I am so so sorry
I have a couple of questions...
1. Did she know the AP's? Work? Ex's?
2. Did you find out each time? How did you find out?
3. How long did each A last?

I am sorry, back to topic... Did she say she loved them?

I am a cheating wife.
Consider this, when your thoughts go to: "I mean if love your spouse then why and if you don't love your spouse why stay? If I was bad enough for her to fall in love with some one and have an affair why come back ? "
Maybe she DOES love you. Very much. Maybe her cheating had nothing at all to do with you but everything to do with her. Maybe, just maybe, she is the broken one for many many reasons that not only you, but she herself isn't aware of fully.
Remember that.
4 affairs in 3 years is a lot......if she is seeing a therapist (and she really, really should be), she can answer many of those questions through therapy with her. What I learned about myself was invaluable. Together, both of you with the therapist, can utilize tools to assist in self awareness.

1. She found all of them thru the web, 2. I found about all of them around the same time. first saw some cybering on her phone then started digging, and found a month of chat between her and the last guy she was with. now the first guy was across the country and she had been talking with him since before we met (over 10 yrs) she told me they where just friends then she ran off and spent a week with him. I was just to damd trusting. (hind sight is always 20/20) 3. IDK

Shoretime
if I had found out any other way it might not hurt as bad. I read all there conversation and they where in love. at least the first guy and the last IDK about in between. part of what gets me is I am her second husband. I treat her like a queen and a lady. her first husband abused her hit her hell he put her in the hospital once! and cheated on her there hole marriage. I just don't understand. maybe I never will.

Why may I ask are you cheating? are you looking for something better? are you not happy? would it not be better to leave the person you are with before starting with someone ells? to me that is the way to do it.......I was married before and I started the divorce before I ever touched or connected with another. I still had enough respect for her not to make the hurt of us breaking up worse...... any way I am feeling depressed thinking about it all again. God bless you and I really hope things work out for you and your husband. and if you want something or someone ells please tell him first no matter how bad he is he dissevers that.

I am sorry for your pain. I, too, asked why. The answer is much simpler than one would think. They cheat because they want to. They cheat because they can.

I have heard, too, that it has nothing to do with us, the betrayed spouses. Actually, my H told me it has nothing to do with me. Kind of hard to wrap our brains around that!

My H said he never stopped loving me. Always has, always will. Yet he cheated, got caught, swore he'd never cheat again, and then went and cheated again. huh? Loving us has nothing to do with cheating.

Odd paradox, isn't it?

I suggest you start reading the chumplady.com. She has a book, too.
She is pretty harsh, sarcastic, but she is the only one who really sees cheating for what it is.

I'd be careful about doling out the forgiveness too readily. Your W needs to earn that.

Be sure she is seeing a therapist. You should have a couple of sessions with her T as well, so the T can see you for his/herself.
Don't bother to go to marriage counseling until she's been to therapy first. It's a waste of time otherwise. Cheaters lie.

Stop trying to imagine a perfect scenario and wonder why you life doesn't fit it. Look at things as they are. Decide what you want. You cannot save your marriage alone. Your W needs to be doing the heavy lifting here, assuring you that she will be faithful and doing whatever that takes.

I made my H write a letter apologizing to the OW's husband. I mailed it. I didn't trust that my H would. I also made my H tell the OW with a witness that the A was over and to leave him alone. And I also told the OW's family what she had been up to. Secrets keep affairs going.
Shame can be powerful, although I think the OW has no shame.

Hope this helps. Make your W work to assure you that you are her one and only. If she cannot do that, you have to decide if you want to keep going through this. You do have choices, you might not like them, but you don't have to keep going through this pain.

to betray vows is always 100% on the betrayer

drop the "if i was bad enough"

read post #2

maybe your wife is similar, maybe your wife has some mental health issues, and maybe your wife is just a rotten POS at her core

can't answer is Bullshit, why won't she answer

Thank you Refurb, I to don't think there is any thing I could have done to cause her to cheat. that is 100% on her. I don't think she is a pos. as a person. she is one of the most caring people I know.......she know she messed up and promises it will never happen again. I do so want to trust her. as for answering the question she said it was like she was a different person ...like duel personality? she is in therapy we have renewed our vows and things are better but I still fear that if I can't put my finger on how she justified her cheating it may happen again......

my wife cheated and "ran off", no attempt to reconcile
i can understand your worries over can she / will she
there are success stories
she is in counseling
you should consider going for yourself and maybe a little bit down the road, couples counseling

good things can happen

hurthusband68
How can you work on a problem If you don't know what the problem is? That is what she is wanting you to do by not telling you why.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. I am sorry. I agree with Storm you need to tell the AP's families and your CS's family ect...

www.teensafe.com great tool to find out information


Have you wife read this book super short. This was what it took for my H to realize what he has done to me.

http://www.lindajmacdonald.com/HOW_TO_HELP_YOUR_SPOUSE_HEAL_FROM_YOUR_AFFAIR--ljm2.doc

Has she apologized?

That is the million dollar question. If you feel strong enough, check out cheaters anonymous. It can trigger some real pain and anger butit is one of the few places you can see the raw and honest side from a CS perspective.

You will find a plethora of CS. Some still in the A struggling to end it. Some so bogged down with guilt and some narcissistic ones who continue to feel little or no guilt. There's not one type of cheater just as there is not one type of BS or marriage.

Some marriages were great pre A others were ok and some cs are married to real dirt bags. No matter what, you, in the end, have to navigate your marriage in a way that works best for you. These boards are great for support, advice and insight but don't replace somebody's opinion with your own.

I'm posting both the link to CA and rebuilding.

http://www.dailystrength.org/groups/rebuilding-marriage-after-infidelity

http://www.dailystrength.org/groups/cheatersanonymous

hurthusband-it doesn't matter why. You shouldn't waste any of your time trying to figure it out because that takes your focus from where it should be and puts it in a place that distracts you from the reality.

The only why you need to answer is "Why is it okay with me that she treats me this way?" 3 affairs in 4 years? That's an awful lot of lying.

It's okay to love someone and still walk away from them because they aren't good for you.

Please check out www.chumplady.com. It sounds like a women's site but there are plenty of men in chump nation. She has a lot of articles that bring some sense to infidelity that doesn't exist anywhere else. The article that brought about my awakening was about how to tell the difference between a truly remorseful cheater and one that you're wasting your precious time with. http://www.chumplady.com/2013/07/real-remorse-or-genuine-imitation-naugahyde-remorse/

Follow the link and then follow your gut. Leave your heart out of the equation!

It has nothing to do with you, as Shoretimenow and others have mentioned, and everything to do with her, and her state of emotional dysfunction. You are the type of person who would divorce before seeing another person, she is not.

I'd give thought to the stories she'd fed you about her ex-husband, because to me, those tales are designed to pull on your heart strings, and manipulate you to make allowance for things you may not have without the story of woe.

She seems to have an inability to appreciate what she has with you, and self-sabotages her marriage, possibly because she does not feel equal to you, and may even feel like you're too good for her, well-knowing of her deceptive ways.

Four affairs in three years tells me she needs to seek professional therapy, and probably for a few years before she can figure out why she's doing this.

The things you read about her and the love affairs are false positives, because they didn't truly love each other. When two emotionally dysfunctional people find each other and enter into a taboo romantic affair, everything is heightened and urgent, and a false sense of romantic attachment and love is procreated.

Like someone else suggested, I'd investigate your sense of forgiveness because true forgiveness, unlike forgiveness offered out of fear of them leaving, can take years to rebuild. I did the same thing and offered forgiveness right after D day, but in time, I discovered that it was not authentic.

I wish you well.

"WHY?? WHY! WHY!?!" I remember demanding to know, begging to know, obsessing over this question day and night.

I tried to answer the question by blaming myself: I wasn't good enough, I didn't do this, I did do that...

I blamed the OW: she tricked him, she lied, she seduced, she preyed upon his weaknesses.

Then I excused: my husband was depressed, my husband had low self esteem, my husband got trapped in a bad situation and couldn't find his way out.

Then I blamed him: he was a horrible, awful person.

None of these and all of these are true. The fact is: affairs are not ONE singular choice. Affairs are a series of choices that start out small, and relatively innocuous. If you haven't, please read "NOT Just Friends" by Shirley Glass. This book alone helped me to understand how (and when) affairs start and (to some extent) why.

That said, you may never ever have your WHY answered in a satisfactory way because there is never going to be a reasonable answer to unreasonable choices. Your wife didn't sit down and plot this out using logic. She went with her heart and her impulses. She was "in the fog" and wasn't making good, smart choices, she was doing what "felt good" in the heat of each moment as it came. Even when it felt bad afterward.

Now that my husband and I are 5 years past DDAY and have really rebuilt an amazing marriage, I'm able to see some of the "whys" more clearly, but until I let go of "if he loved me, he never would have..." none of them really meant much. That thinking is faulty. The fact is, as has been mentioned, your wife's unfaithfulness had NOTHING to do with you. And, it's very, very possible to love more than one person at a time. AND... it's very possible to hurt someone you love. We all do it every day, sometimes knowingly, and sometimes not.

Some of the first steps to moving forward in healing for me were to let go of screaming "WHYYYYYY!!" to the universe, because no answer really satisfied me and I kept chasing my own tail. Instead, I focused on the WHEN/HOW/WHERE and with my husband, we established borders, boundaries, and rules that made it highly unlikely that a repeat offense would occur. We patched up (or in most cases - completely rebuilt) all the walls that had been breached.

Don't get me wrong: nothing's foolproof. Even a bulletproof jacket won't stop a bullet to the head. However, I do feel like that helped give me some of the security I needed to put my trust in my husband and move forward. A lot of counseling and help from MarriageBuilders.com also helped us to fix sooo much of what was broken in our relationship. We had no idea that a lot of what we were doing was actually undermining our marriage and making it possible for an affair to come between us.

I don't know you or your wife, but I imagine your wife DOES and DID love you. I imagine that you were good to her and she IS a good person, but that she made some pretty poor choices. Figure out how to make the GOOD choices more obvious and how to make the BAD choices less accessible, and you'll have a better shot at making things work.

I only ask these three questions and can't get an answer to.


1. how could you do it? You say you love me and you always have then how?

2. You say you never intended to hurt me.......How could you think this would not hurt me?
3. Why was it so easy for you to do this to me yet you never did it to your ex? I treat you like a lady he treated you like shit yet you where faithful to him and not me?



If I could get answers to these 3 questions My Mind would be more at ease.
And I could truly put all this betrayal behind me. I will never forget, I have forgiven and am trying my best to move on these answers will help me understand how a person could do that to someone they love..........