Infidelity Articles By Katie Lersch

By: Katie Lersch: Most wives who are dealing with the aftermath of the affair REALLY want to believe that the affair is over. This can be true even when you don’t know if you want to save your marriage. Nearly every wife wants the knowledge that the other woman is gone and out of your lives – regardless of what is going to happen moving forward.

That is why it can be very frustrating when she refuses to just go away. Even when husbands sometimes tell these women that it’s truly over and there is nothing left, these women can refuse to take no for an answer and can continue to try to engage in playful and flirty ways that are meant to lure him back from his wife.

Needless to say, this can make a wife furious and cause her to look for ways to call the other woman off. She might say: “the affair had been going on for almost seven months before I got wind of it. I just never thought that my husband would ever do something like that to me. I had a slight medical issue during this time, which meant that, for a while anyway, sex was off the table. You would think that a man who was married as long as my husband has been would understand this and would not go elsewhere seeking sex. But nope, not my husband. He took up with a younger woman from his gym. I admit that I wasn’t watching for the signs because I was dealing with my own issues. But once I found out, my husband was immediately begging for forgiveness, telling me that he would take care of me emotionally and physically, and telling the other woman that there would never be any contact again. My husband admitted that the other woman ‘took it kind of hard’ and then announced to my husband that she knew that he was not going to be able to stay away from her. This annoyed me, but I figured she would soon move on. Well, she hasn’t. I check my husband’s email and phone all of the time now and she will send him provocative pictures. He often just ignores her. But sometimes he will respond back, which drives me insane. The other day she sent a picture of her in lingerie with the caption ‘how do you like this?’ And my husband actually responded with: ‘I like it a lot. But I can’t act on it.’ The thing is, I feel like in time, she is going to wear him down. She will not stop until she weakens him enough until he comes back. I feel like he is weak to even respond to her and then I become disgusted with him. When I confront him, he says that he would never act on it. How can I make her stop? I know that it would not be smart to confront or engage with her. I don’t want to do that. But I want for her to stop trying to lure him back to her.”

I understand why you feel the way that you do. It’s very hard to make progress on your marriage when you have someone else competing for your spouse’s attention. And it can feel as if she has no right whatsoever to hang around when she’s been straight-up told that it’s over and that she is not welcome anymore.

The thing is, though, you can’t always control what she does. Now, don’t get me wrong. You can most definitely block her on your husband’s email and on his phone. And you should do that. Immediately. You should do whatever is necessary to make it much harder for her to just reach out to him whenever the moment strikes her.

With that said, the person who you are most likely to have some influence over is not her or you – it is your husband. It’s very important that he not respond or engage with her. Because when he does, it just encourages her to keep right on doing this. And it sends her mixed signals so that she almost feels justified in her actions.

If the two of you are in counseling, I would certainly ask the counselor to make this VERY clear to your husband. Recovery after an affair means that your husband has to have the integrity and the intention to have NO CONTACT. Sure, he’s not the one sending the texts and photos. But he should not be responding to them either.

You can certainly have a conversation about this, but it often will have more impact coming from someone who isn’t you. So, you might say: “I keep seeing communication from her and it needs to stop. You may say that you aren’t literally acting on it, but even a response from you likely feels like a victory to her and urges her on. In order for us to recover and heal, I need for you to be loyal to me and to COMPLETELY cut off contract. I feel that this goes without saying. I can’t completely trust you if you’re having interactions with her behind my back. Please block her communications. Or I will do it myself. And if she should somehow get through, ignore and delete the communication with no response whatsoever. She needs to leave us alone. But she won’t do that if she knows that she can get a response out of you. I need you to uphold the commitment you claimed to have to me and stop all contact. Will you do that?”

Hopefully, this, combined with a word from your counselor or whatever self help you are using, will be enough. You are absolutely in the right about this. In order to recover and to eventually trust again, you need to know that he’s not betraying you by continuing to engage with her – even if the engagement is just electronically for now.

I do not think that you are being at all unreasonable about this.  You have every right to expect your husband to do what he has claimed. I suppose I was lucky in that the other woman was located in a far-away location so that once my husband returned home, there was really no easy access.  Because I know that I could not have tolerated this situation, either.   There’s more about my thought process during recovery on my blog at http://surviving-the-affair.com

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