My situation is this: my wife and I dated for three and a half years and were engaged for about one year before we got married - so four and a half years all together. During the second and third year, I was in what I now realize was an EA with a person I’ve been friends with for almost 20 years. We communicated exclusively online, and never saw each other in person during that time because we live thousands of miles apart.

Our communication was text only, no pictures, videos, phone calls or video chats. We mostly talked about what was going on in our respective lives, but sometimes our conversations got explicitly sexual. We have been physically intimate before, prior to my relationship with my wife, so a lot of the sexual messages were about the nights we spent together in the past. Sometimes they were about things we wanted to do to each other. There was no live sexting.

I’ve tried to reconstruct a timeline from memory, but because of the way we communicated (disappearing messages) I don’t know the exact details. As best I can remember, we communicated about once a month or so, and most conversations were pretty short and non-sexual. I think we had sexual conversations roughly a dozen times.

A few months before I proposed, even though I was deep in the fog and not yet fully awake to the terrible betrayal I was engaging in, my conscience somehow got through to me enough that I realized I shouldn’t be having conversations like that when I was about to get engaged, so I stopped reaching out to my AP. Because we didn’t communicate that often anyway, there was a pretty long period before I heard from them again. The next time they reached out, I made sure to steer our conversation away from anything sexual, and I tried to keep them as short as possible.

The fog lifted for me just before the wedding, when I heard about a friend who had been caught in an EA that had left his marriage on life support. All of a sudden, and I truly mean literally all at once, I saw everything I had done clearly. I saw my betrayal for what it was. I was immediately consumed by the most powerful wave of guilt, shame, regret, self loathing and anxiety that I’d ever felt in my life. I managed to keep my composure long enough to get home, find a quiet place away from everyone and cry the hardest I’d ever cried.

My wife and I were in the final weeks of planning our wedding, and the stress of that time held me together for a while. Our wedding was truly the happiest day of my life. I love my wife more than anything in this world, which makes my shame at having betrayed her so incredibly deep. I truly would do anything to take back what I did, even die. I would happily lay down my life to prevent my wife from crying even a single tear over me, but I know it doesn’t work that way.

After the wedding, I sent my AP a message telling her that we could never have another conversation like the ones we’d had. I told them how ashamed I was, how much I loved my wife, and that I was never going to betray her again.

I was so afraid to have that conversation, not because I didn’t want things to end - from the moment I gained clarity I’ve never once wanted to go back to it - but because I was terrified about how my AP would react. They took it so much better than I thought, and agreed that the A was over.

I felt better for a short while, but it was wasn’t long before the crushing guilt came back. I didn’t know what to do, so I bought and read a ton of books about infidelity. I've read "When Good People Have Affairs" by Mira Kirshenbaum, "After the Affair" by Janice Spring, "The State of Affairs" by Esther Perel, "Betrayed and Betrayer" by Ann and Ben Wilson, "When You're The One Who Cheats" by Tammy Nelson, and "Healing from Infidelity" by Michelle Wiener-Davis. I've also read every advice article I can find online - anything that might offer some guidance.

The books helped me to really understand so much more about affairs, but they did nothing to help me understand what to do. So I started therapy. For the past several months I’ve been working through the guilt, shame and anxiety with my therapist, and exploring the reasons behind it. I’ve learned a lot about myself - tendencies I’ve had for a long time that come from my upbringing - and I’m learning how to monitor and correct my thoughts so I can make better choices in the future.

My therapist believes that I shouldn’t tell my wife what happened because there wasn’t a physical relationship. She told me that all it would do is cause my wife pain, and it wouldn’t make me feel any better. I don’t want to hurt my wife, and part of me thinks my therapist is right. And there seems to be some mainstream support for that stance - in “When Good People Have Affairs”, Mira Kirshenbaum says that one should never tell their partner about an affair unless there was unprotected sex involved. She says that most people confess because they want to be honest, but honesty is a nebulous moral principle, where not hurting people is a concrete one. But I feel really conflicted because I love my wife, and I want what’s best for her. I just can’t tell what that is.

I know that I'll never make this mistake again, and I know that I'll never forget what I did. Whatever the outcome, I'm going to be haunted by this forever. I don't want to keep quiet because I want to get away with this - I'd happily accept any consequences, if I could just spare my wife the pain. I would lay down my life if it meant that she'd never have to go through that. I'm really lost, and I don't know what I should do here.

So, what would you do if you were in my situation? Would you tell?