My girlfriend is married

I met her a year ago. I know its taboo. I know it was wrong then, but then we both fell in love... She's afraid to divorce because of the repercussions on her family. She has no kids, but everyone is very close, including her sisters kids. I dont know where to start, or what to say to explain all this.

(Don't worry, I would have squeezed it all out of you, anyway, like a Jiff Lemon, LOL. ;-)) First questions: 1. So what you mean is, her family wouldn't approve and might ostracise her if they knew? 2. Why do you suppose it is they would they do that if they could see that she were ditching what was deadwood or even downright toxicity (husband) and going for the much better and healthier bet (you)?

1) yes 2) her husband isnt a bad seed. She just married the wrong man. She's not tested, not stimulated, and more annoyed than anything. She just says she realized she married more of a friend than a lover

Wow, thought it was only me.....I've been seeing a guy for over 3 years-through GF, engagement, and marriage. And he says the same about her. Says their lives and families are so intertwined that he can't just leave her. He said he put himself in the situation so he's going to see where it takes him, but still came back to me after marriage. He loves me, he would marry me if he would have met me first, that I challenge him like no one else ever has, we are both very educated and driven, she is not, and he wants to be with me but can't leave her. Not unless she wanted to leave him because he can't hurt her like that. I could go into things so much more but it would be a novel. I don't know what advice to give you since I am there myself. I love him with all my heart, but I feel so lost not having all of his at times. I'm 35, not some teenage girl, and we both realize what we've done. It's something that just happened, it was stronger than us both and one reason why we still are together. I don't know what to do either. I could never tell her because in the end it would hurt him and that's something I never want to do. So despite the fact they would be over instantly, I wouldn't do that to him. Anyone who doesn't understand would say to leave and never look back but it's not that easy. I leave and I lose the love of my life. I leave and I know his heart will be broken but he won't say a word because he feels like I will find someone who can give me all the things he can't right now. But what I want is him....that's all, just him. I wish I could help you more CNDGUY, at least we both know that there are others out there who are truly good people who wind up in F'd up situations that really just happened. Chemistry can be stopped but real love happens no matter what circumstances surround those involved. That's what I feel. I just wish it wouldn't have happened to me like this because I know I can never have the real relationship with him that I desire while he is married. And I know that I won't have love without him either. So what do people like CNDGUY and me do???

Well, I was going to take this bit-by-bit but, now you've jumped in, LOSTLAB (not that I mind, mind) and raised practically every sub-issue, so... "So what do people like CNDGUY and me do???" How's about, have your two heads banged together to knock some sense into the pair of you? What do you MEAN, you thought it was only you? What - in the world? Within a 5-mile radius of you? Come off it. Buckle up, you two... 1. You and CNDGUY both, are ALREADY heartbroken - and increasingly with each passing day, week, month, year - THINK ABOUT IT! But heartbroken in dribs and drabs (that amass) rather than one fell swoop. So a reversal of that, despite preceded by a couple of months' on-off pain and inconvenience is NOT going to hurt more than staying in that (tell it like it is) BUTLER position. 2. Because-because-because, blah-blah-blah, not-yet-not-yet-NOT-YET, Tooo-morrow-Tomorrow, I luv ya, Tomorrow, You're always (ALWAYS) a day a-waaaay! Do you two not realise that this is a standard set of excuses type fob-off scenario the world over when a spouse takes a lover on the side, and one that has been playing out for centuries? Clearly not. The adulterer his or herself doesn't even have to be fobbing you off KNOWINGLY OR INTENTIONALLY (although at some point that witting-ness does take over). When that's the case, they just find themselves issuing the same ol' or new or updated excuses to stand in for the fact that they have nothing else believable to say in order to account and justify for the fact that they somehow just CANNOT bring themselves to one-two-three-JUMP! When someone truly is in-love with you, they will move MOUNTAINS to get to be your proper full-time, life partner. Not being with you for as many minutes out of each and every day, and especially on occasions like birthdays and Christmases, HURTS TOO MUCH. Having to still share their days and all such extra-special occasions with their 'previous' partner, FEELS HORRID. So even if they didn't originally INTEND to leave their spouses, time containing comparisons and contrasts does it for them anyway. But we're talking mere months. Like 2-3. Realising they aren't ever realistically going to leave their spouses and lives for you, they want the next best thing - which is, to keep having BOTH. You AND the spouse. Cake and eat it. Walter Mitty City. But guess who's always the hapless pigeon sat eagerly waiting under hers and her husbands or his and his wife's restaurant table, waiting starving-hungrily for every tiny little crumb to drop? Is that all you two deserve - crumbs? Not the full meat and two veg with gravy followed by dessert? What are you both - horrific to look at?...so annoying (despite physically attractive) that you're anti-social?...an embarrassment?...a pair of lepers, whereby you have to take what you can get, even if what you can get is next to nothing compared to the rest of the men and women out there? Or a pair of giant commitmentphobes who're under the common illusion that you can conveniently have a BIT of a relationship, perhaps 50-60%. Well, no, you can't. That's like saying you're a bit of a stool. But unless a stool has enough of a seat and more than one leg, it's - what now? A lump of useless wood that doesn't even suffice as an umbrella. There is no such THING as part of a relationship. If you had half a pot-plant, would you expect it to survive, let alone thrive, hold water and nutrients, produce flowers, grow bigger, look and smell nice...? It's destined to die come what may, isn't it. Take Mr Soulmate (who's half-French, half-Italian): Standing in the way of *our* being together for the rest of our lives, *included* the following obstacles: 1. We lived in separate countries (met on holiday in Spain), the Channel in between us meaning one of us had to uproot our entire lives and lifestyles. 2. My being literally incapable of moving from England to his home country of France until my kid reached university age (because I have primary custody), meaning only he could (unless we wanted to wait (effing no!)), so that's what HE faced. 3. Not knowing whether he and my kid would get on or clash horribly or whether my ex-husband (who still passive-aggressively held a torch) would become a constant thorn in our side according to all prior indications...ergo, whether any drastic move might be for nought but a serious-serious life-step backwards. 4. Not speaking English at all well (I've had to give him daily lessons), another money-earning AND socialising obstacle, and a custody commitment that means only self-employment was possible. 5. His own, at the time very young child, of whom he had weekend custody, living happily in her home country with her mother, meaning bringing her with him wasn't an option and here he'd not only have to jointly earn enough to support our lifestyles AND accrue a pension, but THEN SOME in order to afford to keep going back to have custody of her each and every year...total £5k minimum per year, and that's only because his family and friends provide food and accommodation. But he obviously needs a second car kept over there, plus running expenses, so that takes it up to more like £7k. This meant persuading and negotiating with her already hostile and uncooperative mother to get her to allow him a completely different custody arrangement (five one-to-two-week custody periods coinciding with her school holidays plus one whole summer month - July alternated with August) to what had been court ordered and what she and daughter were long used to. Plus the tedium of all that to-and-fro-ing as well as having to constantly re-adjust then re-adjust back again. 6. His steady job plus French-govt-paid disability compensation payments (for his having suffered permanent injury in a motorway accident not of his doing) was in France. They would obviously both stop. He had to beg and plead for his employer to let him off his time-committal contract. Apparently, he got down on his knees in front of his entire colleagues until his boss took pity on him. 7. He had no savings, had been forced to spend them all whilst too injured to work full-time and awaiting a lump sum compensation payout (possibly; how much, he didn't know). He spent a year doing serious, SERIOUS overtime, enough to include the cost of coming here every month then every 2 weeks. He refused my help, bar one occasion. 8. A drastic decrease in what had been his regular, normal contact with his mother, father, two sisters, dead brother and sister's graves, aunts, uncles, cousins (close family), all his memory markers. 9. Ditto his entire social life, including his favourite haunts and venues. 10. Ditto trading his better weather for THIS muddy puddle isle. 11. Ditto giving up his beautiful, much-loved, rented French farmhouse that he'd spent 3 years toiling over to completely renovate and had only just completed (which we still both wistfully mourn). 12. Having to sort through, painfully eliminate, then pack up his remaining entire worldly possessions and pay to have them shipped over. 13. Not knowing for certain (in the true sense of the word) whether we as a full-time couple would work out or not, let alone to the point where we'd want to make it lifelong official. Etcetera. The life transformation he faced was a 97% complete and disorientating one. Huge risk. HUGE! And the entire adjustments I had to make weren't exactly a walk in the park, either. There had been nothing wrong with our lives right before we'd met. But, oh, suddenly there absolutely was! So as you can see, NOTHING was bigger, more important, more pressing than our love and desperately wanting and needing to live our lives together. NOTHING. And had we NOT been able to do so, we would too quickly have begun to resent and then hate almost every home obstacle. We would have committed murder if that had been our only way of being forever together. I kid you not. We would, today, still kill if that's what it took. You do feel like that - when it's TRUE love and you know it is without one shadow of a doubt because you have proof-proof-proof, endless proof. You only need to look at how much being regularly separated hurts YOU, to realise how it should feel for them (as would show in actions) yet clearly doesn't. Not enough. 'Not enough' shouldn't be good enough. If it is or has to be, then you have an issue that you need to examine very honestly and closely. E.g., what are your reasons for wanting to have your cake and eat it (and thinking that can work)? I literally cannot face living without you is as I cannot face living without you *DOES*. I literally cannot live without you (and proving it) is true love speaking. If they don't feel like that or not enough to manage to act on it whilst the urge is at its strongest and most powerful (during and by the end of the Honeymoon Period, all things having gone well) then what on earth ELSE is going to be capable of motivatingly propelling them into a life with you, do you think? All THEY seem to be coming out with is what DETERS them! Oh, they can kid themselves that they just need more time to do this or allow this/that to happen. But extricating yourself physically and practically from merely a married life and marital home does NOT take more than a couple of months to achieve. Look at all those people who DO leave their spouse and former marital home. And at those who do so even without anyone at the ready to go to. So if they shilly-shally then something ELSE, something OTHER than the practical is keeping them glued. Guess what that is, go on? They do NOT not love their spouses or all-round prefer you and what a life with you would be like to them. They are moreover happy with their lives with their spouses except for one definite or lots of tiny, niggley side-things, like there not being quite enough sex or romance for their liking, or insufficient excitement and stimulation in their lives generally, or trying to pander to a recent new worry that they're growing old and losing their looks and desirability (mid life crisis). Or whatever. I love you and not my spouse/I love you way more than my spouse, and all things symptomatic of that love, is as *does*. Do you know what Mr Soulmate says when asked, 'What was the biggest risk you faced at that past point?'. This: The possibility of NOT being able to be together (in the normal, natural way) for the rest of our lives. Do you know what Mr Soulmate says when asked, 'What if your family hadn't liked Soulmate and tried to advise you against or even tried to interfere so's to split you up?'. This: Then I would have told them to eff off and die and refused to ever see or speak to them again. Mr Soulmate didn't just move a mountain, he swam an entire sea. He to all intents and purposes left his only child. Of COURSE he could have left a wife had he at that point had one and I was willing to play cuckoo in the nest. So back to your adulterers: Boo-hoo - see a solicitor and start divorce proceedings. Boo-hoo - hire a van to move his/her stuff out. Boo-hoo - get to play parental unit from separate abodes. Any kids. Now that IS an issue. But it needn't be if both parties handle the kids sympathetically and patiently and help them to adjust to their new routines. Plus, anyway, when parents are happy, the little sponge-like empaths are happy and healthy. They are the new shoots in the pot-plant's pot. Living in a house where mummy and daddy don't show love like friends' parents do does not make kids happy. Neither does hearing mummy and daddy always argue. Neither does discovering one of your perfect heroes has been duplicitous and lying their faces off for months/years. .................... You shouldn't have agreed to date them and then, by having kept on seeing them, allowed yourself to get involved and trapped by your emotions and ambition in the first place. Here is your punishment unless you reverse that emotional crime: Miserable 'with' them in your lives, miserable without them in your lives. But NOT miserable once you quickly get over them (which - psych fact - always takes far less time and nightmare than we imagine). And, really, there's not exactly a lot to get over to begin with. Is there? I mean, jeez - if you can't even leave a SEMI-relationship then how would you ever cope if you needed to leave a full one? We ALL of us, bar a slim minority, have had to say goodbye to something we really didn't want to have to, and which hurts to, say goodbye to. It's called, willpower and self-discipline... Short-term pain for the sake of longer-term gain. Because, WOW, what a springboard to happiness it turns out to be! LOST LAB GIRL, he couldn't even leave her when she was his mere girlfriend. So what does that tell you? LOST LAB GIRL, he can't hurt her but can hurt you? What does that tell you? CNDGUY: allegedly, her mere friend means more to her than her (cough!) one and only lover-to-(allegedly)-end-all-lovers. What does that tell you? You are both MISTRESSES, Bits On The Side. What do you think that's doing to your self-esteem, how you see and think about yourselves? Now to the coup d'etat: Even if the miraculous DID happen, what guarantees these people won't cheat on the pair of YOU one day, the minute things need work and attention to get them back to Good? For every physical entity in this world there is a psychological equivalent. Why are you both self-harming with walking-talking knives-on-legs? Nobody said getting yourself out of a bad situation that you knowingly put yourself into was ever easy. But it is once you've done it. And it's a darn sight easier if you cease thinking and just JUMP! And stay jumped until staying jumped suddenly feels GREAT! Which it always does. You are being 'called' to sacrifice a few months' equilibrium and normality for the sake of a better life. Boo-hoo. Right? And now the coup d'etat majoris: This might be a TEST, the surpassing of which (by doing the right and moral thing on all levels) might earn you the best reward you could ever have hoped to imagine. I *am* that rewarded soldier. Right before meeting Mr Soulmate I had to say, thank-you but no thank-you, to a guy I had incredible like and attraction for (because I could see he wasn't ready for a relationship, meaning it would have all ended in tears). And right before him, I'd had to chuck the 3-year rebound ex (who might as well have been married for all the dicking around he did). And then I met my reward, he for whom the level of like, admiration, respect, physical and mental and emotional attraction, etc., is literally impossible to convey using written language. And I've seen it happen to others that way. So I know what I know and your choice is whether you can trust what a wise but total stranger says or not, which is probably part of the test. And now to the denouement: Go stand under a ticking clock. Pretend you're an ice-lolly, that the ticking is the melting juice of it dripping, dripping, dripping....Tick...Tock...Tick...Tock.... Your chance at real, genuine, authentic, lasting happiness of a level far greater than you could EVER have with this married person, is shrinking second...by second. Thoughts? (I should bloody cocoa?!) Oh, and (just in case -) don't get snarky, will you, either of you. This is me trying to liberate you from a version of earthly hell.