I think it's easy to be blinded by everything you may be losing in a situation like yours. You're remembering all the good things about the relationship, why you married her and were with her in the first place. How things were when you made each other happy. But you have to be realistic and look at the whole picture. Why do you want to reconcile? Is it because you feel it's the right thing for you and your future? Or because you feel it's the right thing for the children or the traditional view of what you should do. Ultimately, you need to focus on what will make you happy and your life fulfilled (and from the sounds of how things were I don't think it's a relationship with your wife although I could be wrong...). Regardless of what you've done, mistakes you've made, you deserve to be happy. To me it sounds like you were living a very meek and unhappy existence and you made a mistake. You're human. It's easy to develop feelings not necessarily for someone else but for the way that person may make us feel, the fact that they give us joy and hope in our lives again. I guess you could say I have a bit of personal experience in this whole area. You become attracted to your perception of that person's role in your life, even though it could be completely different from reality. And coming from someone who has been trying to fix the marriage for almost two years, there are sometimes relationships that aren't meant to be fixed... And you can end up wasting a lot of good years and energy trying to fix them. Yes you had an affair, you made a mistake. A huge one and a long term one. But your wife was no angel either. She also had a role in the demise of the relationship. My advice, for starters anyways, quit blaming yourself so much. Relationships end, things happen that we can't change or take back, but life goes on and you will be happy again. Just hang in there