oh, and exposure.


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## Spoons027 (Jun 19, 2017)

Girl, he’s gone. He’s so infatuated with her he refuses to listen to reason or sense. You’re just wasting more time the more you try. If he doesn’t want to listen, nothing will get through to him. Right now, he doesn’t think like you or care, hence the blank stare when you told him to think about his daughter. He has no one in mind but himself and this other woman.

Please start protecting yourself and your kid. Don’t wait until he leaves you for real. Don’t put up with that.


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## wilson (Nov 5, 2012)

So sad to see him caught up in this. It will be very hard to get him to see clearly. It's the same thing with those Nigerian emails. People get so caught up in it they lose all rationality. It typically only stops when they run out of money. You need to protect yourself and your family. Your husband is not thinking clearly and may drain your finances before you know it.


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## Diana7 (Apr 19, 2016)

Yes you have been a chump, but you don't have to carry on being one. I would have given him the choice, her or me years ago.
His comment that he has been 'helping the less fortunate' had to be one of the worst statements of trying to justify bad behaviour that I have heard. Disgusting. 
Don't these men realise that these girls are stringing many men along at the same time? That they have no interest at all in the men themselves? Its pathetic.:frown2:


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