Dear PJ:

You are welcome.

Your wife is “a good person and generous person, great mother ..and an extremely hard worker at home and her job”-

– you shouldn’t have betrayed a good and generous person” day in and day out, week after week for six whole months.

I know you don’t want to feel guilty, but before discarding it listen to the message behind it: you betrayed a good, generous woman, a good mother to your own two children, so you said.

“The years of dating my wife in my book were just ok”, but your lover of six months, who is someone else’s wife and a mother to two children of her own, she was way better than okay, “never felt so close to someone, not even in my prior romantic relationships or my marriage”.

The reason you married your wife is because “no one else came along to make me question my decision”. But now someone did come along to question your decision.

As painful as it is for you and your wife to have lost this baby, it is not what kept you in the affair. What kept you in the affair is that you met a woman who was way better than okay, and now, okay is not good enough.

I suggest that before another pregnancy happens in your marriage, that a separation takes place. Co parent your two children as a team. If she is the great mother you say she is, she will do her best to co parent her children with you.

It may be a good idea for you and your wife to attend couple counseling not for the purpose of continuing the marriage but for the purpose of proceeding to co parent your children and protect your children from any and all possible expressions of hostility between their parents.

It is not divorce in itself that hurts children so much- it is the hostility involved. Take that factor away, and a divorce seems to me like the right step ahead, for you, for your wife and for your children.

anita