SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hello again,

My WH still works with AP number 3. They have little contact, but still have some contact. The D-day with her and him was Feb 2020. I’m not okay with this, even though I agreed to try to be. Does anyone have any feedback on WS working with AP?
Also, my story: WH is a serial cheater, master manipulator and liar. My 1st D day was 2017. I’m feeling like ending it. My mind wants to be free of it all.

All I needed to read was serial cheater. My answer is leave asap. It is the only way out of infidelity.

He should not be within 1 Mile of the AP.

No contact is suggested for a reason. It’s one innocent phone call about work and then 💥💥💥🤯the affair starts up again.

Ask me how I know. I lived it.

BTW - serial cheaters don’t change. I would advise you to consider how you will feel about another Dday with AP #6 or AP#7 etc.

You can stay but please protect yourself.

I opened this thread because my husband still works with his AP (their affair happened the first half of 2020, and I found out in July 2020). We’ve found a way to make it work, but I don’t see our arrangement working in a situation like yours where you’re dealing with a serial cheater (honestly, I don’t know how anyone does it with a serial cheater; I would be out if I found out there was cheating on his part before or since his 2020 workplace affair).

I think if you’re this far out and don’t feel ok with it, that’s a big clue in and of itself.

There are other jobs, really. We live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, and my husband is in a niche field with almost no chance that he could find something else comparable; certainly not without us uprooting everything, losing a lot, and me having to give up my job and the only support system I have. So I put a three year timeline on it to see how I would feel about him working with her, and if I hadn’t been good with the situation at that point, I would have asked him to pull the plug.

I feel like if you’re not good with it by now, you need a change.

However, if it would help you to hear the process of how I came to be fine with it, I’m happy to share more. Regardless, I hope things work out and you find peace.

I wasted a year of my life trying to R while my fWW worked with AP. Real R started after she got a new job.

Wh is a serial cheater, master manipulator and liar. My 1st D day was 2017. I’m feeling like ending it. My mind wants to be free of it all.

I think you already know. This will never work. People uproot their lives to get away from AP.

Finding a new job is the least he should do.

[This message edited by goingtomakeit at 1:13 PM, Sunday, January 28th]

I would be a deal breaker for me.

The answer will differ with each couple and individual.

My wife remained in the same job for several years with her Boss/AP. She is not a serial cheater. She confessed the infidelity to me swearing it would never happen again. She did not want to forfeit her job and chose to stay.

I would rather she quit. 4 years later we had our first child, yes she is mine! While in the same job 3 years later our second child arrived. At this point we decided for her to leave employment to be a full time mom.

During the years between the infidelity and first child, I was a mess. She swears no other incidents occurred but a few occasions I'm not so sure. It was he'll for those years, ultimately ptsd was diagnosed 30 years later. I felt some safety when the first child was born. 3 yrs later with next child and leaving employment, there was no contact and I actually felt safe.

I kick myself now for freezing and not demanding no contact. I did not realize to damage being done to myself.

If I found myself in your shoes now at minimum I would demand no contact. Being a 3rd offense I would be gone.

Good luck with your decision. Get an individual counselor with infidelity trauma experience., it will help you immensely.

I share this story regularly:

Some years ago I was managing a married guy who had a workplace affair with a coworker. He told me about it when his wife found out, and he needed some time off. The OW was actually a friend of mine working in another department in another building. Over the next days and weeks I got the story from both of them and I know for a 100% fact that the affair ended on d-day.
The man stopped going to company functions, using the cafeteria and I arranged for another person to handle whatever work he needed from the department OW was in.
I am 100% convinced the affair was over.

About 6-7 months after d-day the OW – my friend – took another job in another company.

The man – the WH – told me some months later that his reconciliation with his wife finally started after she was rid of the fear of them working together.
The simple fact that there was a risk of them being together at work held her back.

This despite OW still working in the same city and the new job being less than a mile away. Just that it was not the same company was enough.

So – I think your husband working near OW will possibly prevent you from reconciling.

This was an absolute deal breaker for me. WH never returned to the same job. I would not have been ok with it for any amount of time.

For me it wasn't a deal breaker, they worked in different departments but there was overlap. fWW regrets getting involved with the POSOM and there is now hatred towards him. We're now at the point where fWW realises she can't fully recover due to fAP being in the same company and she will leave. Seeing him when she is not expecting to is triggering her massively.

Our situation is not the same as yours, I gave fWW the choice to leave it's taken her this long to really process the A. We're all different. It will also enable us to continue our R journey and fully heal.

For you, I can see it's painful and traumatising. You've got some solid advice above, it depends what YOU can endure or chose another path...

I hope it goes ok. Take good care.

Salty

[This message edited by Salthorse at 9:23 AM, Monday, January 29th]

Working with the AP was a dealbreaker for me, but it didn't stop the A. I made my xWS fire the MOW but they continued their A for another 2 years. There are never guarantees I guess.

Thank you for all of the feedback. I feel like he should have transferred to another department or something, but he hasn’t.

The D day with this OW#3 was in 2020. She’s had multiple AP’s at work in her short time working there. She is 25 years younger than my WH. I feel like they both would be ok with continuing some kind of A just because neither seem to have any boundaries or lines they wouldn’t cross.

I told my WH if he she contacted him via text, call, whatever, I need to know about it so I don’t feel like I’m being tricked again or feel like he’s hiding something.

A few months ago, she called him. I saw it on our phone bill. Supposedly it was to ask him if he wanted to be on call since someone passed it up. Usually, she texts these things to him, but this time she called. The phone bill says the call was 1 min, which means it was a brief call. I asked to see the call log where she called him on his phone, he has accidentally deleted it.

This all feels too much like deception and I’m ready to give up. Of course, he cries and begs me not to leave him, and it was all perfectly innocent. My mind and my heart are scrambled and not at peace. I just feel like a fool.

I sometimes wonder if I’m just gullible or if I’m over reacting. Things have been okay, not great. I don’t feel like I’ve made the right decision by staying a lot of the time because I feel like I deserve more from this marriage than I ever have received and I feel like I worked very hard to try to save it.

I just don’t want to end it until I’m 100 percent sure it’s the right thing to do. It’s very hard to walk away from a life you built with someone.

I've always been a big believer that one can make it work, as long as the WS and AP don't have to interact much or work closely together. As recently as a couple of months ago, I was still posting here about how it can work. But I've changed my mind. It's been 20 years. If I had it to do all over again, I'd 100% set the boundary that my H had to find employment elsewhere.

It was hard in the beginning to trust that he wasn't lying to me about being in contact with her. I think recovery would have been much easier and faster had we not had that extra stressor.

He still has to have contact with her for business a couple of times a year.

If he wants to go out with his work friends, there's a possibility that she'll be there too.

Some of the same people are still around and know what happened.

She's at all the company parties, so every year I get torqued up that I have to be around her.

She's STILL a presence in our lives - my head - our heads - because she's still around.

My advice now is to not try to make it work. Do your marriage a favor and make it a requirement that the WS switch jobs.

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 5:01 PM, Tuesday, January 30th]

As someone who has successfully reconciled with a fWS who continues to have the same employer as the AP, I absolutely think continued working together should be a dealbreaker as a general rule. I think there are a very (VERY) few circumstances where there are exceptions and itmay be possible, but these are certainly very limited exceptions and certainly never in cases where there is any regular ongoing contact or if the AP and the WS loved one another.

I wont get into the reasons why it was possible in my case, but I absolutely agree with SacredSoul when she says that even in the best possible circumstances, it makes R exponentially /infinitely harder. The OW's vague ongoing presence has 100% been the biggest trigger for me throughout. I'll expand on Bigger's story with an anecdote of my own - R was going well for H and I but it wasn't until OW went on an extended mat leave (Canada so one year long) a few years post-D-day that I finally was able to relax my shoulders.

I told my WH if he she contacted him via text, call, whatever, I need to know about it so I don’t feel like I’m being tricked again or feel like he’s hiding something.

To this day, I am notified immediately about any minimal whiff of contact my husband has with the AP - this is automatic. I'm talking the most minimal of interactions here as there is zero reason for them to interact on a day to day basis. If he walked past her in the hallway (they work 4 floors away from one another so this is very infrequent) he texts me immediately (so he wont forget). Before Christmas, he needed to speak with her assistant (not even her) to get a copy of a document or something so he called me before doing so to let me know and make sure this was okay or whether he should ask someone else to do it for him. This is 7 years later. In the early days, this kind of thing would often cause me to trigger and send me into a tailspin, but he did it anyway without exception or defensiveness, because he understood that it was a HARD boundary, and because he put my comfort and building trust, over his comfort in avoiding an argument. The fact that he messages me about interactions that I would never be able to confirm independently has been significant in building trust elsewhere.

A few months ago, she called him. I saw it on our phone bill. Supposedly it was to ask him if he wanted to be on call since someone passed it up. Usually, she texts these things to him, but this time she called. The phone bill says the call was 1 min, which means it was a brief call. I asked to see the call log where she called him on his phone, he has accidentally deleted it.

Immediate deal breaker. You are not gullible or overreacting. It doesn't matter if it was innocent or not. This was not a slip - it wasn't like he meant to tell you but forgot. He took active steps here to conceal the fact that the call occurred. If he cannot be trusted with the little stuff, he certainly cannot be trusted with the big stuff. You said it yourself, he's a serial cheat and a master manipulator. I get that it's hard to walk away over something that, by itself, seems smaller than the cheating itself, but this is just confirmation that he has not changed and that you will not be able to build trust.

The OW's vague ongoing presence has 100% been the biggest trigger for me throughout.

Yes, well said. Me too. She's like a cockroach issue that you just can't quite ever get rid of. She's gonna pop out from the dark spaces and wiggle her antennae and make everyone feel a little bit dirty every once in a while.

I found hundreds of unrequited love memes on her Pinterest a few years back, and I'm thoroughly convinced that had the ongoing intermittent contact not been happening, she would likely have moved on entirely as well. And that I wouldn't have felt so compelled to go looking for them. The more firmly that the door can be closed behind the A, the better.

Thank you for your responses ((Emergent8)) and ((Sacredsoul33)) Sharing your experiences and perspective is much appreciated. I think you both are right, it’s very hard to recover with them working together. It’s like a dark cloud, and the "forgetting to tell me" she called has sent me into a spiral. It broke my trust, the very small crumb of trust I had for him.

I feel like this has all been for nothing. I’m sick of always making concessions and eating "shit sandwiches" to stay in the marriage. He’s really lost nothing, other than the trust of the people that love him. People in our family now know there is a dark side to him and I think that is what he regrets most…Losing his fake persona.

I’m at least a lot stronger than I used to be when this all began for us. I’m hoping to have that moment of clarity to stay or go, limbo sucks.

He appears to be a serial cheater. AP#3? That is bad news.

I pulled the plug after AP#2. I gave the gift of rug sweeping with AP#1. I was young & dumb.

He expected me to be a doormat with AP#2. However He saw a side of me he wished he never witnessed. He turned me into a someone who now takes no crap, I put myself first, and I make sure I have an exit strategy for everything.

We have separate credit card accounts. My name is not on the mortgage but I am on the deed. I keep an emergency fund of money just in case (even 10 years later). I have a post nup that protects me. My car is in my name that I paid cash for after his last affair. I keep up to date on the real estate market just in case.

Yup that is what his last affair turned me into. I love him but I love 💕 myself more.

I hope this helps you.

Thank you ((The 1st wife)) for sharing your experience. AP #3 happened after I kicked him out about 2nd A.

He was out of the house for 6 months and I was telling him we were done. I never filed for D or anything, and he kept his AP 3 secret from me as he was trying to win me back. It was all so ridiculous.

When she realized he was probably moving back home, she ratted him out to me. Told me her theatrical romantic side of it all. How they were in love, etc. 🙄
She was 23 at the time and he was 48!

I have always had my own accounts, we only share the home and mortgage that has both of our names on it. I was a single mom when I met WH and I always felt he was immature with money. He moved in with me and we lived together unmarried for the first 6 years of our relationship. We shared expenses and it worked out having separate finances.

I have an exit plan, since post DDay 2. I learned to prepare from reading here on SI. I’m truly grateful for all I’ve gained from this site and from all that have helped me gain perspective and to regain my power.