My husband has left me

[WeepingWillow]

Out of the blue my husband told me that he wanted to leave me and has been having an affair with a woman at his work for 2 months. He's been at the job 4 months. We've been together 15 years, married for 7 and have 2 young children.

I'm devasted. This is completly our of character as he is such a kind caring man who dotes on his children and is a fantastic father. Everyone else is deeply shocked too, nothing like this has happened before.

Over the past couple of years we've had a lot of external pressure. He lost his job, changed career, set up his own business which failed and we lost all our savings and are now in debt. There was a distance between us, times had been very tough. I still thought (mistakenly) that we were fundamently OK.

He left saying he needed time to think, he was confused, completely blamed himself, didn't love me anymore and didn't know if he loved this other woman.


He is staying with a friend, hasn't called me and just came around to get more clothes. I'm so shocked that he's just run away even though I know he
is a terrible conflict avoider and awful at talking about what he's feeling...still I had no idea this was coming

I'm getting lot's of support , thankfully and I'm slowly beginning to understand why this has happened but obviously fear the worst. I do want to reconcile but does he not realise he may lose everything or am I the one who's been living in a fantasy?

How can he throw away our relationship after a 2 month fling?

[diana_holbourn]

Maybe you could write to him trying to help him clarify exactly what he wants from his future, and everything he'll miss out on if he leaves you, and how the children will be hurt if he does.

You could ask him questions like,
"If we got back together, and everything started going really well, what would be happening?
How would things be different from the way they were before?
What would be the first signs that things were getting better between us?
What would our families notice first that would let them know that things were beginning to go well for us?
What would you be doing differently that would let me know you felt things were going well?
How would I be behaving differently that would let you know things were going well?
What would we be doing together that would help us enjoy ourselves more, within the limits of our finances?"

Questions like that might help him start thinking about what he would like from his future and how to go about getting it, in case he's just making himself feel bad by dwelling all the time on what's gone wrong. Then when he's thought of how he'd like things to improve, you could hopefully discuss the improvements with him.

Perhaps reminding him about some of the good times you had in the past would help as well.