Seeking help due to adultery
Hi @acceptingbluejay891 would you like to expand more on what help you need?
I have been married for 13 years and blessed with 4 kids. Recently I had an affair with a colleague of mine for 6 months before deciding to stop as I hadn’t given her assurance that I was going to leave my family for her. She is currently filing for her 2nd divorce from an abusive husband. The first 3 months was intense as we shared our feelings with each other and little did we know that both of us had secret crushes of one another. Knowing that I won’t shy away from responsibility and at this stage she was looking for a stable partner who would love and care for her. I instantly ticked off all the boxes and had given her hope that I would end up with her. Slowly that hope started declining as I stopped giving her the assurance that I would be with her and making her feel like she was just a sidepiece and unfortunately I did treat her that way at times. I’ve met and been with her kids and her eldest son had also hoped that I could be what he wanted me to be and her youngest child who is 3 years old even started calling me daddy. I didn’t mine those labels as it struck with me well.
By the 5th to 6th month, I stopped contacting her all the time and avoided her for days as I was busy with my own family whereby I would usually contact her almost every hour via text or call. Seeing that rapid decline she then lost all hope and decided that it’d be best for us to end things seeing that it was going nowhere. Part of me was relieved as I didn’t think I could bear to leave my wife and family to start a new one. However as it’s still fresh in my mind I am starting to regret about ending the affair to the extent that I really do wanna leave it all behind to be with her. I break down at times thinking what could and should have been and to the point of revealing this to my wife hoping that it will end this marriage.
Thank you for sharing all of this. There really is a lot to unpack here, and it takes courage to put it all out like that.
Before we go further, I wanted to check in on something you mentioned, about revealing this to your wife in hopes of ending the marriage. Did you end up telling her? What happened after that?
I also want to gently reflect something back to you. It sounds like you’re caught between two very different kinds of pain right now.
- The grief of ending the affair
- The weight of what staying in your marriage means
But at some point, you’ll need to make a decision and commit to it, because staying in this in-between space is going to be hard on everyone, including yourself.
If you do decide that you want to work on your marriage, have you considered marriage counselling? It can be a really helpful space to process what’s happened and figure out a path forward together with your wife, especially with four kids in the picture.
Firstly, no I have not informed my wife of the affair as I fear of doing so. But part of me feels that I need to. But at this moment I am trying my best to not let the emotions get the best of me. I’ve strived to improve communication with my wife e.g video calling her whenever I am driving just to keep myself occupied not have unnecessary flashbacks. Although they do come and go at times and there is this sudden urge to just breakdown and cry out of a sudden. We have ended the affair fortunately but there is always this sudden urge to revert back. Firstly I am trying my best to overcome this by improving ties with my family and would like to seek advice on how best to move on from this episode. In my line of work, I at times have to counsel and provide a helping hand to my officers who are in situations such as these. Now that I have experienced it first hand, the struggle is real.
Thanks for the clarification @acceptingbluejay891.
On telling your wife, I think it’s worth sitting with the question honestly, rather than deciding from fear or guilt alone. The more useful question might be: what do you actually want for your marriage going forward? That clarity can help guide whether and how you have that conversation.
On the urge to revert, it’s worth being honest with yourself about what that pull is really about. It’s not always about wanting the affair back; sometimes it’s about escaping guilt or filling an emotional gap that still exists in the marriage. That suggests there’s something unresolved that’s worth understanding, not just suppressing.
On moving forward, staying occupied and rebuilding family ties helps, but the underlying feelings might keep surfacing until they’re worked through more directly. Given the weight of what you’re carrying, speaking to a counsellor privately could give you a space to process this that self-management alone can’t. You mentioned that you’ve been that pillar of support for your officers before, so I do think that you know the value of it firsthand.
All the best!