Recovery from Emotional Affair

Hi all, I'm new here but was directed here by someone I trust. I'm not sure what I am looking for here, advice maybe? Here is the situation:

My wife (45) and I (51) have been together for 13 years and married for 11. It is the 2nd marriage for both of us. We both learned a lot of lessons from our first failed marriages, and have always been very intentional about our connection and communication. For most of our marriage I thought things were great.

Flash forward to the pandemic, and my wife happens to land her dream job leading an important function at a small company. The company being small and focused on research and collaboration, they were quicker to resume in-person than my company, a large multi-national conglomerate. My wife was flourishing, in her dream job as I mentioned, working with colleagues she truly loved working with, and it is definitely a work-hard, play-hard company so there were a lot of dinners, social events, etc. Meanwhile I was still working from home with very little in-person contact with anyone other than her and our kids. Little did I know at the time but I was falling into a fairly deep depression.

As a result of this I became distant and unavailable to her (of course I did not realize this at the time). Feeling alone and helpless she confided in a co-worker she had become close with. Over time this developed into your classic emotional affair, which I discovered by checking her phone and seeing her text string with him. It wasn't romantic or sexual but it was highly emotionally intimate, and IMO way over the line. She disagreed at first, but ultimately agreed that things had gotten out of hand.

So, we get into therapy and start working on things, problem is this dream job thing. She agrees to dial it back with this guy, but she is unwilling to leave the job, telling me that if she leaves this job for me/us it'll breed a ton of resentment, which I actually get. But over the course of the next few months it is like a roller coaster, some days I can handle the fact that he's still in her life, other days not so much.

Things all came to a head about a week ago, we were hanging out making dinner one night, and all of a sudden she says she's polyamorous (she had hinted at this, so not a total shock) and that she is in love with this guy, and he's in love with her. But, whatever feelings she has for him doesn't compare to how she feels for me, she doesn't want to leave me, and she wants our relationship to continue, she just also wants to be able to "invest in" this other relationship. By "invest in" she means spend time with this guy, dinners, drinks, etc., but she claims neither of them want things to get physical or romantic, they just have a connection that she can't ignore.

So, here I am not knowing what to do. I love her with all of my heart, and I wish I could give her what she is asking for. I've read a lot about emotional affairs and it seems like the consensus is the only way to fully recover from them is for contact with the emotional affair partner to cease. Not only is that not happening, she's asking to double down on it. I vacillate from feeling like I can learn to live with this and she'll be happier and more engaged in our relationship if I can find a way to give her what she wants, and feeling despair over the whole thing, and thinking I am nuts for entertaining it, and that if she "invests" in this other relationship the bond will only become stronger between them.

Sorry for the long first post. I'm looking for . . advice I think? I don't want our relationship to fail and neither does she, but maybe we just aren't compatible anymore. All I know is it sucks to hear the love of your life tell you she is in love with someone else too.

11 comments posted: Monday, October 16th, 2023