I just have one thing I would like to single out a little bit, and I don’t know if it will help or not, but it might help to change your perspective a little:

 She stood by me at my darkest moments, where my wife should have been. And I feel that I have failed as a husband, as I thought that my wife would need me to lean on; as that I feel would have helped with my healing.

I am not using that as an excuse for the affair, but god when someone comes along and walks beside you in your pain, it’s hard to not follow it. And it is extremely depressing and sad when that person is not your significant other. So the biggest question to me, is if we can’t weather this storm together now, will we ever be able to weather another one or will I be out on my island again.

You seem to be putting expectations on your wife on how you think she should be handling her grief. What do you think those expectations are exactly if you were to list them, and do you think those expectations are fair under the specific circumstances?

Being realistic here, a stillborn child is not just a storm for a couple to weather, it’s a tsunami. When a woman carries a child, especially to almost full-term, there is an unspeakable bond with that child that most people won’t understand unless they actually go through a pregnancy. It’s an amaaazing experience but it’s also a lot of HARD WORK, pain, nausea, hunger, weight gain, worry, and let’s not even get started on actually giving birth. I cannot imagine physically and emotionally going through an entire pregnancy and then having a stillborn child.

I am not trying to minimize your pain and what you’re going through in any way, but I think you should maybe look at what your wife is going through a different way. She’s had to go through everything you went through plus the added physical issues of pregnancy and recovery to add salt in her wounds, many of which you’re not going to be able to truly understand because you haven’t experienced pregnancy. She had to handle that in whatever way she needed to handle that, even if that meant her pretending like it didn’t happen (which was probably the only way she could function at the time, I’m guessing) and even if that meant she wasn’t there for you, walking beside you in your darkest moments… it’s likely she was going through something darker. Again, I’m truly not trying to minimize your grief as I can’t imagine how difficult it has been for you, but it’s just that added component that women have with going through an entire pregnancy, birth, and recovery, that men don’t have to deal with.  Have you thought of it that way before?

Then there is the other woman… she wasn’t dealing with major grief when she was there for you, walking beside you in your pain, right? If not, it was likely EASY for her to be there for you at that time, far easier than it ever would’ve been for your wife.

I just have to wonder if your feelings for her are extra heightened because of the emotional state you were in when you started the affair. I think, when people are going through grief, ANY good feelings that people are able to have tend to feel AMAZING (heightened because of the contrast). She was helping to relieve your grief, so you now associate her with relief, and you also saw her as giving you something your wife wasn’t, while probably not realizing that it was easier for her to give it to you because she was not dealing with her own trauma at the time. I can also see how sharing with someone all of your feelings about the death of a child would make you feel closer to them. Did you have any sort of flirty attraction with this woman before all of this happened?