hahaha... as I read through the first paragraph all I could think was "oh shit I hope she goes on to fuck this up" and she did.

fantastic.

Nothing a little menage a trois won't fix.

Malice-aforethought

hey i kinda agree with this but one thing is missing here...i bet this woman is completely in love with him, and he led her on for a year. you can only do that to someone for so long. they eventually break and do things like write emails. and he's a lying sac of shit. he did not have consent from the wife to seek out other sex partners. the guy deserves a beating too.

She totally did it on purpose, whether she can admit that to herself or not. What a jerk.

God I hate the term "closure," especially when it is totally-one-sided, and non-consensual. Tell you what everyone, how about you write your "closure" out in a journal, bury it for 5-years, then come back and look at it and see if you still feel the overwhelming need to force it into someone else's email box.

Wow, Dan didn't take the (glaringly open) opportunity to wax philosophic about monogamy. Maybe that horse has been flogged to death, along w/ the pooch.

and who the hell reads their spouses work email? sounds like he'd already lied enough that she was good and suspicious. real suspicious. total sac of shit.

Next time, try sending a physical letter, which at least enjoys federal legal protection. Looking at this strictly from a work POV, you could have gotten this guy reprimanded or even fired.

uh the only really relevant "non-consensual" issue to discuss here is the non-consensual sleeping around that the husband did.

What of the possibility that he just told her the wife found it to really bring down the ax on this thing? Not that it isn't pure speculation, nor does it change the answer to the question, presuming all happened as presented. (and, either way, she needs to just let it go, as advised.)

It just seems awfully convenient that THIS was the one time the wife had access to his work e-mail. Maybe he interpreted the letter and trying to weasel her way back in to his life and figured the only way to once-and-for-all end it is to pretend the wife found out and the shit hit the fan. If accusations made them cool it, then his wife "actually" knowing would "have" to result in severing of all ties.

Or, I'm just really bored at work today.

Perfect example of passive-aggressive.

@14 - there is something definitely wrong with sending an unrequested, sexually explicit email to somebody else's work email account. As for the rest, my husband often leaves his browser open....as this guy probably did on his home computer, because he never guessed in a million years that his ex would randomly decide for the first time to send an explicit email to that account. I bet money right now the subject line was not "work related," and sure to raise an eyebrow of suspicion. Any takers?

@8, @14:
The guy fires up his laptop to check a few emails from home, leaves it open on the kitchen table while he takes a piss, wife walks in and sees email with subject "A few words about our illicit affair".

@12 Right on. But then, i am also bored at work.

A hundred bucks says they'll be fucking again in a few weeks.

@6: Totally agree

@16 - you nailed it......subject line was not "notes for budget reports" it was "seeking closure"

betcha

This was a "ripping off the band-aid" situation. The Cheating Dude was going to get caught, as he was building a web of lies. The Kids were already suffering from having a serial liar for a father. At least now that is public knowledge, and the divorce can be speedy. The Frigid Wife can move on with the kids and his wallet. The Side Piece can move on, and maybe with a little therapy of some sort, she can be wiser and not fall in love with a serial liar next time.

The whole point of the email was to end a relationship that would inevitably end badly. Was there really some option where no one gets hurt?

Who wants to bet that she ignores Dan's advice and instead texts him so often over the next few days, "just to apologize" that it turns into a stalking situation?

Or send your be-damned "closure" to I, Anonymous, if you're going to use your sob story to entertain the rest of us.

Obviously, all she needs to do is sext him.

Preferably when he's eating dinner at home.

That always turns guys on.

@21 - yeah I have two. The first is the husband goes back to wife and figures out how to make it work, maybe discusses opening up the relationship, or gets her to be more sexual (assuming the part about her being frigid is even true). The second is the husband realizes it is not going to work, and asks for a divorce, sparing the wife the humiliation of knowing every gruesome detail of the affair, so she can start over a bit banged, but not scarred for life.

@6: OMFG, I could not agree more. "Closure" is psychobabble for "I'm a whiny bitch and trying to get the last word in." It's the last resort for the emotionally crippled.

OK, so let me get this straight...

You were dating some married dude for a year, and his wife checks his e-mails. And, you believed every word he said. AND, you allowed him to put a guilt trip on you.

Guess what? You're an idiot. The married dude is an asshole. The wife is at minimum unfortunate.

He's been married for 16 years, so that puts him in his 40s. You write like you're early-to-mid 20s. He manipulated you for sex. You allowed him to. Deal with the consequences.

@22: And that the wife, now incandescent with fury and perhaps obsessively running through his things with a fine-tooth comb, also sees the texts? Who would take *those* odds?

@25: Your options are perfectly rational, but if we want to argue about this, divorce never really leaves anyone unhurt, more so with kids involved.

Incidentally he was not happy at home in the bedroom, he once told me that they had been together for about 16 years and for the last 10 they had barely had sex.

That may be true but does a husband (or wife) who cheats ever say to the person they're fucking, "the sex with my wife (husband) is really hot but I get off on having sex with someone else behind their back."

Wait, what?!?

Sure she's a dumbshit for sending the email. She's either mean or stupid. And yes, there is nothing on earth she can do to "fix" it at this point.

But it takes two to tango. Dude is every bit as much to blame for this situation as she is. She didn't force him to fuck her. She didn't force him to lie to his wife. You can't just blame her for wrecking the family. If he didn't want to fuck up his family situation, he should have either made an amicable arrangement with his wife, or gotten a divorce before he decided to get some tail on the side.

@12 Oh man, if that were the case, it'd be a dumb-shit move on the husband's part. CPOS already sends unsolicited e-mails about her affairs. What if CPOS's next move was to e-mail the wife to apologize? The result would be as-bad-or-worse than if the wife had actually found the original e-mail in the first place.

@31: Well, there isn't really more to say about the man; his actions are pretty cut and dried from just the letter ... unless he feels like writing in with his crazy-ass rationalizations (Please write in!).

"Regardless of how I feel about his wife." Guess what, honey. You have no right to feel anything other than concern for her welfare and that of her children. She did nothing wrong. She did YOU no wrong. If you were the one who'd been with the cheater for 16 years and had young kids with him, I guarantee that you would not be "screwing him every day."

"I knew that it wasn't fair for me any longer." Listen to yourself. It wasn't fair for the wife and especially the kids. Mr. Hung is primarily to blame here, but you have behaved selfishly, too, and it's actually satisfying to see you get punished, even a little. Yes, something must not have been going right with his marriage for him to be open to an affair. However, unless he has permission from his wife to cheat, than it's his responsibility to either fix the marriage or get out before he starts fucking other people.

I suppose it's unreasonable to expect you to behave with consideration for the well-being of others when obviously on some level you value yourself so little that you put up with this kind of bullshit for a year. Instead of wondering, "Will he hate me forever?" maybe you should wonder how to work on yourself so that you insist on a healthy relationship next time--one that can still involve plenty of hot sex.

@ 3 - Oh god, I thought I was going to have to be the anal-retentive one to point that out. Thanks. :-)

Note to self: Don't cheat on wife - things could get messy.

@12 - I thought the same thing. I think the husband/ex-lover is just trying to put a final nail in this relationship

@12: Given how much he lied to his wife, I can easily believe the scenario you paint. Heck, I bet his wife isn't even frigid, although she may be tired at times from raising little kids. It wouldn't surprise me if he lied about the lack of sex at home as well as everything else.

I don't even send explicit emails to my spouse - we have a rule that you never put anything into an email that you wouldn't want on the front page of the New York Times. Email isn't that secure and it can live almost forever on some server somewhere. Especially at some of the places I've worked at.

@28:
There is a huge range in the amount of damage a divorce can cause. A divorce can be so completely toxic that it permanently devastates everyone involved, especially the kids caught in the middle of the what might literally become a death match. Or it can be a civil and respectful process that allows everyone to eventually move on from the pain of separation.

I'm guessing the divorce without this email (if it ever happened) would have been less toxic than the one with the email.

I disagree - I think the woman who sent the email was acting like a bigger sh*thead in this matter. By everything she said the affair and break-up were mutual...but it was her decision and hers alone to write a sexually explicit email and send it to his work account. That is totally, 100% on her. How can you all rationalize this as an "okay" thing to do, or that somehow he deserved it because he was someone's daddy? I would get it maybe if she were distraught and not thinking clearly, but this was suppose to be closure, where she is thanking him, blah blah. I hope after the divorce he tells everyone what she did so nobody "in the industry" will ever go near her again.

And a word to the wise: never send anything to or from a work email account that you wouldn't want your boss/the recipient's boss to see. My brother is a systems administrator and he regularly sends me copies of the sexually explicit email sent by employees at his company. Really crude stuff, often. And it gets them in trouble, even fired. So don't do it unless you're trying to get someone fired. Especially don't do it if the person has kids to support.

And even thought it sounded like I was jumping all over her, yes, I agree, he's the real uncle fucker here, not her.

@39: "I'm guessing the divorce without this email (if it ever happened) would have been less toxic than the one with the email."

Well, definitely not much of an argument there.

Note to self: if engaged in affair, configure email application to automatically send all email from mistress into email folder with very boring name.

Chicks are just trouble.

34: Yes, something must not have been going right with his marriage for him to be open to an affair. However, unless he has permission from his wife to cheat, than it's his responsibility to either fix the marriage or get out before he starts fucking other people.

I'm not as certain as you are that when people cheat it's always because something is wrong with the marriage. While that is probably true most of the time, I also suspect there are numerous people who simply get off on the thrill of getting away with having sex with someone else behind their partner's back. But I wholeheartedly agree with you that if there are problems in a marriage, then someone who's considering cheating has the responsibility to either fix the marriage or get out before they start fucking someone else.

I suppose it's unreasonable to expect you to behave with consideration for the well-being of others when obviously on some level you value yourself so little that you put up with this kind of bullshit for a year.

Again I differ with your apparent assumption that a person who cheats with someone who's married does it because they value themselves very little. I think there are many people who simply get off on cheating with a married person. I had the opportunity once to fuck a married woman. Had I chosen to do it, it wouldn't have been because I didn't value myself. It was because she was very hot. But, being a believer in the golden rule, I couldn't bring myself to do it.

The fact that she signs the damn letter CPOS, which means she's probably read Savage for at least the last year she's been a CPOS makes me feel like even if the entire population were totally enlightened about sexual behavior, their favorite-ogamy and everything else there will still be CPOS and people who get off on being CPOS.

I guess the total number, conflict and reactions will be way scaled down, though.

Lady, you're a dumbass for sending the email, and I hope he hates you forever. Forget his wife seeing the email - many corporations have software that scans emails for words that are profane, sexual, etc., so instead of just messing up his family, you may have fucked up his job and possibly his career.

While I blame you for any problems he may now have at work, if the wife really found the email and it caused problems at home, that's his fault. He sounds like a piece of shit that was lying to you as well as his wife (like many commenters have pointed out, most people cheating on their spouses are going to say they aren't getting any at home, regardless of whether or not that's really the case).

What you reap is what you so. If this guy's family is destroyed and his kids are hurt, maybe he should have thought of that before he started banging CPOS.

@those people wondering why the wife is checking her husband's e-mail:

Normally, I'd agree. But the reason I'd normally expect a spouse *not* to snoop (and I realize Dan disagrees with me on this) is that I believe a relationship should be based on mutual trust. Since her husband is clearly not remotely trustworthy -- he lied to her, he very likely lied to his mistress -- I'm not surprised that she got suspicious enough to snoop. The letter writer says: "His wife had suspicions and I think she confronted him on occasion but he would just lie his way out of it, we would cool it for awhile and all would be well."

If she was suspicious enough to confront him several times ("on occasion"), clearly she'd stopped buying his lies.

Honestly, as painful as this must be for her now, she's better of divorcing this cheating, lying douchebag. Who wants to bet CPOS is not his first bit on the side?

To the actual questioner, a response that will try not to sound too judgmental:

I was you. Kind of. I was having sex with my best friend who wanted a relationship when I did not (but he'd also been a fuck buddy and I also loved him but was not in relationsip place -- aka complicated) who pretty much would come back to me often when fighting with his boyfriend as they started a relationship, and we'd occasionally try to work out the "friends with benefits" thing as part of our friendship. I felt like an ass, but since I didn't think he belonged with his boyfriend anyway -- and hell, I'd been there first -- I didn't think of myself as the asshole as much as I felt bad and didn't acknowledge it.

Anyway, we eventually broke this off. We'd, by this point, done too much damage to our friendship, so it was an all or nothing (not so clean) clean break.

Fast-forward to about eight months later. He and his boyfriend are taking some sort of break (he's visiting his mother across the country) when his boyfriend reads his email and sees our past correspondence. Though he'd had his share of extracurricular activity throughout their relationship, I was the worst one because I was his friend and fuckbuddy and certainly the biggest "threat." My friend was freaked out, contacted me because he had no one to talk to -- and probably thinking he'd get some sympathy. He got some. But I didn't keep up connection becuase being reminded of it all months later made me realize what a shit I'd been to this mostly innocent party who'd done nothing wrong but love a guy who I'd loved first.

But after kicking myself around for a really long time about it, I also have come to realize there was a reason he didn't delete those messages. A part of him wanted to get caught. And as much as your man's story might seem like your fault (and I agree with others that it's awfully convenient -- both in timing and in different email checking habits), it is not mostly your fault. You have done wrong, but he has done more, even if you sent that email with the subconcious hope of getting caught.

That said, there's one right thing to do now. Stop. All. Contact. It might make you feel better to let him know you are thinking of him. But don't. Even if he contacts you. End it. It will leave you wondering. Some days you will wonder "I hope he doesn't think I didn't care because I stopped contacting him."* But that's your burden now.

In my case, I found out that my friend was coming back to town. And though I'd heard (through a grapevine I've always assumed he would know I'd hear from) that he was coming back "temporarily" to get his stuff, I knew that if he was ever going to get back together with the guy who he belonged with, I had to stay the fuck out. So I didn't contact him. At all. It hurt at the time and in a weird way it still hurts today because of the unknown. (See asterisk above.) But that two week temporary stay turned into them getting back together. And years later, I assume they still are. I'm not happy with him, but I'm much happier than I ever was with him too. Soon that will be you. But only if you cease contact.

What makes people think the writer is female? Nothing in the letter says so, plus paragraph 2's language, particularly "I could not imagine not screwing him every day," sounds to me more like a gay twink than a straight woman. I imagine that the husband in the letter could be a closeted evangelical.

He never should have given her his real name.

@8 I'm kind of with you on that... Not only did the wife read it immediately after it was sent, but she was poking around on his work e-mail. Is there something I'm missing about this story?

There are some things about affairs that I hold as absolutes: The married guy is never going to leave his wife, and it's the married guy who is almost totally to blame. Anything bad that this guy has brought upon himself is the risk he was willing to take for pussy, end of story. If he wanted unattached sex, he should've gone to an escort service.

This lady needs to cut her losses, fade away from this guy's life as much as possible, and find someone who can be emotionally available to her. Like, now. Her drama dribble is nonsense.

I don't want to encourage cheating, but why don't cheaters create a free gmail or hotmail or yahoo address just for the affair? (Oh, and turn off auto-conplete for the address and password.) The CPOS' wife would not have known that the email account even existed.

One more thing to Miss CPOS: Don't ever EVER contact the wife. Go away, far away. If you really want to minimize the damage, and prevent any further trauma (trust me, this wife is traumatized by this) stay the f*ck away from this family FOREVER. That is not only your penance, but the ONLY right thing to do. Without excusing any of the husband's behaviour, what you did will scar her forever, future contact will pick at that scab. Remember that if you think even an "I'm sorry" email would help. It won't.

Incidentally he was not happy at home in the bedroom...

Newsflash: Cheating husband tells mistress that he's unhappy at home.

Anyway, I don't think it's fair that Dan lays all the blame of this on the writer. Maybe she did fuck up consciously or subconsciously, but um... the married guy was the one breaking his vows.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time!

@53,

And use a separate cellphone as well. It really seems like this guy was extremely negligent or wasn't too concerned about getting caught.

I love a letter where everyone seems like a vile idiot. Makes the whole thing pure trashy delight.

For once, I actually think TheMisanthrope is insightful @27.

Scary, that.

Yes, sending the email to a work address is supremely stupid.

I have a friend that works in IT. He can read any email ever sent or received by anyone in his company over the last decade. It's all stored, even if the employee deletes it from their mailbox. This is pretty common for many company's email systems.

Never send anything to or from a work email address that you don't want the boss to read. Because they can and will.

People get fired for shit like this on their work accounts.

If you really need closure do it in person. Have a long heartfelt conversation somewhere public. By writing a letter - AND SENDING IT!!- what you are doing is writing an epitaph. And thats not closure. That is seeking to make it permanent and tangible (and easy for someone else to find).

Talk about hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

There is a very special place in hell for people like this CPOS. Not only has she most likely destroyed the marriage and family, inflicted grevious harm on the wife and inevitably the children, but in her use of business e-mail put his job in jeopardy. All the wife had to do was forward the e-mail to everone in his company, all his business contacts, family, friends, and as much of the general public as possible (you get the picture) and his future at his company would be toast. At a minimum he becomes a laughingstock, but more likely an embarrassment that must be terminated, if only as an objective lesson to the rest of the company. Any recipent at work of the e-mail could claim sexual harrassment. Prove you didn't intend to foward it and even if you can the whole episode shows extremely poor taste and judgment. It has happened before and it will happen again, the work situation that is.

Since we and she doesn't know what is happening at ground zero, it would be prudent for her to leave the area until the fallout has settled. I can easily imagine either the husband or wife paying her a visit and not a social call.

Except for the harm to the wife and kids, I say the husband deserves this shitstorm.

@44 So, Jubilation, in your opinion, in this situation, WWWD? *

*what would Wesley do?

They carried on an affair for a YEAR and never got secret free e-mail addresses? One word: hotmail. Use it well, people.

Skipping over the moral issue of affairs, because they're going to happen, and they might as well be conducted responsibly...

Long-term affairs come in two flavors: FWB and Serious Relationship (where the married one intends to leave their spouse)

1. It is the responsibility of both participants to:
a. be as discreet as humanly possible (unless otherwise agreed upon by cheated-on spouse)
b. be safe - no pregnancies or STIs
c. communicate their expectations

2. It is the responsibility of the married partner to:
a. make it clear to your lover whether you consider the affair FWB or SR
b. if SR (likely transitioning from FWB), get a fucking divorce already unless lover professes willingness to be strung along for 17 years until your infant is out of high school. (and variants)

3. It is the responsibility of the Other Woman/Man to:
a. abide by relationship status above. If you can't live with it, DTMFA.
b. if you start to fall in love with FWB lover, end it, and explain why. If they feel the same, they'll let you know.

CPOS clearly violated rules 1a, and took way too long to respond to 3a&b (assuming he didn't outright dump her). It is unclear whether the husband violated either of the rules under section 2, though as I read it, it doesn't seem like there was any pretense about leaving his wife.

Sending that letter was an act of total idiocy. If you need to write something like that, throw it in a word doc on your computer and sit on it for a while. Emotional e-mailing is like drunk e-mailing/dialing: almost always regretted, and rarely containing statements that can't wait 24 hours. If you needed "closure" (ugh) that would have been better handled over coffee. Your lover may or may not have been an asshole/led you on, but you, madam, behaved like a childish fool.

Confidential to nocutename: I this didn't spoil your crush :)

"I know that he will always suspect that I sent it on purpose"

What the fuck does that even mean? Of course she sent it on purpose. She wrote it, then sent it.

Am I missing something?

"malice aforethought" without the hyphen.

@64 -- excellent point. I believe what CPOS means is that he will always suspect she sent it with the intention that the wife would read it.

@64: As in sent it with the purpose of striking out at him by alerting his wife.

dont feel bad its only natural. so what if she sent the email, it wasnt to his wife, and fuck her anyway if his wife wants to own him that much. sounds like the dude has some stuff to figure out. sucking his balls will only help.

Maybe it wasn't the wife at all. She says they were constantly breaking up and getting back together - sounds to me like he was amusing himself with new women all the time, which is why he was constantly breaking up with her. Then when the woman got sick of dealing with a cheating married man, she'd dump him, and he'd go back to old Tried and True, our letter writer.

You may be right, @69. In that case, he's a dick AND she's stupid.

Wow. I've been reading The Stranger for a few years now and have read all of these SL Letters of the Day and have never once felt like I needed to register to comment....until now.

Just to say, what a bitch.

I used his work email, a no-no I know but I thought it was safe

Yep, that's a bitch move. Sexually explicit emails to a work account, "just to be safe"? Always a good idea.

She deserves to be miserable.

They're both CPOS's. And they're both addicted to drama, otherwise, they wouldn't have done the breakup-to-makeup so many times.
His wife read the email almost as soon as it was sent? Even though it was sent to his work email address? Really? Naw, I don't think so. They both like it loud and messy and he's just playing the game with his ex/not-so-ex. I hope they wind up together (after the wife leaves with everything he's got) because they're obviously two of a kind.

I don't have much sympathy for LW, but I can't quite blame her for breaking up the marriage, not so much because the hubby's actions are ultimately more the cause than the LW's revealing them (not to mention what all was going wrong in their relationship to begin with, no sex for 10 years and all) but because Why on earth would anyone think keeping it together is a good thing? The wife is suspicous and he manages to keep lying and tricking and snowing her. Ugh. Even if he could keep fooling her indefinitely is this marriage worth preserving?

Not my call, of course, and certainly not LW's. That's all true. But I'm not going to get self-righteous about the horrible thing she did in destroying this marraige 'cause marriage is just too sacred to mess with. As for the children, it sucks either way. This does not sound like a healthy home.

Speaking as someone who used to feel that “closure” was necessary until I smartened up: she didn’t write that email because she felt like she needed some kind of neat little ending to their relationship. She wrote the email because she hoped that, by reading all of the heartfelt things she had to say, and by hearing how much he had meant to her, he would leave his wife to be with her, without having to come right out and say it.

Sure, she may have wanted closure to the affair. But that doesn’t mean she wanted closure from the guy.

That being said, the guy is still a douche.

@ 26, that's the best thing I've read all week. Thank you for a great weekend send-off!

@79 unless they're lesbians, in which case they actually are suffering from lesbian bed death.

Let's not be too hard on CPOS. She's obviously in love and wants this fellow back, and couldn't resist the urge to send an email. A forgivable offense, in my book.

I got the same emotional kick from this letter that I used to get from Jerry Springer back in the day, to wit: "Jeez, I may be a huge fuck-up in many areas, but look at THESE idiots. I'm a model of good sense and probity in comparison."

Funny how much of a relief that can be....

Who cares if he'll hate you forever? You're breaking things off. If his family breaks up it'll be because of what he did. Its his family that he cheated on. I'm with Dan on not completely believing your letter. I think its quite possible you didn't mean for the wife to read it, but why are you pretending to care about how he feels or about the wife? You're anonymous, who are you trying to fool anyway?

The key detail was the way she described the email--"After he left I wrote him a very long, very explicit email detailing how I felt about him, how much I had learned from him and celebrated our time together. I was very graphic about what he had done for me sexually and emotionally."

She recapped the entire relationship. She made sure it repeated details he surely already knew.

It was meant to be read by the wife from the start. The minute I read that description I knew where the story was going.

Between the work email address and the relatively quick turnaround time, my money is on #12's explanation.

Not that that changes anything. The message coming from Hubby -- and it did come from Hubby, regardless of whether Wife actually read the email or not -- is clearly, "This sort of behavior causes shit to hit fans. A) Stop. Just stop, and B) time to go cold turkey."

Sometimes this thread should be called "flog," not "slog," as in we all flog each damn dead horse to pieces. My flogging arm is sore after reading all these responses. But it seems that they are less about input and helpful advice and more about condemnation and endless speculation lately.

This is just a sad, miserable, wretched situation for everyone: the letter-writer, who obviously loved the married guy; the mg, whose marriage is in deep trouble now, if it wasn't before; the wife, whose whole world has just fallen apart; and the kids, whose lives will be forever affected by this affair and its aftermath, no matter how it all gets sorted out.

Nothing we all say vilifying any of the participants makes it any better for those involved.

Come on, people: have some compassion or just keep out of it.

But yeah: (duh) get a separate, free email address for your clandestine correspondences.

Confidential to Schmooze: nope; if anything, your outline-style thinking, which meshes with mine, just continues to endear you to me.

There's only one way to salvage this situation. The writer can take close-up Polaroids of her vagina, then leave them on his doorstep in an envelope marked "Personal/confidential".

When he sees it, he'll magically understand how she feels and what a closing experience it's been. And he'll call her up just to discuss closure and how she feels about it.

"Screw the pooch" and "fuck the dog" are not synonymous phrases. The first means to mess things up badly but the second means to do nothing useful, to goof off.
If you're going to speak Canadian, do it right Dan.

Nobody comes up smelling like roses in this mess, but I don't think the wife is getting her fair share of criticism in this thread. I mean, once she gets over her self-pity, she would do well to contemplate why she thought it was perfectly acceptable to make a virtually sexless marriage (for a decade), with no regards as to how her husband felt about it. I suspect that the husband probably did try to talk to his wife about it, and he got the usual feminist-you-are-an-oppressive-male-for-expecting-your-wife-to-have-sex-with-you. Meanwhile, the mistress is nothing short of creepy for her deluded idea of sending a sexually explicit message for the sake of "closure" to her lover's work account. The marriage is over, the wife will get custody, and the husband -- who will be lucky to get even supervised visits with his kids -- will definitely not go back to his mistress, ever. Or even date for a very long time.

@90 No, the usual feminist wouldn't be against expressing your sexual needs, just condoning cheating.

No, the usual feminist thinks that the only good marriage is when the wife no longer wants to have sex with her husband and he suffers. Revenge for centuries of oppressive patriarchy and all that. That is why these same women are also opposed to him having sex with ANYBODY.

Uh Harry, you're filling a lot of holes in this story with assumptions. Not to mention your complete generalization of feminists.

Harry, I'm so sorry things went so badly in your last relationship.
But since you know fuck-all about this marriage and this affair, try hard not to project, okay, sweetie?

@92 Yeah see, that last part is called cheating. Your wife has the right to say she's not okay with an open relationship. And you have the right to say "i want a divorce."

also: seek therapy. if not for yourself, then for all the feminist women who are fighting to simply live their lives as human beings, not whipping boys and playthings and objects and sex toys and commodities. You blaming me, a feminist, and making me responsible for some shit in your own personal life with one woman undermines that.

thanks.

Totally agree with 12. And I'm neither bored nor at work.

The guy has lied to his wife throughout all this, I'm positive he can just as easily lie to the lover. Does she even know for sure that he has a wife? Has she met or seen her and the kids? And no, photos don't count. His "marriage" might just be his favorite excuse to avoid getting involved.

There's an obvious (at least to me) contradiction that nobody here seems to have noticed: how young are his children exactly if he hasn't had sex with the wife in 10 years? It's highly unlikely that they had no children the first few years, then one every year for two or three years, and then stopped having sex altogether. So wouldn't the kids more likely be "adolescent children" by now, or at least tweens? CPOS would probably have referred to them in that way if they were, so as not to feel so bad about herself or attract such negative comments about destroying a marriage with "young children". Seems to me the guy isn't even very good at lying (or basic arithmetics). So both the lover and the hypothetical wife are to blame for believing his obvious lies for so long (he, of course, is to blame for cheating, lying, not creating an anonymous email address his wife wouldn't know about - which really makes me doubt he's married - etc., etc.).

At any rate, the marriage's collapse is the married guy and his wife's doing, as it always is (presuming that there is a wife and that the marriage has indeed collapsed): they simply "weren't made for each other", really. The third party is only an instrument used by one or the other spouse to accelerate the break-up without taking full responsability for it, even when that third party behaves like a POS. You can blame her for being a POS, but not for destroying that marriage - it was in tatters long before she even met the guy.

Oh shit, I'm getting props from Will in Seattle. I need to reanalyze my stance in this post. *Laughing emoticon*

@90 you're either assuming that the husband is such an honest man and telling his girlfriend the truth between break-ups, or projecting your own reality (or, somebody else's around you) to fill in the gaps. The only thing we know about the wife is that she finally had rock solid proof that her husband cheated and flipped her shit. The rest is third-hand from a married dude trying to get into some chick's panties. Hardly valid.

Although, if you're trolling...great job!

I love how she's the jerk, who decided to have 2 kids, and start screwing other people...wait...

CPOS, you need to reevaluate exactly why you sent an email recapping your entire adulterous relationship with this guy to an email address his supervisors (in a company in your SHARED INDUSTRY) most likely monitor. This is purely destructive and self-destructive behavior.

"@95 Yeah see, that last part is called cheating. Your wife has the right to say she's not okay with an open relationship. And you have the right to say 'i want a divorce.'

also: seek therapy. if not for yourself, then for all the feminist women who are fighting to simply live their lives as human beings, not whipping boys and playthings and objects and sex toys and commodities. You blaming me, a feminist, and making me responsible for some shit in your own personal life with one woman undermines that."

Guess what? A wife doesn't have the right to say she's not okay with an open relationship if at the same time she refuses to have sex with her husband. She does not have a right to terminate his sex life. And 'divorce' is not a simple option when the couple has kids. Furthermore if it is not right for a husband to regard his wife as a "sex toy," then it is equally not right for a woman to regard her husband as a nothing more than an ATM dispenser on legs. This is one thing feminists can't get: a marriage is not all about only the woman's needs.