Originally posted by Pigeon:
Tony,

I feel for you in your situation. My mother was 1st married for a short while to an abusive man. After she escaped that marriage after a few months she married my father. He cheated on her repeatedly until she finally threw his ass out when I was 7. He lived 10 minutes from me but I probably only saw him 10 times after that. Good riddence, bastard. She found another man, who was also a divorcee. They dated a long time, bought a house together, but he could never commit to marry her. Then one day he drops dead of a heart attack. He had a home office and my mother discovered messages on the machine from the other woman he was keeping in another town (he was a traveling sales rep). So, given what I've seen from the view of a child of divorce and cheating parents, my advice to you is do not try to patch things up only for the sake of your daughter. If you love her you will want to provide a stable home for her, and so long as your wife is cheating on you (and if she's done it once she'll do it again) you won't have a stable home. Set your life straight first, get custody of your daughter, and love and raise her as best as you can. Allow free visitation, but you are the parent she should be looking to for moral guidance.

One observation:

Originally posted by BOFH:
My particular type of control is knowing what's going on, having information. Not knowing was driving me batty.



Originally posted by BOFH:
How did I know how to find her. Well back in September when my wife said she wanted to leave, I went through my server logs and found she was researching this guy. She told me then he was a representative for Humana Military Healthcare and she was looking at getting a job. So I bought it. But I remembered the name, archived the logs as well as saved a copy of her e-mail box.



Seems to me that if the problem for Lori in your marriage was your controlling her through having all the information all the time that nothing has changed, despite your best efforts at counseling and faith healing. Time to move on.

Scott








Scott,

That's just it, I never checked on her. I had the server logs if our teen daughter started acting strange, spending too much time on the internet, I was going to look at where she had gone.

I set that up with Lori's knowledge, letting her know that everything going in and out was being logged since anyone could use any computer in the house.

So yes, I want to know what is going on. However, until my wife started acting strangely, I never checked up on anything. I just collected data.

I appreciate your advice and she must agree to complete transparency in her life if she does want to come back.

I still do love her, and I do understand why she did it. I don't blame myself for her having an affair, because she should have said something more clear to me much earlier if she felt that way for a long time. So I only accept responsiblity for what I did.

She still has to atone and do a 180 on her behaviors that led to this.

If she cannot do that, she isn't coming back. By the same token, if I cannot do a complete 180 for my insensitive ways, she shouldn't come back either.

No, there are two hurting people here that have to decide what the best way is of not hurting one another any more.

TB

"Seems like our society is more interested in turning each successive generation into cookie-cutter wankers than anything else." -- Jato 8/24/2004