spencerblue

your words are sharp and their message hard...but after some major soul searching i believe them to be true... the NC stuff and the other games may work every now and then, but when someone falls outta love, I dont think there is a coming back ... if there is a boy/girlfriend it exacerbates the problem... think it is time to move on and love the past, learn from the past, but not try and recreate the past

thank you all for the help...your insight in keen indeed. Its amazing how right you all are even with different perspectives. I have a lot to think about

Hi all, Am new here (and to internet chat rooms in general) and have a found myself in an emotional tornado. I have been married to my wife for 6 years; prior to that we dated for 8 years including our college years. We both are easy going people who went to graduate school after college and didnt want to marry until we were done with the rigors of it. We had always prided ourselves on the 'independence' of our relationship; that is, we didnt do everything as a couple. Many times work or school kept us going down parallel, yet different roads. I never got the feeling that there were any problems in our relationship for many years. She is a wonderful, caring person with a high emotional intelligence. She has a level head and is very stable with her feelings -- though i touch on the 'bottle it up and it'll go away' type of personality. Anyway, I ramble. We lived together for the last two years of college through now. We were married in every way but the piece of paper many years before we actually tied the knot. Very little changed after we did. She got a job with a fortune 500 company here in town (san diego) and I openned a business with some colleagues from school. We still had a perfectly wonderful time when spending quality time together, and seemed to be able to spend enough time doing it to satisfy her emotional needs. That slowly started to diminish. I didnt enjoy spending time with her work friends and she didnt enjoy mine. We drifted a bit. (at this point I know this story is surely very common, but its new to me) She met a friend a work, a guy friend. One of the problems we always had was her love of crafts, disneyland and other things which dont really interest me. I did many of them for a long time, but as we drifted I slowed down my participation in these cutesy things. Anyway, this guy friend likes many of them, and they did many of them together. I somewhat jokingly called him the "boyfriend". I tried to talk to her about my fears of him replacing me many times -- to which she always told me I was reading more into it than was there and that they were purely platonic. She pointed out that a man and a woman can be great friends without a 'love' element. This was in year three of our marriage (three years ago). For two years, he maintained a strong position in her social calendar. She had a parallel life with him; she did for these years maintain a close relationship with me, physically and emotionally. However, year three it changed. I was now being shut out of many activities in her life, and he was right there. Our time allocations had virually traded from what they were in the early years. Then I started to notice that she, a person who I had never known to be anything other than starkly honest, had started to be subtely dishonest. Nothing major, white lies about her comings and goings and the like. I am not a jealous, or overbearing type and I let em go. Then one night she came home later than normal and had that look of someone who had just had sex -- the hair a little wild, no makeup, clothes not crisply fitting, and that whole 'glow' about her (again nothing major, only subtle things). She kissed me and her lips were soft and warm, the kind of feel lips get after an evening of use. I was shocked inside, I knew what it all meant, but didnt say anything. I told myself that I was imagining it and that she wouldnt do that. Her schedule got more odd, and I was a continually shrinking part of it. Fast forward 6 months to six months ago. Our relations were now strained. We each were travelling without each other, sometimes for reasons of scheduling, sometimes for contrived reasons. Every single one of those "signs your spouse is cheating" was there. I confronted her. I told her I knew she was having an affair and that it was killing us. She countered with a sincere denial of the affair, but agreed we had to do some major work in our relationship. She said we had to start to do more together and enjoy each other -- that we had drifted and needed to fill the gap, and that this was normal in a long term relationship and that we were smart to be addressing it early on. I felt wonderful, I believed her, and the relief made me forget the preponderance of evidence to the contrary. I loved her dearly and didnt want to lose her. She quit her job. She had now been there 5 years and her options were vested. We had always said when that happens, she could quit and I would be the breadwinner for awhile. No problems here; plus she said that it would give us more time to work on our relationship. Heres the problem, she left a couple weeks later for New York for two weeks with a couple of girl friends she said. She said it was her reward for her job, and that her friends wanted to take her. I said OK. She got back from there and got invited to go to Europe on some goodwill tour with one of her charities for 6 weeks. She told me that when she got back it was relationship fixing time -- that this trip was too great an opportunity to pass up. I said OK. She got home and we lived unhappily for a week when she came into my office and told me she wanted a divorce. She blamed in on us drifting apart. I was devastated; I love her with my whole heart. She left to a friends house for the night. I couldnt eat or sleep that night and, for some reason, openned her laptop to see if I could answer some questions. I found many. Her email revealed a constant relationship with the boyfriend. He had moved to NYC in August -- she had gone to help him and was never there on a girls trip. While in Europe, she emailed and text messaged him (and he her) constantly things like "I miss you" and "I cant wait to be with you" and the like. And that on her way home from Europe she stopped over in NYC for a three day tryst. I was more devastated, and hurt that she not only had repeatedly lied to me, but that she had tried to blame our issues as my doing (which indirectly are obviously my fault for not being there emotionally). I confronted her the next day. She sat stone faced for a minute. She then told me that she had thought when he moved it was going to be over and at that point we would work it out. She didnt want to lose me and thought she would if she told me about it. However, she said it didnt end when he moved. They talked everyday and he was always in her thoughts. They missed each other; when she was in Europe she missed him. She broke down and said that she is completely torn. She says she loves me and she loves him, and that she doesnt know what to do. She stressed that she loves us both equally and fully, that the newness and spontaneousness she felt with him was as attractive to her as the life partner she thought of me as. We spent many days talking, crying and communicating like we hadnt in two years. I was as hurt as I had ever been, and she knew it. We decided to separate in order for us to figure out our lives. We have gone out a few times a week since and talk almost everyday. We have been open and honest and communicated like we should have been all those months. We were definitely making great progress. I can forgive her without conditions for her actions, I realize my role in them. However, here is the catch, she still loves Michael (her friend) she admits. She still doesnt know what she wants. And now the topper, she left yesterday for NYC for New Years to spend it with him. I feel as bad as ever. I know logically I should just be done with her and move on, but I love her, and want to wait for her. What to do? ...thats the tornado