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Feelings for another woman
I am a 42 year old male. I have been married for 16 years. Several months ago my wife and I hit a bit of a rough patch. I began a text relationship with a younger coworker. Nothing physical ever happened between us. Long story short my wife found out about the messages. She made me stop immediately. My wife and I have moved forward from this event and have grown closer. The problem is I still think about the other woman frequently and sometimes it is a distraction with work and family. How can move on from my feelings from this woman?
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I see nothing wrong with having a friend of the opposite sex. As long as this relationship is nothing more then texting between friends and you have no bigger expectations I see no reason to stop texting.
You wife may have been wrong to stop you depending on what she saw in the messages. If the messages were just two friends talk about work and family life. Sort of the same conversation you might have with a buddy over a beer there is nothing wrong here.
I suggest couple counseling for you with a psychologist. Doing so allows you to say why you might want to continues texting or your wife can say how she really feels about this in a safe environment.
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If you are simply thinking about the other woman and there isn't anything you got from texting her that you don't have with the wife, then it isn't too complicated to retrain your thinking.
Your subconscious mind, (SM) is like having another person inside of you, watching everything you do every day. It feels one of its job is to make you happy and so what you focus your thoughts on a lot, your SM will assume it is very important to you, no matter if its good stuff, bad scary stuff or forbidden stuff and it will do its best to keep bringing up thoughts of this woman to you. So this is a matter of retraining your subconscious mind. YOu have to be deligent and that means that every time a thought of her pops into your conscious mind, thanks to your SM, you need to tell your SM either out loud or inside yourself that you made a mistake. You don't want to think about this woman because your wife is more imporant to you. Of course this has to be true. If you have fallen out of love with your wife but are just best friends now, then your SM will know you are not being truthful with yourself and it will not cooperate with you and you will end up battling yourself until you do the right thing. The SM will pop thoughts of someone into your mind quite often, annoyingly often and you have to stop and tell it the same message over and over. It can be 10 times in 5 minutes, several times per hour but eventually after a few days of doing this, the SM will get the message and stop bringing thoughts of the other woman to the forefront.
You mentioned a rough patch. I don't know what that constituted but I know darn well that when a person wants something from their marriage and is no longer getting it or not as much as before, instead of working on fixing that, they go looking elsewhere for what they are missing. So you need to be honest with yourself and figure out what exactly drove you to pay attention to another woman. Since I don't know the real reason, I will toss out some examples in case you aren't following what I am saying.
A man might turn to another woman if:
He is not feeling appreciated, taken for granted and simply wants the attention of another
He or the wife were too busy to have time to talk like they used to so he chats with another women
Wife doesn't seem as romantically invested as she used to, so even if he won't have sex, he still turns to another simply for the imaginations of what it would be like
Sex is too predictable, the same old same old and nothing much about it is memorable anymore so he will turn to another either for the visual and mental stimulation and'or sex.
There are probably lots of other reasons. Simply stopping the texting doesn't fix what caused the rough patch you refer to. So unless there is something you haven't shared such as both you and wife having a heart to heart talk, getting all your concerns out there and both promising to change some things and are actually carrying through on them to improve your relationship, I can not believe that all is fine. If the two of you haven't talked and tried working on the causes of your rough patch, then I suggest seeing a couples therapist for counseling.
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