SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Nothing will change in your situation unless/until you are ok with divorce as an option. It doesn’t sound like you are there. The type of person your WW is, won’t lift a finger unless her future could be severely disrupted. None of this is ideal, but it’s what you have to work with.

If nothing you do gets the intimacy that you need you should look outside your marriage for fulfillment. I’m talking about emotional intimacy as well as sexual intimacy. If your wife cannot or will not provide it there’s nothing you can do except for yourself and not for the marriage. We cannot change another human being. She might do some surface changes, but it sounds like she is in entrenched in the life that she’s had all these years.
If you want something different, you’ll have to find it somewhere else. My suggestion is to get as healthy as you can at 73 and then go for it. Do you like gardening, do you like hiking, do you want to join a book club? Do you like to ride bikes. How about chess. There are so many things that you can look around and find of interest. It’s just a matter of making yourself go look. You can choose to stay "married" or separate. In this case there is no right or wrong way. It’s what gives your life meaning, purpose and love.
Bigger is right. She does not appear to meet the definition of a ws. She appears to be a closed off personality. I am going out on a very shakey limb here. Could she be on the spectrum? They sometimes have difficulty with deep emotional connections. If you see no empathy or sympathy she might have some sociopathic leanings. Human beings are across the universe in emotions. Some need constant nurturing which feels smothering to others. I see a 73 year old man who needs nurturing and isn’t getting it. It’s up to you how you go about it.

He is on his fourth marriage. He married his first wife about the time my wife and I got back together. It lasted about 5 years. His second lasted less than a year his third lasted maybe 15 years. He has been married to his current wife about 10 years.

I have not spoken to him about all this. I have thought about it but have held out hope that my wife and I could get past this without involving anyone else. Interestingly he stopped communicating with the family about 2 months ago. In my information vacuum I wondered if my wife told him I found their letters and he is laying low to see how I react. This is total speculation

I agree with OhitsYou’s comment about my wife not moving unless I do something to threaten her security. That is my struggle now and I am getting closer to a decision. The irony is that if she heals it will have to be without me.

When I first started looking into attachment styles I wondered if it was pathological. The answer is probably not. For her it is likely a learned behavior. Again without professional help we will never know. The things I do know are that her behavior towards me has gotten much worse over time but she is the perfect host and companion to friends and other family. When I found the letters her downturn became dramatic but again only with me. These types of things are what convinces me that she is hiding a secret that still matters. I have set a personal goal to bring this to some kind of conclusion after the holidays. I am about at the end of my rope

Inkhulk…frigid? That word is an insult. From a gynecologist.

Inkhulk post #18:

But you also may "just" have a cold wife. Dealing with a faithful but frigid wife is really not our speciality.

I do get what you are saying InkHulk, but I am coming to see that there is hardly such a thing. The so-called frigid woman is indeed quite hot-blooded inside her igloo, she just will not show that side of herself to her husband--all too often her *betrayed* husband.

OP, I don't think concerning yourself with your WW's attachment style is at all helpful to you. It is most likely a crutch. It is much MUCH easier on our psyches to believe that our WW is the way she is because she is a dismissive-avoidant or whatever, than because of lives were a lie. Again I am really sorry that you are finding all this about the last 53 years of your life, especially now the most wonderful time of the year....but if you move you can maybe make the next chapter the most wonderful time ... for YOU.

I am curious about the timeline of your relationship with WW. How exactly did you and she get back together? And what did she tell you for breaking up with you in the first place?

post #22:

If nothing you do gets the intimacy that you need you should look outside your marriage for fulfillment. I’m talking about emotional intimacy as well as sexual intimacy. If your wife cannot or will not provide it there’s nothing you can do except for yourself and not for the marriage. We cannot change another human being. She might do some surface changes, but it sounds like she is in entrenched in the life that she’s had all these years.

I trust you are telling the OP to divorce first, right?

If you want something different, you’ll have to find it somewhere else. My suggestion is to get as healthy as you can at 73 and then go for it. Do you like gardening, do you like hiking, do you want to join a book club? Do you like to ride bikes. How about chess. There are so many things that you can look around and find of interest. It’s just a matter of making yourself go look. You can choose to stay "married" or separate. In this case there is no right or wrong way. It’s what gives your life meaning, purpose and love.

This post is well-intentioned no doubt, but the one big problem here, not acknowledged, is that his WW is a serious pain in his side who keeps re-injuring him. Going hiking or gardening will hardly bring the OP joy if at the end of the day he keeps coming back inside to the Shrew-Lady.

After a bad breakup, nevermind something this bad, it takes a lot just to get through the day, making sure to be eating properly and getting decent sleep. New avenues are wonderful but at the beginning you have to really push yourself to do them, anything beyond basic self-care in fact. And this is all with No-Contact w the toxic ex, not seeing her on a daily basis and getting reinjured.

Bigger is right. She does not appear to meet the definition of a ws. She appears to be a closed off personality. I am going out on a very shakey limb here. Could she be on the spectrum? They sometimes have difficulty with deep emotional connections. If you see no empathy or sympathy she might have some sociopathic leanings. Human beings are across the universe in emotions. Some need constant nurturing which feels smothering to others. I see a 73 year old man who needs nurturing and isn’t getting it. It’s up to you how you go about it.

Are you kidding me? This is TEXTBOOK infidelity. At the very least, WW kept from OP relevant secrets about herself and their lives together, and she kept those secrets with another man. Including: She made OP sit at the table all these years with her past lover, with OP in the dark. Good grief!

Closed-off personality? What about her steamy letters to her lover?

By the way, I don't think Bigger even wrote a post on this thread, but that is neither here nor there.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 2:48 PM, Sunday, November 30th]

IMHO, this can reasonably viewed as a form of betrayal, particularly her complete unwillingness to simply talk to help mitigate your pain. But if OP said he didn’t see it that way, I think that could be reasonable as well.

I just was a little concerned that you came to an infidelity forum from an AI prompt and are quickly talking about life altering decisions. If it is with open eyes, then so be it. Maybe I’ll just suggest you pause and reflect and make sure you know your own heart and mind clearly. Wish you the best.

I think you can put it to your wife in very simple terms: either she is honest and forthcoming with you about her relationship with her brother or the marriage is over. And if the marriage is over, you’re going to be honest with your family about why.

She is going to accuse you of blackmail, but it’s not. After over half a century of marriage and building a life with you based on lies and omissions, the very least she can do is give you the truth. And if she can’t do that for you, then your kids and grandchildren are entitled to an explanation as to why the core family unit— you and your wife as a couple— is splitting a part.

I also think that all your assumptions about this relationship have been on the money thus far. Your wife has been emotionally unavailable to you because she belonged to someone else. She dumped you in HS for him and got back together with you either after he ended the relationship or she was forced to by her parents. Her mother was happy she got engaged to you because it meant the whole sordid business might be in the past, and her father was quiet and sullen because he knew it was a sham.

As for the other man, I don’t know what the circumstances are of how he came to be a part of your wife’s family, but I think it’s safe to assume that he came from a screwed up family of origin and that he has trouble sustaining relationships (as indicated by his 4 failed marriages). There’s little doubt in my mind that your wife is a big reason for this, either because they were still involved with each other (emotionally or sexually) and the fact that she kicked off a sexual relationship with him when he was 15 and he was 18.

For a garden-variety adultery situation, I wouldn’t advise confronting the other man, but in this case, I don’t see what you have to lose by asking what happened if you’re not getting the answers you want from your wife.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 6:03 PM, Sunday, November 30th]

What BluerThanBlue post #31 just above said. All of it. Your WW needs to understand that this is NOT going away and that some very hard conversations are coming.

Your marriage, even what you thought was your marriage before you discovered those letters, has been bad, with a bad disengaged wife. What you just found out however, means that it was actually a sham, where your WW was still in an affair. Yes, keeping this secret from you means that your WW is STILL unfaithful. She put your brother-in-law before you with them in the bubble together of this dark secret, with you OUT of their bubble. But in addition to that, she was likely at least still actively pining for her stepbrother, if not actually having sex with him. So I hardly see how you can continue with this charade, no matter what WW does from here on out. So you will have to leave, and your children and adult grandchildren will need to know why, as this affects them as well.

Yes, leaving WILL hurt much more in the short-term...but MUCH better days will be in store.

And yet....filing for D, you are still not there yet. If you do not feel that you have the full truth to your satisfaction--her full disclosure which will have to include a polygraph for it to be considered as such--then far as I can see you will NOT be able to continue with her in your most likely sham marriage.You cannot guarantee you will stay after the full truth, but you need the full truth to even CONSIDER staying. And meanwhile, as family gatherings will have to look much different going forward, your children and grandchildren will need to be appraised of this situation in this case as well.

We dated about a year Kid stuff nothing heavy. Near the end of our junior year 1968 she told me she wanted to breakup with me because I was "too nice". We still moved In similar circles and saw each other periodically. she was always friendly. The odd thing was that she never publicly dated anyone else through high school 1970. We went to different colleges about 80 miles apart. I saw her in fall of 1970 when I met her, the brother and her sister at a football game. She and her brother sat together on one side and her sister an I sat on the opposing side. When we met after the game he was drunk but she seemed to be sober. I didn’t see her again until. Spring of 1972. I was visiting her sister at their parents house when a guy came to the door. My wife walked through the den and out the door without saying a word to anyone. The guy must have need 10 years older than her. Her sister turned to me and said "that was her boyfriend. He’s a jerk." She had recently left school and was living at home.

The next time I saw her was fall of 1972. I had visited her sister at her sisters apartment and was surprised when my wife answered the door. Her sister wasn’t home but she invited me in. We talked and she went with me to dinner. A week or so later I call her and asked her to attend a concert with me. She said that she was already going to the concert with the other guy but that was going to be her last time to see him. She said she would call me when she got back from the concert. She called me about 10:00 the night of the concert and we talked until after midnight. That was when we got back together. I asked her to marry me in March of 1973. When we told her parents that we were engaged her mother suggested that we marry in June. Which we did.

All of this seemed perfectly normal 55 years ago but looks pretty twisted when I put it all together today. I was in love and at best naive and at worst stupid.

Someone ask what kind of family the brother came from. It was a wreck. He has 3 brothers and a sister. Their father abandoned them while very young. His mother was murdered when his was 12. The kids were split up into foster homes the older brother was a criminal from a young age and is in prison for life. the younger brother and sister were abused by an uncle. The younger brother seems fine but the sister has been in a nursing home for years due to drug abuse. When he came to live with my wife’s parents he was a walking wound. Perfect to be healed by a 17 year old girl who lived in the shadow of an older sister that could do no wrong.

Wait, so you were dating her sister at the time? How did the breakup with her go?

To InkHulks concern about coming to this sight from an AI prompt and quickly moving to a life altering decision.

Your concerns are well founded. I started with solo counseling. I got a lot of questions but none were anywhere near as thought provoking as the ones that have been asked on this forum. The counselor offered no guidance as to how to move toward a decision. It began to seem pointless.

As far as the life altering decisions, I have been struggling to put all of this in perspective for 10 years. The discovery of the letters just made it al more real and urgent by raising even more questions. I have been in turmoil for 6 months with nowhere to turn. You are right I don’t know my own heart but I am finally getting input that may help me determine what I really feel. I am in no hurry to blow up my life but I know that I can’t continue down this road.

Thanks to all for you comments. They help.

Oh no. I never dated my wife’s sister. She has been a close friend since we were in the ninth grade. She and her husband of 53 years are my dearest friends to this day. The sister dated lots of guys but I was never one of them.

Won’t be fooled, I am going to h/j to explain my response. We are discussing life altering decisions with a 73 year old man who has obligations and years and years of living one way. Now he is having to look at a life he thought he knew and what to do. It has to be scary as hell to contemplate breaking up a home, a family. My suggestions look anemic but they were made with idea of him easing into a life outside of his marriage one step at a time. And of course I mean no longer with his wife if he is looking for physical intimacy. We can’t help him with outrage. We need to give him options…and hope, and things to look forward to.

The letters are not a threat to your marriage, her lack of emotional intimacy is. If she was emotionally invested or, if she had the emotional intelligence, the requisite skills to intervene, she could, most likely, help you contextually process this revelation.

How was your initial approach to her with your discovery? Was it confrontational? Could it have put her on defense? She seems unnecessarily defensive-guarded over a past and long dead relationship. Could it be shame, embarrassment?

Also, many people do protectively compartmentalize their previous relationships. They very carefully, neatly package up that chapter of their lives. It’s all their own, it’s intimately private, tucked safely away, and yes, even cherished, but not necessarily more so than their current chapter with you. The chapter they’ve followed through with.

She was only 16, him 18. Adolescence, a very melodramatic phase in a life, characterized by heightened emotional reactivity. My love letters during that phase in my life are nauseating, embarrassing to read now with over the top anthems and declarations of love that seem almost ridiculous now in the context and the scope of my life.

The scope and context of your life together is decades of marriage, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren…

Now, I don’t mean to dismiss your concerns, at all. I too would be very troubled by this discovery and her response, especially in light of your past and current marital situation.

It’s not your fault you stumbled upon this discovery. I believe you are indeed entitled to a caring response from her. It’s the lack of care, or seeming lack of care, and perhaps empathy, that is at the heart of the matter. I would never let someone I deeply love and care about feel like they are "Plan-B", a consolation prize and would do everything in my power to help them navigate-process this, especially if it’s truly contextual.

[This message edited by RealityBlows at 1:18 AM, Monday, December 1st]

To RealtyBlow point:

You are right the letters were never the point. I never cared about the affair after all it did happen 55 years ago. What I care about is that she chose her old secret affair over the well being of our 53 year marriage and that of her husband. She let me twist in the wind for the past 6 months acting like nothing ever happened. Even if she told me the whole truth today I doubt that our marriage would ever recover.

You ask if my approach towards her was confrontational. The answer is not for the first 30 seconds. When she denied writing the letters I got angry. Then she brushed off my concerns as being overly dramatic. She finally arrived at it was just none of my business. I was angry broken hearted and emotionally crushed all at the same time. Yes I was confrontational.

You are also right that I am an old man. All I ever wanted was closeness, a warm touch and shared feelings both good and bad. In short a connection. I do not see a path forward where any of that can happen. I have a lot to think about.