Questions about post EA world, esp NC issues...

[asymptomatic]

A highly-selective, highly-subjective abbreviated history:

 

We are “old people”—my wife in her early 50’s, I in my early ‘60’s. We have been married more or less happily for nearly 20 years, mostly “more”. No coital infidelity on either side that I know of. But it feels like there might have been a few EA’s in recent years. During the past two years or so, I began to see a pattern of secret lunches for my wife with two former bf’s (separately).

 

Each ex-bf had been sexually active with her a few months’ time during a 9-month period, many years ago, when she and I briefly broke up—about a year before we got back together again, then married. One of them had been a long-time non-romantic pal of hers, since they were in high school. The other was also someone she had known non-romantically, but only for a few years prior to their romantic/sexual involvement.

 

The short version is that I began to see a series of emails “inadvertently” left open from time to time which showed a pattern of mildly-sexual emails (video of a woman fellating the gearshift in a parked car, rather than the male driver—a European eyeglass commercial), photo of snow-sculpture of a six-foot high phallus, sexual jokes, sexual references to her with others in her past, etc.

 

I noticed that the only non-sexual emails seemed to be the ones in which my wife would ask when “he” was going to take her to lunch. Probably not literally true, but it seemed so to me! After noticing six or eight of these emails, I confronted her with the apparent problem. For several hours she completely denied the existence of any such emails.

 

Eventually she said maybe she never noticed the sexual images because she didn’t know how to download the attachments. Most of them were embedded in the body of the email and required no downloading. She eventually acknowledged that, as well.

 

After a number of difficult discussions, anger-filled on both sides, she finally admitted all. But she did hold on to the defense that nothing was going on, nothing sexual of any kind, they were just friends. They had been just friends before they were lovers, they had been lovers for a relatively short time, and now they were just friends again. But she pledged NC with all ex-bf’s—no phone calls, no emails, no meals together, no nothing. Within two weeks she was sending small, innocuous emails to each of them—I found out a couple of months later. Not good.

 

A few months after that, there was a rather elaborate ruse to cover up a private lunch with the “old friend” from high school. She told me she was meeting with a girlfriend. Turned out the girlfriend had asked nearly two weeks before to change the day for their lunch.

 

She scratched out the guy’s name in her schedule book after she became afraid I might have seen it in her book the evening before (which I had), and replaced it with the woman’s name (who had already cancelled two weeks before!). Again she denied all this for a day or so, then eventually cratered to the “evidence”. Renewed intense vow such lying would never happen again.

 

For about two years before this period we experienced some tough times—a huge financial reversal for me, followed by a health problem that nearly killed me. Both situations considerably improved now, but they definitely were ugly for a while. I am sure I was not the ideal companion in every way, every day! But I found myself pretty bummed out by what I thought looked to be a strong tendency for her to use EA’s to get through tough times.

 

I also felt the very intense lying about many elements of the relationships pretty much ruined any credibility about “nothing going on”. In retrospect, I can come fairly close to believing no sexual acting-out happened on a physical plane. But I did find it interesting there didn’t seem to be any such strong “reaching out” to other friends in this period, beyond her former lovers.

 

We have now spent nearly three years in counseling both separately and together. Much of it helped. She still does some individual therapy.

A few months back, after a lot of discussion, that she would not initiate any contact with these men ever again. If she had some accidental social contact, she would interact in a minimal way, just sufficient to be civil.

 

She seems to be about two-thirds of the way from the “I’m doing this as an accommodation for you, because it makes you nuts; and for no other reason, and I’m not at all happy about it” end of the spectrum to the “ I see, upon reflection, the danger inherent in this kind of activity. I agree the commitment to the primacy of my marital relationship means something other than a 51-49 ratio of intimacy with my husband to intimacy with my old lovers. I would benefit greatly from some ratio more like 99-1! In truth, maybe I might have benefitted earlier from reducing intensity of connection with my parents, as well as with these lads…”

 

One of these guys seems to have disconnected already. No sign of his contacting her (as far as I know!) for many months. But now, the rub! It turns out she has briefly contacted the other one, the high-school friend, on two occasions in the past couple of months—about the parent of a mutual hometown friend who had died.

 

I thought she could have left his knowledge needs to him to take care of! Especially since the information she sent him was public-domain newspaper material, that he was likely to come across himself! I told her I thought this was a violation of our “deal”. She somewhat agrees. Then a week ago, he emailed her to pick a day for lunch. She asked me how she should respond.

 

I asked her to tell me what she thought. She said she wanted to be “straightforward”. Basically she thinks she should explain to him in a phone call that she now feels their lunches together violate somehow the primacy of her relationship with me and maybe same for him with his own wife. I asked her to role-play with me such a conversation.

 

When I, as the other guy, asked her why she felt that way now, after so many years of lunches that didn’t lead to anything “unfaithful”, she didn’t have much of an answer. When I/he asked her if it would be ok to have lunches with her, if other people were also there, she thought maybe that would be ok, since it would put an “intimacy cap” on their conversations. In the “olden days”, I am sure I would have been angry! But, for the moment, my emotions feel as if they are manageable.

 

After all the above, my questions are these: Does it feel to anyone else that we would both be better off for her to give up “maintaining the friendship” with this guy? My thought is that the serial examples of quite elaborate, often pre-meditated, lying about her behavior with this guy suggest something like “NC means NC!”.

 

Does her hope to hold on to her relationship with him feel to you all like an alcoholic asking to go to the bar with a chaperone who has no incentive to be an effective chaperone, and is responsible to no one; at least definitely not responsible to me! Are there other mitigating circumstances I should be looking for or thinking of? I am not completely comfortable acting as her parole officer, but it often feels as if the alternative is that she goes to lunch with him a few times “chaperoned”, then one day the chaperone gets held up and misses the lunch, and she can’t find the courage to tell me. And the cyclone powers up again, havoc in the land!! I feel uncertain about my ability to endure the cycle many more times…

 

I just now thought of it as a math problem! Take her natural right to a certain amount of unshared (with me) life experience, which is (maybe) about equal in value to my right to expect her overt promise of fidelity to and primacy of our relationship above others to be kept (which would include not lying so importantly, so many times, about these other relationships). Then reduce the value of her right, as it applies to spending time alone or nearly alone or functionally alone with this guy (and the others, should the issue arise with them in the future) by the negative value of the blatant lying. Does she then lose her “right” to spend time with this guy?

 

Is there another, way better, way to look at this? Do you wish I would not write as if this were a “Bad Kerouac Contest” entry?

 

Thank you for any thoughts you can share…