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If this affair was sub/dom dynamic, and if it's true that in such dynamics, it is the sub who holds the full power, then it was Mrs. Asp , who had the most power during her affair. It's possible that she never respected and cared about AP. I don't think in s/d dynamics sub has to respect dom (correct me if I am wrong). I think the sub just needs to feel safe around dom to have such dynamic. She felt safe doing it with AP because of a).He is married man, and so he won't do anything that would jeopardize his marriage.

b).He won't be judgmental of her.

So, yeah, he could very well be just an outlet for her 'darker impulses'.

c). AP was never part of "society" that sexually suppressed her to become the "good girl". She didn't need to be good in front of him.

The bigger problem here is that some of the tasks she performed were clearly meant to cuckold her husband. I don't believe she is that dumb to not realize what these tasks actually meant. Since she had carried maximum power during her affair, she could have easily said 'no' to such acts or lie about doing them. But, she didn't. She had no problem performing them. She seems to have experienced some sick sexual pleasure doing these tasks. These kinds of things don't usually happen in many affairs. Cheaters tend to keep their partners invisible during their affair to escape the guilt of it and keep the affair fantasy alive. But, here, that is not the case. She actively involved her husband unbeknownst to him. These things usually happen when cheaters carry lots of resentment against their partners.

Mrs.Asp said she had to suppress her 'sexual urgers' because of "society" which also included her husband. It's possible that she carried resentment against society for suppressing her and forcing her to be the "good girl". Since society also included her husband, she might have carried some resentment against him too without realizing it. This resentment burst out during her affair.

She, possibly, didn't respect her husband during her affair. That's why it was so easy for her to perform such acts for a long time.

My theory is this, this whole affair was not about her and her AP. It wasn't about the dynamics between them. It was about her, as a wife and OP, as a husband. She resented the kind of dynamics that existed before her affair between OP, as a husband and her, as a wife. Because, in her mind, OP I.e the husband suppressed her sexually with the dynamics they shared in their marriage. She wanted to change it without actually changing it, if it makes sense. This affair was S/D dynamic. But the actual sub here was the husband, and dom was her. And there was no consent. She denied him sex. She cuckolded him. She tried to sexually control/ suppress him. She used AP as an excuse to do that. She could easily blame him for those acts.

But, eventually, the guilt caught up to her. She was somehow (lockdown, APs lack of interest, IC etc) able to free herself from this toxicity and truly realize what she has done. She confessed on her own and didn't trickle the truth. We can not ignore this fact. This must account for something. She was abusing her husband during the affair. But, she was able to end this abuse somehow. May that's what she meant when she said, "You won" that he is free of her abuse.(I know this interpretation of what she said could be too much of stretch from me). She definitely hates what she had become during her affair. A 'deviant' monster who abused her husband. She knows that very well. She could be in this misguided belief that if she sexually opened up, she would end up abusing OP again. That could be the reason behind her after affair denial to sexually open up. It's just a theory. I could be wrong.

I don't believe OP as individual was ever a part of the 'society' that suppressed her. But, in her mind, 'husband'is part of that 'society'. So, OP was part of that 'society' as a husband. If OP was the AP here then I don't think she would mind sexually opening up to him.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 11:35 AM, Saturday, March 25th]

LurkingSoul -

Let's not romanticize things here. There was no "freeing herself" from the A/AP. Lockdown happened and the physical ended bc of that, and then AP lost interest.

No lockdown, no end of A.

GoldenR: lockdown did end eventually. It was inevitable. She could have resumed her affair after lockdown was over. Many cheaters did resume their affairs after lockdown was over. There was absolutely no reason for her to confess on her own if she wanted affair to continue or wanted to carry this secret to her grave. She didn't have to confess and destroy her carefully crafted image as "good girl, wife and mother" in front of everybody. Lockdown, disinterested AP, etc etc whichever the reason maybe, she did end the affair and confessed of her indiscretions on her own. That doesn't mean she should be forgiven. That's entirely up to OP to decide. I do feel she is remorseful and that is the only reason she confessed but she just yet doesn't understand the depth of her cruel acts and how deep they cut down her husband. I don't even know she will ever understand that.

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 7:02 PM, Saturday, March 25th]

Just got caught up on your thread and must say, its quite stunning on a number of fronts. The speed at which it grows is one. I started reading last night, went to bed, got up early and it was still growing. Quite a debate your story has sparked.

First of all, I want to express my condolences to you on the loss of your marriage at your CW's hands. No matter what path you take, the original M has been burned to ash, but as I like to say, even ash can be repurposed to mix into cement and poured into a new foundation if the Betrayed is willing (a huge "if") and the CS is 100% remorseful and willing to put in exponentially more effort than the BS. A new M can be formed as I have read from the attestations of others. I personally never experienced true reconciliation and it compounded my pain every single day that I remained, but I was young(ish) and foolishly thought I had enough resolve for both of us. What ended up happening was mere existence and pretty much a burned out spot that represented almost a decade of my life's timeline. I was like Neo in the Matrix when he was stuck in the no mans land of the train station. Suffice it to say its no way to live.

Sir, I must tell you that I wince a lot reading your story as well as the comments here. My betrayal was a one and done (90% sure) but was compounded by the fact that the marital treason was committed by my then wife and supposed best friend (et tu Brute?). When I read of a year and a half of your CWs horrendous acts and subsequent twisted and sub par efforts to R with you, I ask myself, how long can he do this?

The pain of the A is one thing and it is huge. The contortions you are putting yourself through to attempt R are another thing entirely. Its like reading a live account of water torture and I am yelling "Stop, you're killing him!"

Im not sure Ive read of more mental gymnastics and psychological mechanations to try and explain the moral morass that is the soul of a CS. At this point, there is an integrity gap in her that is the size of the Royal Gorge and the attempt is being made to fill it in one shovel full at a time. Its exhausting to read and cant imagine the tread that is being taken off the tires of your life (please excuse the mixed metaphors but they are apropos imo).

I dont have anything to add to the arguments on display here as to the thinking and motivations of your CW and dont even want to try. Its a rabbit hole to me with no resolution available and quite frankly, exhausting in and of itself. I mean, Dom/Sub theories to help explain her moral bankruptcy? Hell, if true, it'd terrify me even more to run, not walk away.

My only thoughts are for you. How long can you keep this up? Why even try? When have you paid enough in blood sweat and tears? Do you consider yourself worthy of far better than this in love, loyalty, affection and passion? Important questions that only you can answer. All I can say is that from your own written account, the costs are piling up into a huge defecit. I think of Wall Street, Money Never Sleeps where Jake's (Shia Labeouf) friend is yelling on the phone, "Sell, sell!" as his losses mount.

I am glad you stopped the MC and moved her out of your bed. Maybe its time to take the next step toward moving her out of of your life, truly healing, and building a life on the other side of this disaster. This I can attest to. Been married now for decades to an amazing woman who was also a survivor of a brutal betrayal. Life is good...strike that...life has been great on this side.

All the best to you Sir, regardless of what you decide.

Does any ws respect their BS while they are lying to them,and fucking someone else? And,in this case, taking partially naked pics,while their unaware BS is in the background, and sending them to the AP?

If that's respect,I'd hate to see what disrespect looks like.

In order to be a WS, you have to have some twisted views of how the world works. Often your own perspective is off base and there is a poor understanding of self. Affairs are rarely as simple as wanting to get off. Are there some? Sure, but I find them to be the exception and not the rule.

I think I can understand AN’s WW saying that she respected him. Unfortunately I think she is conflating respect with caring deeply about what he thinks of her. Respect is and action she gives towards him. Caring deeply about his opinion is much more about her.

I don’t think anyone here would disagree that her actions demonstrate a tremendous amount of disrespect towards AN.

It is clear that AN’s wife has a lot of work to do to figure out not just who she is sexually, but as a person. It boggles my mind when people say the why’s are bullshit but then expect instant change. How can change occur without some serious brutally honest digging of what makes you tick? You can not have authentic change without doing that kind of work.

People don’t need therapy to act out, behave like assholes, and self destruct. They need IC to figure out who they really are and learn to find healthy ways to cope and mange life.

I pointed this out before but I feel like people keep ignoring it... AN tells us in the first post that his WW has done everything we normally would say a wayward needs to be doing to R except for dealing with her sex hangups. This and his love for her have kept him in the game, trying to R.

Many people would have heard of the depth of this betrayal and chosen D. AN did not. He chose to try to R. It may not work out for him but he has been willing to try. That is the context here. A WW that deeply betrayed her husband, has a lot of shame around her sexual desires but has done a lot right post DD too. Now he is pushing for what he needs in the bedroom and there is a hint of progress from her as she is accepting to try to deal with her issues on sex. She has made progress in other areas, it is possible that she will with this too. If she doesn't, AN will have a decision to make about D. Instead of helping him think through how to make progress I feel like many people are just pointing out that his wife betrayed him deeply so just D her already. It's a legitimate point of view but how much of that does he need to hear when he has already committed to try to see of this can be fixed?

My other observation is that the level of assumptions being made about her intent is really over the top in this thread. There is no doubt she drove a sexual dagger very deep into the marriage. But some posters don't seem to be able to acknowledge that the human sex drive can be a very complicated thing. Your experience with sex may be very different from the next person's. Sure, his WW could be a malicious, intentional, cruel, cuckolding woman who reveled in deeply hurting AN and got off on it. That is possible. It's also possible that she just went down a rabbit hole for herself and never really considered AN, how he felt or what might happen if he found out. Just like so many waywards do in so many affairs. Intent and impact are often not aligned in life. Logic doesnt explain everything, particularly in situations like this.

A WS who demands reconciliation exclusively on their terms, refuses to take accountability for their own actions, and demands a return to the "status quo" without any regard for how the needs and feelings of their BS is not a model WS, no matter how many other checkboxes they tick off.

AspectNorth clearly loves his wife and wants to remain married to her. If she just validated his feelings and tried to meet him halfway, he would probably be much less anxious and ambivalent than he is today. But as it stands, it’s her way or the highway.

The only thing for AN to do at this point is decide whether this relationship, as it is today, is acceptable or not.

I always see where it's said that the WS just wasn't thinking about their spouse during the A, didn't think about ramifications on them.

My reply to that is if that were the case then they'd cheat right out in the open. They're hiding the affair bc they don't want their BS to catch them. That in itself shows that they are very much considering them during the A.

Hiding the affair while wrapped up in your own fantasy world and deliberately reveling in hurting your spouse are two different things.

Actually, I think quite a bit of this particular scenario has been SOP for extramarital affairs. There's been an effort by some to make it sound like the worst case we've ever heard of or something, but as cheating stories go, it's not substantially different or worse than others. WS's are messed up people and they do messed up things, hence our presence here. That doesn't mean people can't change and grow. I've seen it happen.

A WS who demands reconciliation exclusively on their terms, refuses to take accountability for their own actions, and demands a return to the "status quo" without any regard for how the needs and feelings of their BS is not a model WS, no matter how many other checkboxes they tick off.

Well, that's one way of reading it. Another might be that she doesn't like oral sex and then had the temerity to say so. It doesn't matter that she's tried it before, when, or with whom. What matters is that it's not her preference.

Another might be that she doesn't like oral sex and then had the temerity to say so. It doesn't matter that she's tried it before, when, or with whom. What matters is that it's not her preference.

What matters is that it's not her preference WITH OP. There. I fixed it for ya. It’s proven that it WAS her preference with AP.

No doubt another excuse for WW is coming shortly from CT.

It’s this humiliation I’m talking about and that includes what AN’s WS did.

It doesn’t break everyone’s code, but it breaks mine

That’s fine. I’m with you 100% that there’s a small group that can deal with what happened. A slightly larger group that would even try.

Here’s my thing, there’s been a lot of stuff in this thread that has been manipulative. Attempts to manipulate AN. Repeatedly asking him to picture WS and AP doing it. Casting her actions in the worst possible light, based on zero facts. Telling him that she should not be forgiven (and by extension anyone who would forgive is wrong).

He’s already been manipulated by the WS, now he gets it here. Social pressure. When people manipulate, they almost always do it for their own reasons.

The WS and the Madonna/whore thing…it wouldn’t exist without social pressure and manipulation either.

I try to ask myself when I post, am I communicating, or am I manipulating? It can be a hard line to walk, especially if you get at all emotionally invested in the story, if it resonates with your own.

If this affair was sub/dom dynamic, and if it's true that in such dynamics, it is the sub who holds the full power, then it was Mrs. Asp , who had the most power during her affair.

Yes... and no. The illusion of relinquishing control unlocks the floodgates for the sub. There's supposed to be a healthy dom on the other end of the process, one who is aware of the "sub frenzy" hormones that wash through the sub and make them practically willing to jump off a cliff if they're told to. The recklessness and dissociation from consequences can be severe. If the dom is just an asshole juicing off their own power fetish, the sub can get badly hurt, all the while begging for more. That doesn't absolve the sub for their voluntary participation in whatever acts they commit; if a sub robs a bank on a dom's orders, they are still accountable. But it's not just playacting, either. People will do things under the influence of a dynamic that they wouldn't in other circumstances, just like being drunk or drugged will lower inhibition.

I see a tendency on this thread to treat posts saying "I understand this broken thinking" as equivalent to "You should forgive the outcome of that thinking." The two are separate. Some people see the acts as so heinous that it's a waste of time to even try to understand the motivation. That's fair. Honestly, if my spouse got off on inflicting deliberate harm on me at the AP's direction, I don't think I'd be able to get past that. I might understand the scenario and believe in his remorse, but we wouldn't even get as far as debating what he was and wasn't willing to do to make it up to me. I think that would be my personal line in the sand.

The reality, thankfully for me, is that I haven't had to test that boundary. How many members here said, "I always believed that if my partner cheated, the relationship would end then and there?" The reason this site exists is that life after D-Day is usually more complicated than we imagined. We're here because people realize, in a mixture of shock and grief and hope and hopium, that it's worth trying to find out if there's something left to save. And AN isn't me. He doesn't have to be. My line in the sand may not be the same as his, and that's ok. He has to live with the consequences of his decision, and I do not.

Understandably, all of us here are going to have advice for fellow members that is informed by our own experience. The posters I admire most are the ones who say "Here's what I did, here's where I went wrong, here's why and how I would do things differently, and here's what I advise you to do." I especially admire those posts when I'm aware of that member's history and the Herculean effort they are expending to respect the OP's agency to make their own choices. I sometimes get frustrated by cut-and-paste responses of "here's the only viable option for anyone in your situation." I always get frustrated by attempts to shame or bludgeon members into that course of action because the speaker believes that their motivation justifies anything they choose to say.

AN wants to understand why his WW did what she did. I feel I can help with that. What he does with that information is up to him. I'm not advocating for him to give her another chance; I'm responding to his information-gathering request. Maybe he'll conclude, as I believe I would in his situation, that the damage was too grave to come back from. His WW has acknowledged that she wouldn't blame him if he did. It sounds like he's working towards either giving her a fair chance to rebuild or cutting her loose. That's all that can be asked of any BS, IMO.

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 5:21 PM, Saturday, March 25th]

the level of assumptions being made about her intent is really over the top in this thread

From both BS and WS.

I pointed this out before but I feel like people keep ignoring it... AN tells us in the first post that his WW has done everything we normally would say a wayward needs to be doing to R except for dealing with her sex hangups. This and his love for her have kept him in the game, trying to R.

Many people would have heard of the depth of this betrayal and chosen D. AN did not. He chose to try to R. It may not work out for him but he has been willing to try. That is the context here. A WW that deeply betrayed her husband, has a lot of shame around her sexual desires but has done a lot right post DD too. Now he is pushing for what he needs in the bedroom and there is a hint of progress from her as she is accepting to try to deal with her issues on sex. She has made progress in other areas, it is possible that she will with this too. If she doesn't, AN will have a decision to make about D. Instead of helping him think through how to make progress I feel like many people are just pointing out that his wife betrayed him deeply so just D her already. It's a legitimate point of view but how much of that does he need to hear when he has already committed to try to see of this can be fixed?

Agreed. I also agree with a lot of other information on this thread. The only problem is that it is coming so fast at AN, that it is hard to digest it all.

Another 'problem', I believe, stems from the last two years. I can't even imagine the trance AN first experienced, yet alone finding his own footing. He was basically placed into a program, immediately, and taking the cues from his WW's councilor. Only after a long period of time has elapsed that AN is now feeling that he is only going to have to be his own advocate to get what he needs in this marriage to continue. I hate to say this, but it is almost like NOW is the starting point for him to attempt reconciliation. AN is now clearly stating that the old status quo, who Mrs. AN may have thought would be the best thing for her husband, is no longer acceptable. And to her credit(AND DISCREDIT, because her initial response was defensive), she is seeking therapy that may be acceptable to both parties. Not every male wants off-the-charts freaky-type sex, and AN has stated that is NOT his desire. Let's listen to what AN wants, instead of assuming what he wants as it pertains to his marriage.

Since when is oral considered off-the-charts freaky-type sex?

It's not, but AN specifically stated earlier that he was not interested in everything that AP and his WW did.

The DISCREDIT to Mrs. AN that I mentioned in my last post was specifically about the defensive response that WW said to AN when he said the status quo is no longer acceptable.

I do not think you’ll get enthusiastic oral sex from your WW. Make peace with that or leave.

It’s been three years. If she had that in her, you would know by now.

If that’s a problem for you, it’s ok to move on. It’s also ok to stay and decide that’s not a big deal.

She’s a flawed and fucked up person. Wishing otherwise doesn’t manifest into reality, and I’m sorry for that.

Who knows why she did what she did, and frankly who cares.

Live your life. It’s ok to move on. It’s simplistic to say you’re moving on because she won’t give oral. Do not minimize yourself like that.

It’s also ok to stay for other reasons (money, fear, it’s too hard, kids, etc.)

Time will help you decide this.