My marriage problem has, as it's seed, me being a lousy husband for the last several years, ignoring my family and wife by burying myself in work and spending my free time playing online role playing games. My wife was under a lot of stress both from an seriously ill parent and two of our children that have had serious health and mental health issues over the last couple of years. My life and my wife's life prior to and during our marriage are a lot more complicated than that and I posted the long version of the background in the next window if you want the full background.

My wife felt trapped and neglected so on Aug. 8th she started a gmail account to log on to internet sex sites to have email sex. She then opened a second account on 22 August for online sex chat and opened a Skype account so she and her partners could hear each other. Things progressed to the point where she was contacting multiple guys everyday through Ashely Madison or Dreambooks: Adult Pen Pals, Reddit Adult Penpal site, and more and having chat sex with them oftentimes multiple times a day. This I found out through my own investigations.

Things came to a head on 4 October when the stress of the cheating formed a crisis in her that caused her to tell me what she was doing; she had decided that either she was going to leave me or shock me into showing I cared. I showed her I cared so much that I practically had an emotional breakdown and she promised never to do this again. It was an epiphany to me. I was losing my wife to a bunch of pixels and strangers voices. I told her about the abuse I had as a child and explained to her why I was always so distant and things almost overnight became much better between us.

The only problem is, that when the crisis came, she admitted to two guys and because she had been saying she had been part of an internet chat group for ESL tutors let let me believe that this started innocently and progressed to online sex with them. The gory details are posted in the other thread of how I found out that it was her initiating everything by going to sex email and chat sites and not innocent at all.

I believe my wife when she says it's over and that she won't do it again. It was 7 weeks out of our 20+ years of marriage. I also believe in the last month we have forged a closeness dealing with the infidelity issue and with my past neglect. The problems I have now are:

How do I stop thinking about what she did and move on? I hear her chat with the other guys in my head sometimes when we are intimate. It drives me nuts.

How do I trust someone who when initially confronted did not really tell the truth?

It may be over now, buy how can I be sure a year from now when new stresses might appear in our marriage that she won't turn to the internet for sexual companionship again?

She admitted the fun was in the chase to get guys to have sex with her. I am a bit worried that it might be an addiction. How can we deal with that?

I haven't touched a video game in 5 weeks and I have little interest anymore, but maybe I'll get sucked back in if stress appears in our marriage again. How can I prevent that?