I am a wife who cheated, and my husband stayed with me. What was the time between your wife telling you she wanted a divorce, having the affair, and you finding out? Did she have the affair after starting counseling? I ask because I wonder if the affair was really so separate from her thinking about divorce.

She told me she was unhappy with our marriage and about a month later it came out that she had the affair around that same time. She said she had been unhappy for years and had decided to leave long before the affair. We had gone to counseling for years as well but now that everything is out it is obvious the counseling was never even breaking the surface of what was really going on (she has some sexual abuse and rape as a child). I truly believe she did not intend to have the affair, it just was a drunken mistake. We are talking separation now for her to work and heal on hurts and issues from her childhood. By the way I had to find out about the affair from our pastor. Thoughts?

Save yourself the agony of the slow roll downhill and divorce your cheating wife.

The affair is not disconnected from her wish to divorce.

She is not emotionally connected to you, nor sexually interested in you.

You need to consult a lawyer, gte checked for STDs, know your options financially, etc.

Then you file for divorce and custody of your kids. fight for your decency and emphasize her indecency.

Get started, she is lost you as a wife. Not the woman you think she is.

It's going to take a lot of work for her to get to a good place and become the woman you thought you had. I think you need to ask yourself if you and your children would be better off giving her the divorce she wants now or later. There are no guarantees that she will make the progress you want and need.

I think if you love her that you should give her a chance. It will be hard for a long time but if you both want to be together it can happen. She needs to rebuild your trust and that will take a long time. She needs to work on herself and figure out why she had an affair but you both need to work together to make the marriage work. i wish you good luck!

One of my good friends went through something similar. They'd married when they were young, and he had a drinking problem, she had had some emotional affairs (undiscovered) and eventually she asked him to move out. They have two kids in elementary/middle school. After about a year he asked her out on a date and they dated a few times and decided that he would move back in. It worked for them. I think having some emotional/physical space can really help each person grow independently and it is possible that after that growth the two people can come together again. I definitely don't believe that infidelity should be an automatic deal breaker, but the fact that she's come clean and still wants to remain in the marriage seems to be a positive thing in your situation. I highly recommend listening to Dan Savages podcast - he covers infidelity a lot and I agree with him that infidelity, in some way, shape or form, will happen in most long term relationships. It is up to you as a couple to determine if and how you will move forward from it. I wish you the best of luck.

dsj2017, I appreciate the positive comment. The progress she has made in just a few days has been remarkable and seems sincere. We both have things to work on, obviously hers are much more serious and will require the proper work (counseling, mental health eval, etc). She has already started to map out what it will look like and has made the necessary appointments to get things going. I have hope in many ways but the biggest is how brutally honest we have been with each other even though it hurts to hear some of the things. We are amicable and do not fight when we have hard conversations and are able to validate each others feelings instead of getting defensive. Our relationship is closer than it is ever been which is ironic after infidelity but it is what makes me believe the affair had less to do with being unhappy with me and more with going back to destructive behaviors. I asked her last night to tell me specific details about the affair and although it hurt her to rehash it, I explained it would help me begin to heal and she did so without holding things back. The people on here saying to dump her because she doesn't love me and wants out of the marriage simply do not have enough details to even make such comments and I really should reconsider making those kind of comments with limited information.