Sad to be back

[tryingtilDorR]

AN - besides this dispute over no contact with OM, what else is going on in the R? Does she say she wants to D eventually? Is she putting any effort into working on the M?

My W says we will D eventually and that she is just here for our kids right now. We are in total limbo.

[AnotherNightmare]

I have struggled with many of the same issues as you regarding no-contact and an EA. My W also thinks that she can be 'friends' with this person and that occasional contact isn't a problem.

Trying,

I have read through your thread also and will keep an eye on it with my comments and experiences. Our situations are in fact very similar, even the timing seems about the same. My W not only wants to keep in touch with the current OM and the OM from 12 years ago, she even stayed friends with all her former boy-friends. While I was snooping I found out she was looking for them online and even found some of them.
I guess what she is struggling with is that I told her that other than the coparenting issue I would want no contact with her if we got a D. And I reinforced that by letting her know that she either talks to me or to OM, i.e. if she decides to get together again with OM either during or after our M, I would find a way to avoid contact with her 100%. Even coparenting would go through a third person.
So that kind of took care of this issue:

The issue I have is that my W considers us 'separated' and therefore I don't really have a lot of leverage.

I am not snooping, have not been since late April after I blacklisted OM's e-mail address in her account. But she does not know that for sure and she has no idea how I did it. When she confronted me, because she had found out that I had blacklisted OM, she also admitted that he had contacted her. She told me that all she wrote back was "I'm OK. No contact!" I assumed she told the truth, because she repeated that in a MC session to her C.

We also went to Retro early this year - it woke me up and I recognized things I needed to change but didn't have much impact on her.

Same here. I had a major breakthrough at Retro as well as on this board. I read a lot of books, even went through the bootcamp exercises of "Love without Hurt", because I had discovered some abusive behavior. And almost everyone can use a little more compassion. I think it improved my relation to our kids a lot, even to her.
She said after Retro that she did not discover anything about herself that she had not discovered before when e-mailing with OM. It made me sick to my stomach, because I knew how he had manipulated her. During Nov and Dec I had collected all the e-mails as evidence, so I can read through them whenever I want. On 11/5, OM told her his D story blaming his W for everything and comparing his W to me (even though she was not as ruthless and unloving as me). On 11/6 W started talking about D to OM, and on 11/7 he recommended the D lawyer who handled his D. W dropped the bomb on me on 11/11. Coincidence?

So she is still in that kind of fog thinking it is all my fault. There are lots of mistakes I made. I ignored the early warnings, I left her alone when she needed me, made all the typical male mistakes. But does that justify an A, let alone two?

AN - besides this dispute over no contact with OM, what else is going on in the R? Does she say she wants to D eventually? Is she putting any effort into working on the M?

She has not decided on the D. She was much closer to it in Nov and Dec when the EA was moving at full steam. Now it is more like she does not believe I (not we) can make it work.
She continues to go to IC working on her issues. However, she keeps everything a secret telling me she does not feel safe enough to tell me. She may have a point there, because early whenever she told me something, I tended to use it against her. 2 or 3 months ago, she came back from a session claiming her mistake was she was not assertive enough. I said you know exactly what would have happened. I would have pulled back even further. I think to her it came across like I destroyed her picture of our marriage that she had painted during IC, because all she said was "That is why I am not telling you anything."

The last R talk we had was more than 2 weeks ago. It was very brief, because I stopped her in her tracks by letting her know that unless she ends the R with OM permanently, there is nothing we need to talk about with regards to our M. She asked for distance, and I am giving it to her. The only thing we discuss are tactical issue and kids.

[ImprovedRomeo]

AN, how are you doing?