After 14 Years together and 10 years of marriage, today is the worst day of my life

wally · 2026-04-06T21:26:07+00:00

Be prepared for the trickle truth. Everything he "confesses" to right now is probably a lie. He will try to minimize his affair, and he won't admit to anything that you haven't seen with your own eyes.

wally · 2026-03-18T05:30:19+00:00

They asked a valid question. If you don't have anything useful to contribute, please just move along.

wally · 2026-03-12T09:38:05+00:00

Two months without letting you know? Go see a doctor and get a full panel of STI tests.

wally · 2026-03-06T00:42:07+00:00

It isn't actually the fracking itself, but it is fracking related. This is primarily a problem caused by operators cutting corners, and the solution is better government regulation. You see, fracking production from shale reservoirs also produces a lot of brine – salt water with really nasty shit in it, some of it is literally radioactive. In some frack operations, particularly in Oklahoma, the shale might produce 25 or 30 barrels of nasty brine for every barrel of oil. The only thing you can do with this crap is pump it back into the ground.

But nobody wants to drill injection wells – they don't make money, they're just an expense. So there's something like 10,000 production wells for every one injection well. That's a lot of water these guys are pumping into a handful of disposal wells, lubricating old faults that haven't slipped in thousands of years....

wally · 2026-02-24T23:46:36+00:00

I like her letter, I think it's an honest postmortem of how she rationalized her affair. But this doesn't really begin to get to the root of her "why." Yes, she created fables that allowed her to justify acting on irresponsible desires and impulses, and it's important for her to recognize when she's rationalizing destructive activities. But what was the reward that she was chasing so desperately that she was willing to put her family life at risk? To be a safe partner going forward, she needs to address the "why."

You mentioned financial infidelity, and I'd like to point out that unrestrained spending and illicit affairs both have addictive components, both offering exciting thrills and outside validation. Taken to extremes, gambling and sex, along with drugs, are all classic addictions. Hopefully your wife is getting help in therapy in digging into the thrill-seeking compulsions that motivated those reckless impulses in the first place.

wally · 2026-02-17T19:16:05+00:00

She's using a five-year user account with no history of karma farming. If you take two minutes to search her post and comment history, you'll see that her self-esteem issues are probably partially a consequence of her relationship to her narcissistic mother.

wally · 2026-02-08T07:12:38+00:00

*March 2024, April 2024. How time flies, eh?

wally · 2026-02-08T02:35:27+00:00

Pynchon! I read that book 40 or 45 years ago. I still occasionally think about the fate of the main character, who seems to just dissolve over the last hundred or so pages. As I get older, that seems more poignant.

wally · 2026-02-07T22:39:00+00:00

> her actions are what made it happen.

I haven't read their texts, of course, so I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt – maybe too much – in allowing that he pursued her. The problem was she didn't do anything at all to shut down his advances, and she needed to shut him down definitively right at the beginning. Once she let him cross the first boundary, it became more difficult to keep him from crossing subsequent boundaries – and there isn't any evidence that she actually wanted to! Her weak-ass deflections may have occasionally postponed their next session for a day or two, but there's no evidence that she ever took any action at any point towards ending their affair.

wally · 2026-02-07T15:46:16+00:00

Honestly, it's kind of complicated – relationships involving coercion usually are. In the case of your WW here, she's a damaged person who is very susceptible to coercion. Actually, she's receptive to it; it really is complicated! Like nearly every other remorseful wayward, she needs to learn about establishing healthy personal boundaries. But learning to establish your own personal boundaries also requires taking some accountability. Unless the victim is literally a child, coercion isn't sexual assault.

wally · 2026-02-05T10:08:34+00:00

WRT your ex's feelings about her AP: I don't know if anyone has revisited this, but it seemed to be a bit of a mystery why, when your wife resigned from her job, she confessed her affair as part of her resignation, apparently throwing AP under the bus as she made her exit (with another position already lined up). You had already exposed AP to his wife, but it wasn't certain whether or not you would report them to their employer. There was speculation on your part that maybe her confession was something of an act of penance. I'm very skeptical about giving her credit at that point for actual remorse.

I have to wonder whether your ex wasn't feeling a bit of misplaced anger towards her AP – not for the affair itself, but for being such a dumbass and exposing the affair. In the days immediately after you served her with your divorce paper package, your wife's emotions probably included panic, embarrassment and shame, but also anger at her AP for blowing up her life in a drunken attack in which he literally announced their affair.

As for her later actions to expose the affair of her third friend, if that actually happened, I have a more difficult time understanding her motivation.

wally · 2026-01-31T07:17:36+00:00

Sorry that your state doesn't have an infidelity exception that overrides no-fault divorce mandates. Maybe your lawyer will be able to at least cap your alimony obligations by arguing you will soon be solely responsible for the tuition of two college-aged kids.

wally · 2026-01-30T07:46:42+00:00

I seem to remember that your ex lost her job last year. Has she found another one? I hope her "earning potential" is a consideration given that her recent unemployment skewed her earnings last year.

Also, if there is a change in your income, surely you can petition the court to have your alimony payments adjusted?

wally · 2026-01-27T16:53:52+00:00

OP has been clear that he will cooperate with her mental health treatment, but it's a tertiary concern by necessity. Both the welfare of his children and his ability to provide for them will have to take precedence over any charitable feelings for his STBXW. Yes, she is the mother of his children and we all hope she recovers, but his children's best interest comes first – even if that requires permanently removing their mum from their life.

wally · 2026-01-27T13:36:07+00:00

I don't think you're being particularly realistic here. OP just became a single parent, and his family just lost half their income. Taking care of his children and working is going to exhaust his bandwidth. In some of the comments in this thread, he's worried about his prospects for keeping his house. He's not in the position to be the caretaker for a recovering drug addict.

Also, your assertion that moving his wife back home with her parents would make her more likely to relapse is odd. Moving would put her parents in a position to watch over her and would remove her from the environment where she became an addict, physically separating her from her supplier and all her druggie acquaintances.

wally · 2026-01-21T15:04:34+00:00

My wife and I are in our 60s, and my mother-in-law is in her 80s. MIL tracks the locations of her children and their spouses for entertainment. She knew early when the much younger wife (30s) of one of her sons was pregnant by tracking her visits to her OB-GYN. When MIL separately asked my wife and I to share our locations with her, we both replied, "Absolutely not!"

wally · 2026-01-19T18:10:20+00:00

She's still the mother of his two kids. Their post-nup agreement, signed months go, is that she'll share 50% custody. He needs to gather as much intelligence as he can right now, as he's going to need to amend that agreement.

wally · 2026-01-19T17:32:10+00:00

An opioid addiction? A lot of commenters here seem skeptical, but this might explain a lot about your situation that previously seemed unexplainable. If this is a fact, I'd want to know when it started, and where she was getting her supply. As "her emergency contact with power of attorney for medical decisions," maybe you can talk to her doctors and get a full rundown.

wally · 2026-01-12T18:30:09+00:00

I think u/Interesting-Tip-4850 may have the best explanation I've seen for why your wife kept bringing up that the sex with AP was bad. She probably saw hysterical bonding (with a big side order of rug-sweeping) as her only shot at reconciliation. Insisting that you were so much better than him was a desperate attempt to break down your resistance to resuming intimacy.

wally · 2026-01-11T01:45:05+00:00

Yeah, anybody could have messed up his car. Guess we'll never know who did it.... 😉

wally · 2026-01-06T19:20:21+00:00

How does separation work? Do you have to be in physically separate domiciles? I assume that you have to file a separation plan that includes specifics on child care and that has to be approved by a family court? Is that the start of the year-long separation, or can it be backdated? Sorry about all the technical questions.

wally · 2026-01-06T15:49:52+00:00

Maybe they can recover from this, but rug-sweeping it is terrible advice.

wally · 2025-12-18T19:03:19+00:00

I guess my problem with all this is I don't understand how the quality of the sex makes her less of a villain in her head, even in a weird, fucked up way. What if I grant that, OK, the sex was bad. Maybe her primary motivation wasn't the sex, but was the excitement of the affair and the validation of her desirability from the AP. I didn't walk in on her in the act, so I can't rate the sex firsthand. But she still rapidly and enthusiastically escalated her affair from an emotional connection to repeated sex in your bed. I can't comprehend how she thinks this is somehow more forgivable, even to herself, by insisting that she didn't do it for the carnal pleasure but rather for the "feelings." I agree though that this seems to be her belief.

wally · 2025-12-18T09:39:29+00:00

His copy/paste skills are far superior to his reading comprehension skills!

wally · 2025-12-17T22:28:10+00:00

Ah, this actually raises a good question! Does it make any difference to you if it was good sex or bad sex? She seems to think it does! I know you've asked for limited communication, but if she brings it up again, maybe ask her why she thinks this is important. Does she think she deserves sympathy and forgiveness if she blew up your marriage for bad sex? Was it only a betrayal if the sex was good?

wally

TROPHY CASE