First, if your marriage counselor is telling you to come here for serious advice like this, you need a new counselor. Good intentions and hard-won wisdom is no substitute for actually having a face-to-face conversation. There are a hundred questions you haven't answered...

So, what do you want? For your husband to come back and not have any more affairs? To get a divorce and be rid of him?

Why is your husband lying to you? (do you have proof that he actually is lying to you? Does he want you to catch him in a lie?) Is he concealing something from you because he doesn't want to hurt you, or because he's afraid of you?

First off Mattie, welcome.

Second, I am very sorry to hear about your marriage difficulties.

From where I am sitting, you only have a few things to consider.

Your husband has already made the choice that his freedom is more important than your marriage. There is no other way to put it. He is likely still seeing the other woman and it is clear that he does not want to try and work anything out with you right now. If he is continuing a pattern of lying to you, then he is nowhere close to being a partner in your marriage. His leaving is a pretty clear signal that he no longer sees himself as married to you.

So, the question is, are you willing to sit at home and wait for him to make up his mind whether to divorce you or to come back home? If so, how long are you willing to wait? Are you willing to take him back with no strings attached? Is your relationship with him strong enough for both of you? Because right now, he has opted out of the relationship. You admitted that you were willing to forgive but not forget, so can you live with him again, knowing what he has done, and what he continues to do? You need to understand that in his eyes, your feelings are secondary to his right now. This is all about 'him' and what he feels like he is entitled to.

If this has been going on since January, it looks from here like the progress has been towards divorce and not towards reconciliation. The longer he stays out, the less likely he is to come home unless his new "interest" dumps him. Right now, he has a pretty good situation. He is still married to you, which preserves his property and money from a messy divorce, plus a pretty cushy fall-back position if his new life doesn't match up with his fantasy. And he is also getting to live the life of the care-free bachelor. He gets to date and come and go as he pleases.

Pretty sweet deal! I can't see a reason to change the status quo if I am him.

The way I see it is that you are the one in control of the rest of your life. He made the choice to leave, so you get to choose how you live your life from this moment on. You need to decide what YOU want to happen. If you want to save the marriage, then you need to decide what you are willing to give up to get him back. Because if hasn't come back on his own, you are going to have to compete for his attention. Can you do that? Are you WILLING to do that?

If you decide that you need more from your estranged husband than what he has to offer you, then make the move to build a new life that doesn't include him.

Also, realize that it is real easy for me to sit here and offer advice from the safety of my computer. No matter what you choose, my life will be unaffected. So always take such advice with a grain of salt. I think you know exactly what you want to do. It's just a very difficult and scary situation you are standing in right now. I have stood in your shoes and I know how sad you are and how hopeless the situation looks. The only advice I would hope you will take is that you need to make the decision that works for YOU. Because no matter how your life unfolds with, or without him, you need to be able to look yourself in the mirror and know that you were honest with yourself.

On a lighter note, while I was going through my marital crisis, my good friend reminded me that members of the opposite sex are not rare, nor are they an endangered species. There are plenty of them around and a lot of them are far superior to the one that got away.

Good luck and I wish you the very best.

DannyO (love your photo)

My marriage counselor is just that...a marriage only counselor. My husband didn't go to two appointments so I cancelled the rest. Don't know what I want. Still trying to figure that one out. I do have proof that he's lying. He knows I know. He says he lies because I'll get upset.

Does this help?

WOW! Now that's what I was hoping for. I loved your comments. I'll be pondering them over and over again. But question still unanswered --- how do I make the decision that works for ME? And if you've been thru this, what did you do? I'm having trouble getting out. I don't have a lot of friends...cause we own our own business. That took up all of our life for the last 20 years. Thanks for your help.

Hello again Mattie!

You make the best decision you can with the information available to you at the moment. You can never be sure that the decision you make today will be the right choice. If we all knew how our choices would work out, we would probably make a lot better choices. LOL!! But......life is messy. Our choices often look downright ridiculous when we look back on them with the experience we gained. The problem is that NOT choosing doesn't solve anything either. Our lives are filled with these crucial decisions, it's just that most of them don't revolve around facing the reality that the person you trusted more than anyone else in your world has betrayed that trust. The hurt from that realization can be debilitating.

As for me, I threw my ex out on her ass. The girls stayed with me and I never looked back. But Mattie.......that was ME. What you do CANNOT be influenced by some guy on the internet with a silly one-eared cat avatar. "Getting out" might be the hardest thing you ever do. But him coming home could be worse. When you look deep inside yourself, you know what you need. Never forget that your marriage is in the condition it is right now because your husband made a conscious choice. No matter what might have happened up until he left, he quit the marriage. You didn't. He is responsible for where the marriage stands right now because of his unilateral decision to walk out.

You say you don't have many friends. Do you have one you trust? Just having a sounding board can make you feel better about where you are. No one likes to feel alone, especially when they are truly alone. I unfortunately had no friends or family to talk to about my situation, and it was a very difficult time for me. If you have a trusted friend, I hope you will let them be there with you.

Be aware that since you and your husband are in business together, your situation is even more complex. If I were in your position, I would consult an attorney as quickly as possible. No matter where you and your husband find yourselves in the future, you need to protect your interest in the business today.

As I said, this is a very sad and difficult time for you, and I am very sorry that you have to go through this. What ever you decide to do will be hard and your life will never be the same. I just hope that your life is better because of your decision.

Again......my best wishes to you.

I don't know what qualifications marriage counselors have where you live but in California a Marriage & Family Counselor can and does work with individuals as well as couples and is an excellent resource for help in figuring out what you want to do. If she or he won't help in this, find a better counselor.

OK, he says he lies because you'll get upset. There may be more truth to that than you think!

I've seen relationships where one person (in this case, your husband, perhaps) wants to end the relationship, but he or she is too much of a coward to do it. So he or she sabotages the relationship until the other person is driven to end it. That way the first person doesn't need to feel guilty -- he or she didn't want to end it, did want to try to find a way, etc. It's the second person's fault it didn't work -- he or she is the one who abandoned the first!

Your husband is behaving in a way that makes you unhappy (maybe even having an affair), he won't go to counseling with you, and now he's moved out. And he's not even a very good liar -- makes little effort to hide his guilt, so he gets to hurt you twice -- first, by what he does, and second, by lying about it. I think he wants out.

He says he doesn't want to end it, but talk is cheap. Has he actually done anything about patching things up? Or does he keep finding new ways to make things worse?