[timj]

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?

[timj]

The background of my marriage problem story.
I grew up as an abused child. I am not going to relive all the details here, but I can share one story so you can see what my childhood was like. I was playing baseball with a couple of neighbor boys. I was maybe 13-years old. One of them kept throwing at my head trying to hurt me. I warned him to stop, he threw at me again so I charged him, knocked him down and held him down and told him to stop or I was going to really kick his ***. He father came outside, told me to get off his son, so I did, and I ran home. I did NOT hurt him. I could of beaten the crap out of him. I didn’t hit him, I just held him down and told him to stop trying to hurt me. My neighbor’s father called my father that night and told him I was beating the crap out of his son. This is false, but I can now see how he felt that way. My father took a leather dog leash with metal buckles, took me to the garage and started beating me. I was cut all over and bleeding from more than a score or wounds covering my body. My mother eventually turned up and grabbed my father and screamed at him that he was killing me and he stopped. Being hit was the norm in my childhood. It taught me to avoid people and to feel like everyone just wants to hurt you. So, I tried very hard to hide every emotion and protect myself from getting close to anyone.
Eventually in my senior year of high school I found a girl friend, or she found me or we found each other. I felt she was very cute, but I think she was a bit insecure. I fell completely in love with her. Everything that I had repressed seemed to fade away, but really it didn’t. She went to a different college freshman year than I did, because I chose to switch to a higher quality university before our freshman year started. This caused some stress in our relationship, but we stayed together and would visit about one weekend a month, I convinced her to transfer to my school her sophomore year, but we did have a bit of a falling out during the summer between our freshman and sophomore years. I had given her a pre-engagement ring and of all stupid things I took it back as she had started occasionally going out with other guys. Just as friends she said, but I didn’t trust her. How could I trust anyone? I had closed off all emotions in my heart; I needed to protect myself.
Our sophomore year we stayed together. I spent tons of time with her, helping her especially with calculus because the school she transferred from was so lame that her first year calculus course only covered half the material of the one at my school, but they placed her in second year calculus when she transferred. She had a lot to learn to survive the course. We had survived the summer, remained together and to my knowledge she had stopped going out with anyone else. I felt we were regaining the closeness that we had lost the previous summer and had started talking about our future together occasionally. We were not committed or engaged, but I felt we were and I was trying to work up the courage to ask her to marry me and return the ring as a real engagement ring, not a pre-engagement one.
I was working late. I worked at the McDonald’s on weekend evenings to make money for college. (With the relationship I described above with my family, I think you can realize that I didn’t want a cent from my family so I vowed to pay for my education myself and I had cut myself off from contact with my parents.) My girlfriend’s apartment was one street away, through a parking structure. It was late, like 1 AM as we had just finished up closing and I thought I’d walk over to her place and see if her light was on. I saw her through the parking structure, she was holding hands with some guy walking toward her apartment. I froze, sort of hid behind a pillar and watched them. They walked up to the porch, kissed, and went inside. The lights went on, the lights went out; he didn’t leave. Now things start to get hard to remember. I am not sure if I rang the doorbell and waited for her to come to the door (if this is what happened, she didn’t) or I didn’t ring, all I know is that I waited for a while, maybe 10 minutes getting more and more upset and trying to figure out what to do as I saw in my mind the woman I loved and cared for more than anyone in the world “F-ing someone”. I lost control. I climbed up the porch, her apartment was on the second floor, it was summer and hot and her living room window was open, I climbed in. They we naked and on the living room floor “F-ing”. I started screaming, I have no idea what I was saying but I imagine it was about how I was going to kill them both. I had completely lost control. They were grabbing clothes and trying to get dressed and I am sure they were screaming at me to get the “F” out and that they were going to call the police. I was temporarily mentally ill and out of control. I really don’t remember what was said. I left the way I entered back out the window without touching anyone and literally jumped off the porch roof 12-feet to the ground and ran home so out of control I had no idea how I was going to deal with this. When I got there I took a hammer, took the ring outside and started hitting it over and over into the concrete. I broke the tubular steel hammer. That’s when I stopped.
This one event combined with my childhood scarred me in rather deep and profound ways that until recently (recent in this context is about 30 years later than the event described above) I haven’t dealt with. It convinced me that everyone I get close to just wants to hurt me. They really do not care for me at all. They just want to abuse me. They might pretend to care to get something they want, but really I meant nothing to them. This is so painful.
Time passes, a couple of years, I meet the woman that will become my wife of more than 20 years. She has her own demons. She is the daughter of an immigrant family. Both her parents were Holocost survivors and I cannot pretend to understand how this affected her childhood and development. Recently we have talked a lot about both of our childhoods, but I still do not understand it very well. We sort of fell in bed together one night during a party at the place we lived at in college. We started sleeping together fairly often, but I would not openly acknowledge the relationship. In essence, I treated her like dirt. I was a b.....d. Who wants to feel that your lover is embarrassed to be seen with you as a boy friend? I know that is how she felt. I felt completely different. I was trying to protect myself from getting too close and getting hurt again. Any time I started feeling close to her, I’d break up. I couldn’t let her break up with me and hurt me. I was a terrible, terrible person. Please forgive me.
This went on for years till we got married. She stayed with me because she lacked self-confidence. Everyone, her mother included and all her friends thought she was crazy. Well, they were probably right, but I am glad she didn’t listen to them regardless of the heartache we have both caused each other. I think she never felt attractive. My wife is and always was incredibly beautiful.
Our marriage has been rocky to say the least. It didn’t start out that badly, but she always knew there were events in my life that I barely talked about that had damaged me emotionally. We had several children, I had a career I was trying to bury myself in, to find some success in something in my life. I failed. I was a university professor and I failed to get tenure. I wanted to try and maintain my research career somehow and a colleague offered me a place in his lab a couple of hours away. Rather than talk to my wife about this, I engineered that I couldn’t find a job locally, and more or less announced that my only option was to work in my friend’s lab 2.5 hours away. I worked there 4 days a week and was home 3 days a week. My wife refused to move so the job ended. There was a risk in moving as the funding was not guaranteed so she was probably wiser than I was. This was a huge breach in trust in our relationship. I had been telling my wife I couldn’t find a job locally. I was lying. I tried to only find a local position where I could maintain my research career. I did not try and find another job locally and stopped all together once I had arranged to continue my research career in my colleague’s lab. I am not trying to make myself look good at all here. I was a b.....d and not much of a husband.
As a failed research scientist, I started bouncing between jobs with various biotech companies. I eventually became a high school teacher, which I found enjoyment and fulfillment in, but it is not a prestigious job. My wife never avoided a chance to tell me what a failure and disappointment I was. I found something outside my marriage where there was fulfillment. I started playing online games, primarily one particular online role playing game. There I was successful, there I was respected, and in real-life I was increasingly becoming a failure. My wife became an angry, frustrated nag and took this out on everyone around her. She screamed at me, she screamed at our children. Our sex life went to zero. She felt her life was passing by without any fulfillment. She was reaching a mid-life crisis.
In early August she found an outlet. My wife is a tutor and she told me she was part of a tutor chat group. She started spending a lot of time with her iPad mini. During the day and in the evening she found something to chat about. On October 3rd my wife said she was reaching a crisis and hinted that she was finding online companionship. I was so repressed and unhappy with our marriage I acted stonefaced and chose not to confront this. She left angry. On 4 Oct. I came home from work and I tried to act like nothing happened. After all, if you act like nothing matters, it won’t hurt you right? My wife freaked out. She told me she was having sex online and implied it was just 2 guys, one from overseas and one from a northeastern state. I still thought they were from an online tutoring group and that things took an unexpected turn to sex chat. She wanted to force a crisis and finally decide whether there was anything in this marriage to save.
At that moment something in my life changed. I couldn’t respond, I was too repressed but my wife had brought home a 6-pack of a very strong beer (she was drinking a lot these days) so I started to drink. I am NOT a big drinker, not since college. In our marriage I doubt I drank enough to get drunk more than a half-dozen times in her presence (College was a different story, I drank a lot in college both before and after I met the woman I married but stopped as I got older and would maybe have a beer or glass of wine every day or every other day). I saw that I was going to lose her. Everything I had repressed started rolling out of me as I drank more. I was crying and trying to explain to her that I loved her but couldn’t tell her and that I didn’t want to live without her. One child is off to college, one child was out with friends and the last child was upstairs with headphones on while I cried and poured my heart out. She hugged and said she was so sorry about what she had done. I went upstairs and my wife went out to pick up the one child that was away and came back and we made love like we never had done before. There was a closeness and intimacy that was lacking for the last 20 years. The next morning she told me she was going to delete everything and never contact anyone again. She said she wanted to say goodbye to the 2 guys and ask them not to contact her again. She emailed them on the 6th, said goodbye deleted their correspondence.
That should be the end of this story, happily ever after.
That night we made love again. We were sort of like newlyweds in a way. I had trouble sleeping. My wife fell asleep. She was dreaming. She said a man’s name, not mine. I was so upset; I went downstairs. When she was pretending it was an online tutor group, she had bought an item on Ebay she said was from one of them. It was an old album, I found it and looked at the band member’s names—one had the first name she muttered. I freaked out. I started searching online, I found him. He looked like a successful research scientist, an assistant director of a research institute, he had a Ph.D. like I do, but he was not a failure. I was afraid that the crisis she mentioned was that she was going to leave me, the failure, for this guy, the success. I was in tears. I was up for hours. I had to work; I was distraught. I tried to go to bed but I was crying and my wife heard me and woke up. She asked what was wrong and I told her. She said she was so, so sorry and I went to work.
I couldn’t focus. My wife had made one mistake about the accounts she was using for her sex emailing, at this point that’s all I thought it was. She had left the account open, nothing incriminating on screen, but I had seen the email account name. I didn’t at the time know it was her sex chat account. I went to teach, I had a free period, and I started searching. I found the email address linked to Dreambooks: Adult Pen Pals website. She had lied to me about how this started. It wasn’t a tutoring chat group that went a rye. She had posted an ad looking for someone to send erotic emails to. I sent her 2 emails accusing her of lying and going to a “F… Site” telling her I wouldn’t be home till I talked to someone. She spent the day going from website to website deleting all of her accounts, trying to permanently delete both of her sex email accounts. It wasn’t just Dreambooks, but I didn’t know this yet. Again I freaked out, made an appointment with a therapist and didn’t come home till after I had spoken with her.
When I returned home, my wife offered to come clean. She told me about Dreambooks and that she had found her email sex partners through that website. She told me that she would tell me everything if I asked. I asked a few questions and got a few answers. I knew the names of the 2 guys, she suggested there were a couple of others that didn’t matter, that it was just sex and she had never touched anyone, never met anyone, never had any interest in meeting anyone. I thought it was all being done by email. But she was hiding things.
I let it go for a few days; things settled down. My wife had to visit her father who is ill and she took her mini so I didn’t get a chance to investigate it. I confirmed that her email accounts had been disconnected and that the guy from the northeast had disconnected his email account, I didn’t yet know the email addresses of any others so I figured that was that.
But I wondered.
I am quite handy with technology. My wife went out or a couple of hours with one of our children one evening after returning from NYC and left her mini. I accessed all backup files and found a message that while deleted from the notepad, still existed in the backup. The message was to the overseas guy talking about her adventures online that day that included several men and mentioned finding them at AM. AM is Ashely Madison, it’s a “F… site” for married people looking to cheat. At this point I confronted her again and asked her why she didn’t really come clean. She said it was because she was afraid she would lose me if I knew what she had done and that she had to be able to live with herself and she was so ashamed and asked me to let it go.
I couldn’t let it go.
I knew enough at this point that I figured I could reactivate both of her gmail accounts and take control of them. I did. She had tried to delete everything. For instance Hangouts Chat can be deleted on your computer, but guess what, if someone you had chatted with tries to contact you again, the entire chat history is reloaded from their computer. 2 guys had tried to contact her and when the account was reactivated, the chats were reloaded. I had the entire chat log of the overseas guy. They were chatting and “F…ing” most days from 22 Aug to 3 Oct. They would chat after she dropped one child off to school, she would chat after she came home from tutoring, she would chat at night when I was working. The overseas guy had figured out who she was in real life and besides “text F…ing” with her was advising her how to become a better sneak and not get caught. It was literally thousands and thousands of lines of their chat that I read through, in tears the whole time. I read it all. There was also a chat from another guy that ended with him asking about moving to Skype. The chat ended. I am not an idiot. I found and logged into her secret Skype account. My wife isn’t very creative with passwords. He wasn’t her only Skype contact. I had her ENTIRE web history, she hadn’t deleted the log of EVERY website she went to during the 7 weeks of her sneaking around. I knew everything, had every name, just not he content. It was so hurtful. On Oct. 1st my wife and I had gone out. We had had sex in the car on the way home. The next day she was bragging to the overseas guy she had a good day, got off 4 times and he was saying how Mrs. Horny’s husband should be happy as some trickled down to him. Now when we are together and she whispers something, I see it’s something she whispered before to some f…ing pixel that isn’t part of her real life. It is killing me.
I had told my wife I wouldn’t search anymore after the iPad note that mentioned AM. I lied. I am not proud. We had a big fight and I felt terrible. I thought she was going to leave me. I begged her not to leave me. I told her I would stop. So I stopped snooping. We are still together.

This was written about 2 weeks ago.

[healingme4me]

If you are both open to the suggestion, couples counseling can help rebuild from an affair.

It could have been much, worse, I'd imagine?

Keep talking, and try not to allow resentment to seep into what you are trying to overcome, together. I hope, there's brighter days, ahead for the two of you.

[timj]

The details should appear shortly healingme4me. My 5th post was a detailed background of myself and my marriage.

Yes, it could of been much worse. It only progressed to having cyber sex several times a day via chat and a couple of Skype encounters. She never met anyone in person and she told me she did not have any intent on meeting anyone in person. At least she said that in her chat with one of her sex partners. I gained control of her sex chat gmail account and read some of the chats that were not deleted including one of thousands of lines spanning a couple of weeks. Let me call this guy Sex Mentor because he had actually identified my wife in real life (She was not very good at not telling guys details that allow them to identify them if they want to. I know. I read her chat with Sex Mentor and plugged in 3 pieces of information she provided and in less than 10 seconds identified her) and was giving her advice about how to do a better job hiding her identity. In that chat she told Sex Mentor that she had never met anyone. She told me she never intended to meet anyone and that seemed to be confirmed in a chat that she never expected me to read.

But what started as a couple of erotic penpals blossomed into multiple chat encounters every day before things came to a crisis. They changed from email sex pals that lived far away to Skyping a local guy and having chat sex with anyone regardless of their location. Things were heading beyond what she told me. It was clearly snowballing out of control.

One of her penpals in particular worried and and still does. There was one guy she seemed to really care for on an emotional level. For instance, in her chats with Sex Mentor she said she was particularly intellectually compatible with him, she NEVER told him that she was having online sex with many other men and women as if she wanted to reserve the possibility to meet him and not have him know what else she was doing and she even figured out his real life name, job and location. Not things expected of some casual cyber encounter. This guy was email only and went on for at least 6 weeks.

So yes, things were bad, but could of been a lot worse.

[wife22]

easy accessibility and fast rewards may become addictive.
I suppose that what happened to both of you(gaming in different spheres).
If you are committed to each other you can save the marriage,but it will take lot of work to rebuild the trust you both lost. It is not easy to forget,but forgiving and working will help. You both have to commit to sharing your fears ,facing them instead of projecting them into addictive routine.
It will take a hard work to reconnect,understand and trust each other,but if you love -it worth it
god bless