pantheruspardus,
I am sorry that you were given a reason to search for a forum like this. You said:
I want to make the marriage work and we start counselling in a week.
I am saying this gently, but one person cannot make a marriage work. It takes two, who are fully committed, and who protect the relationship and their partner. The issue here is that your wife was not doing her part, so there was bound to be trouble, regardless of whether or not you were working 24/7 and ploughing 100% of your energy into the relationship. So please do not wear yourself out thinking it is your task to move mountains. It is your wife's task to do that, to convince you why you should remain with her, and why she is a 'safe' life partner for you after doing something as risky as she did with a complete stranger (unless there was more to this than she has revealed so far).
The general thinking here is that after infidelity occurs, it is better for the person who cheated, and sometimes for their betrayed partner too (if they are struggling) to have individual counseling, to work through their issues, before going to marriage counseling. People need to be 'fixed' as individuals before they can think about rebuilding a relationship damaged by betrayal, and two broken people are unlikely to combine to create a great relationship.
It’s never happened before but she was away, curious (we met so young and never had ‘loads of fun’), she had company and one thing led to another.
Given what has just happened, you need to ratchet back on your certainty that your wife has not done something like this before. This could be the first time, but it might also be the first time she got caught. Whatever the case, the fact that your wife drifted into something like this so quickly and easily, simply because she was apart from you, suggests that this was something that she had been thinking about for longer than just a plane ride. That is something she needs to explore and explain to you.
She is not a bad person, she is a wonderful mother and has been a good wife but she has broken my heart.
Again, I am saying this gently, and with compassion, but if you are going to rebuild any kind of new relationship with your wife, you need to take her off the pedestal you have put her on. We can all try to whitewash or airbrush something that a spouse, relative, or child has done, in an attempt to make it less bad or more palatable, but if the next stage of your relationship with your wife is going to survive, it has to have a sold foundation, based on the reality of who both of you are.
Erecting a stature to your wife and singing her praises after she cheats - and plenty here have done the same - is a form of denial. We do not want to accept that our perfect angel is actually a flawed person, with feet of clay, but we have to move towards that reality if we are going to remain with them. Your wife has a lot of investigating work to do about why her boundaries were poor, and why she was open to do what she did. If lack of experience was a valid justification, you would have done the same, but you did not. So why was it such a strong motivation for her? This is what she has to work on.
PLEASE NO JUDGING
I would hope no-one here who has been hit by the same bus that has just hit you would judge you. You are reeling in the aftermath of a recent revelation that has left you trying desperately to save everything that you thought was safe and guaranteed. Nobody has a right to judge you; we all reacted the way we did, and frankly, nobody knows how to deal with something like this when they feel like they are plummeting down a lift shaft. That is why this forum has tens of thousands of members, who all came here wanting help, answers, or just a sympathetic hearing.
I am sure we all had times we wished for a quick fix, a magic bullet, or some kind of shortcut back to something like the life we thought we had before everything changed. Nobody has found those. Reconciliation can be a long and bumpy road, and there is no way around that. All any of us can do is take things one day at a time, and make use of the resources that are out there.
Please take good care of yourself. If you find you have no appetite, and that you are not eating, pick yourself up the kinds of nutritional supplements and protein bars that dieters use. If your sleep is affected, go and talk to your doctor. If you have anyone around you that can offer support, open up to them. If you feel like you cannot do that, because you do not want those around you to know, you can post here, where you are anonymous, but in the company of many, many people who have walked down the same path you are on.
You are not alone.
[This message edited by M1965 at 7:41 PM, Saturday, October 22nd]