Let’s think about important factors in a romantic relationship. First, is the question “Is this woman the one for you? You may have asked yourself this question a long time ago, but I believe it is still relevant to the situation you are going through now. It may be a time to reflect if she is the person, you are madly in love with and willing to work through any of these problems for. Despite how awful the situation may be, you may state that you will always continue to work on things because she is the one you love. On the other hand, after reflecting on this question you may state she is not the one for you then at that point it may be time to move on. I will assume based on the information provided that you have not decided to end the relationship at this point, and you are only suggesting a temporary break.
Now, let’s try to address the confrontation.
Betrayal is an awful experience. However, people can recover from affairs. You have suggested to take a break in the marriage. This can be helpful, and I believe you have enough reason at this point to tell her this. I don’t think there is much she can say at this point to go against your decision about taking a break. It is best to confront her about the situation and follow through with your decision.
However, let me recommend taking further steps because I want to be mindful that you may still want to work on this marriage after. You mentioned at times feeling like you were stalking her after you first found out about her sexting someone else. Later, you continued to look through her messages to discover more information. Obviously, your suspicions were right but you can experience some major symptoms from this. Often times the individual who has been cheated on in the marriage develops symptoms similar to Post-traumatic stress disorder. This is not to say the affair was a life-threatening event, but you can begin to develop this hypervigilance in the relationship. You can continue to ruminate and remain guarded in the relationship after this experience which is not healthy.
Thus, you may need to go through a process of healing from this entire experience. Therapy can help in this process. First, you need to develop the skills in expressing your emotions to her about the affair. I cannot emphasize enough that you cannot simply just take the break and never talk about what happened ever again. Also, it is more complicated than just having one conversation about the affair and never talking about it again. This is a process in which she has to hear you out and you have to continue to practice expressing your feelings in a healthy way. For example, if I was seeing both of you for couples counseling, I would structure it so you only talked about the affair during therapy and that way you have your designated time every week to practice expressing yourself to her. The next portion to healing from this is you being allowed to ask questions to her about the affair. She must be willing to answer your questions honestly and with transparency. If she does not, then it will be very difficult to continue with a healthy marriage if she refuses to answer questions or continues to lie about the affair. You can ask her as many questions you feel comfortable with but do not ask questions specific to the type of sex that occurred. Ultimately, this will only cause you to experience increased awful images in your head. I tell couples your marriage number one between the both of you has ended. The relationship trust is shattered at this point. I emphasize we still have hope that marriage number two between you two can work but we must commit to really making it work.
I recommend continuing with this process of expressing your feelings and asking the questions you want for as long as you need to. Some couples go through this process for months of the hurt person being listened to and asking questions. Once you feel ready then you can begin to have a discussion with her on what went wrong in the relationship to lead to this affair. This will likely involve talking about things you never really talked about before. This may involve talking about conflicts you just avoided or talking about needs that were not being expressed in the relationship.
The last phase of healing is to start to develop ways of reconnecting with each other again. I notice some people jump straight into this phase often after an affair. They just decide to not talk about the affair again and then think taking a trip together will reignite the spark in the marriage and this will solve the issues. This usually backfires. It is important to go through the process I mentioned above before you start moving into developing new ways to reconnect with your partner.
Ultimately, I imagine this experience is awful and I want you to continue to be kind to yourself as you are going through this. Life is already being hard enough on you, do not be harder on yourself.
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