I have listened to your show and read your column for many years. I like that you cut to the chase. My husband and I have been married for fifteen years and have three children. Our twelve year old suffers form a chronic medical condition which requires me to be a full time caregiver and homeschooler.

I will do my best to sum up how I became a CPS and how I have attempted to move on with our lives. My husband and I had an amazing sex life—up and until our wedding night. Afterwards, he was unable to perform sexually. I begged and pleaded for him to get some help either with an MD or a shrink or both. He refused. Seven years into a totally sexless marriage, I became close friends with a college buddy of his. Lots of common interests. We also shared a common wound: we were both in sexless marriages. I tried, cried, and begged my husband to get some help because I could not stay in a marriage with no sex. Long story short, his friend and I started out with casual outings to book stores. (We're both big readers.) We soon had our inside jokes. I tried to warn my husband at one point about how this relationship was spiraling out of control. Husband shook it off assuring me that his friend would never do anything improper.

His friend became physically affectionate and I found myself falling head over heels for the guy. The attraction was dynamite.

One weekend, we spent the night at the guy's house with his wife. She had to be up at 5 a.m. and left us to a night of heavy drinking. My husband passed out in the guest room and the friend and I started groping. The next thing I knew my husband was pulling me off of his friend. He asked what the hell we were doing and I was so drunk I told him I wasn't really sure. The next day we had to travel to for his sister's wedding. A tense situation to say the least. He ranted and railed at me for the entire twelve-hour drive. He threatened to kill himself, to kill his friend, to destroy both of us in the community. I took the blame and promised to end it. Which I did. I had developed emotional feelings as well as sexual feelings for the friend. I never told him that. My husband wanted to sweep it under the rug and move on. There were signs he was handling it poorly. He became an alcoholic. He would become angry and verbally abusive. I felt like I deserved it. He would continue to ask me for nitty gritty details and I began to evade his questions because the more I told him, the more enraged he became.

We had been trying to have children for many, many years and had been unsuccessful. As soon as I became pregnant, this barely consummated affair seemed to be water under the bridge. That is, until the guy's wife found out we were having a baby and mailed us a gift. My husband was enraged again and decided to call her and tell her the truth about her husband. I begged him not to do it. He told me that I wanted him to suffer in silence. I became pregnant with our twins five months later. We now had three babies who required everything we had.

My husband I attempted to go to counseling and it basically came down to this: either my husband has to accept his part in this tragedy or we had to divorce and move on. Due to ages of our children, we decided to sweep it under the rug and move onwards. At this point I was gravely inured in an accident and needed 24/7 nursing care for months. During my convalescense, my husband refused to engage in sexual contact with me. I met a man online through a porno site and we had cybersex. It was a great release for me. When the guy expressed romantic feelings, I ended it. It turned out my husband had placed tracking software on my computer and saw our messages. More rage.

Jump ahead several years. My husband and I went though extensive counseling and I thought things were ok. Now, seven years later, he has started having flashbacks and nightmares. He is inconsolable. He was so sure that I was lying to him that he contacted our former friend for all the details. My former friend made it sound like it was all my fault. He said I was the sexual aggressor. Now my husband says the scab has been ripped off, that he always knew I was a liar, and that he doesn't know what to do now.

Having a special needs child with critical health problems means all hands on deck. I have tried everything I can to get my husband to understand that I have been faithful to him through this time and WHY I was unfaithful to him. He wants to go back to couples counseling. I am fine with it as long as he understands the circumstances that led me to stray in the first place.

Dan, I am really lost. I will stay for the kids. I am bound and determined to care for them. My question is: can he get past this?

Sad And Long Tears

It sure doesn't sound like your husband can get past this—it actually sounds like your husband is determined never to get past this, SALT, which would explain why he insists on ripping the wound open at regular intervals. Because so long as he can keep torturing you for this nothing of an affair, so long as he can keep offloading all responsibility for the state of his marriage onto his wife's shoulders, he doesn't have to be intimate with you in any way (sexually and emotionally), he doesn't have to examine his own role in the breakdown of his marriage, and he never has to give up the "moral high ground" of being the "victim" of this, again, big fat nothing of an affair. (Like Esther Perel says: "The victim of the affair is not always the victim of the marriage.")

Since you're not in a position to leave, SALT, what you should seek in counseling is some sort of negotiated settlement. Detente. Let go of old expectations, stop picking at past, failures, and focus on your responsibilities to each other and your kids going forward. You aren't lovers and haven't been for a long time. You are partners and you are parents—your kids need you, they need both of you, and it would appear that you can't provide the care they need if you divorce. So you're fucking stuck with each other for the foreseeable future, SALT, and you'll have to make the best of it. Tell your husband, in the presence of your counselor, that you're not seeking his forgiveness. This isn't an attempt to repair your marriage or to restore your relationship to the condition it was in before you married. You're there to put a cap on it—a cap like the one they put on top of the reactors at Chernobyl—and that means no more discussions, no more recriminations, no more fights about this. If not for your sake, then for your kids' sakes.

All you owe each other going forward is kindness, consideration, and respect. Period. He doesn't have to get over his anger about your long-ago sexual betrayal—which came in the wake his sexual betrayal/abandonment—but he'll have to eat it. Because you're not going to answer or apologize for it anymore.