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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I haven't posted on this thread because there's no there there.

I left my husband for another man when my daughter was 2. If I am being totally honest, I should never have married my ex. I should really never have gotten pregnant. It was what he wanted, not what I wanted, and while I love DD more than anything in the entire world, the honest truth is that our marriage was broken almost before it began and having a baby made everything that was bad worse.

As several other PPs have mentioned, it wasn't the affair. It wasn't any one thing. It was a 9-year pattern of disregard and emotional unavailability coupled with his belief that he could make up for that unavailability by spending money on our house or going on fancy vacations (during which he was also more or less unavailable due to "just wanting to relax").

All of that got worse when DD was born. There was a fundamental disconnect between what my ex was actually doing with her, with us as a family unit, with me as a couple, and what he believed he was doing. I could have been more assertive. I could have been nicer. I could have been a lot of things. But so could he. We could both have been better partners to each other, and maybe that would've made up for the fundamental differences that made us not great as a couple. Maybe not.

I became emotionally involved with someone who we were both friends with. He was also married, though separated for reasons I was not even really aware of until fairly recently. How did the emotional affair start? Gradually. It's a pattern of gradually investing more emotional energy in a different person. For me, that investment was partially in response to my husband's emotional neglect and partially in response to my friend himself. I like to think that if we met 15 years earlier, we would probably have ended up exactly where we ended up, but there is no way to know what would have happened.

We saw each other for lunch pretty regularly, and when I realized that I was falling in love with him, I talked to him about it. To my delight and horror, he was feeling the same way about me. We talked about what to do. He made it very clear that if it was what I wanted, he would step back and be a supportive platonic friend of my marriage. He also made it clear that if it was what I wanted, he would marry me and love me for the rest of my life. We kissed a bit, but that was as far as it went.

It took me about a month to figure out how to talk to my ex about it. I wish that conversation had happened earlier, but when it finally happened, it was actually a pretty good conversation. My ex was sad. He was angry. But he didn't go crazy. He didn't make threats. He continued being exactly the person he was before - methodical and cold. We came up with a plan about how to tell DD and who would go where. I moved into an apartment nearby and took DD to get new furniture for her "new room."

My former AP/now DH and I got married a little over 2 years after my first husband and I separated. We took it slow and gradual. Many of the things that the dream-filled former AP posted above about the first days of love were true for us. Neither of us was naive enough to believe that those things were just how our relationship would be, but we have been married for 5 years now, and things are still dreamy like that a lot of the time.

My ex and I share custody. He is remarried and has a baby. We have a cordial but distant relationship. His wife doesn't like me (I assume because he told her "She left me for him"), and I respect their relationship and keep my distance. She loves my DD, and that has always been the most important thing. We work out schedules for holidays, which frankly are not terribly different than the schedules my ex and I had to work out about his parents vs. my parents. She and I went to a few of DD's school events last year. Both of our husbands were traveling and not able to make it. We laughed about some of the Things That Dads Worry About with their young daughters. We took silly pictures and sent them to the dudes. That happens maybe once a year and doesn't lead to hair-braiding BFF utopia, but we are adults and manage to act like adults.

The reason I am posting this is that this situation is 1000% the exception to the rule. I am literally the only person I know who has built a relationship out of an affair - emotional or otherwise. That just isn't usually what happens. People who are caught up in affairs are not thinking rationally - about their marriages, about their relationships with their APs, about how their kids will handle it, etc. Then you get caught up in the horror of divorce, which makes monsters out of good people no matter what's going on to cause it.

If you think your life will be a cake walk after you divorce, and that is something that you need to believe to sustain the hard work that is doing the right thing and leaving someone instead of cheating on them for years, then do so recognizing that the cake walk is hard work too. And is basically a unicorn.[/quote]

Wow. Your post is so well-written. Your first marriage sounds a lot like mine. Except mine ended in my ex cheating and leaving, not after he left a trail of destruction behind. I have no idea if he and AP are together or not. I run into her on occasion and choose to look the other way.

But, anyway, you sound mature and like such a lovely person (non-sarcastically). I'm glad you found a good and happy ending and that things are well for you. [/quote]

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