is don't hold out hope for your relationship with your husband. Also, get out cleverly.

I knew a woman who ignored this sort of behavior and her husband was playing for time while he transferred and hid assets. He filed for divorce. Don't just get out, get smart about how you get out. Protect your rights.

To the Anonymous who posted the above: Don't hope. Get out now! A man who would do this has much more wrong with him than merely lying and cheating. Sorry, my dear, but you are married to one of the really bad guys.

I will grant that Cary seems a bit out of his gourd here (and if an account of a troubled relationship send you teetering over the edge of sanity, maybe giving advice is not the best line of work for you? Unless all of your readers really get off on you waxing poetical [or whatever that was supposed to be]), but the relationship does not sound so crazy to me. I would not describe the relationship as "crazy" at all, rather as quite straightforwardly: shitty.

Not to get too technical and all, but this is a clear-cut scientifically sound example of a shitty marriage, featuring a shithead of a wife doing shitty things. Where is all this helpless madness Cary is blathering on about? This woman is hysterical, in the classic sense of not being able (or willing) to contain her wandering nether regions.

And as for the um "platonic" thing, let us dispatch with that quickly with 2 basic facts:

1) Even if she is not scrwing these guys, she might as well be...

And on top of that:

2) She IS screwing them! Seriously! There may be 1 or 2 she has kept it um flirty with or whatever, but she is definitely boning the rest and probably DOZENS YOU HAVE NOT EVEN HEARD ABOUT!!!

All of the LW's "Somehow I believe her when she says she has not had sex with them" can be described as: Denial, to a pathological degree. Anyone other than someone utterly paralyzed by fear of leaving this woman would have divorced her cheating ass years ago. LW has created delusions in order to be able to justify not leaving.

Can't imagine why the counselor is supporting her, unless she is boning him too.

Cary: wake the hell up and treat the LW's troubles like the real-world, blood-and-guts troubles they are, not as a jumping-off point for your self-indulgent tripped-out prose poems.

I was 3/4 healed from a fairly simple divorce, riding my bike a lot and taking care of myself. I responded to her personal, and we met for lunch. I enjoyed her company a great deal, and she made it clear she was interested in seeing me again, and that she was single and un-attached. Yeah, mostly.

Three months go by and the relationship is going great. We have mutual fiends, and her mostly-grown kids and I get along great. I loved her, and was truly happy with her and her family, but funny things start happening.

Like ten days before we were to spend a week together she calls and cancels, then disappears for that week.

Or, my favorite, the phone rings early on a Sunday morning, and I'm in bed with her. She answers--it's a man's voice--and she replies "no, just here by myself..." to a question. Not wanting to make a lier out of her, I left.

Two hours later she calls and asks why I left...I chuckled and told her.

A few weeks later I found pictures of her and the other guy together during the mystery week. It was funny because it didn’t really make me upset or angry, since I had already figured it out. I took them to her and asked her what they were, and she lied, saying they were from a few years back. I showed her the date on the back, grabbed my things, and left. Didn't call, quit it cold turkey and never heard a peep from her. It hurt like hell, but I was done with that crap. I eventually moved.

Two years later she calls and asks me to move back. Go figure.

I thought I was naive. But this character takes the cake! I know of no man in the world, except maybe for homosexuals, that would get involved with a married woman, for an "emotional" relationship. You have got to be kidding! Her phone sex is getting him warmed up for intellectual conversation. Get real!

Reading these letters has opened my eyes and helped me a lot. Some of them are written beautifully, especially the one with the line about hope, and going into the abyss and eventually some light will come thru.

I have been married 6 years and for the past 5, this has pretty much been my life. My husband also has a creepy need to get affection from other women. And two years ago he involved his children in his games. It was absolutely sickening to me that he would coach them to lie to me about these other women. Kept pictures of them in his mobile. I accessed his mobile records and discovered that with one woman in particular, he was calling her upwards of 35 times/month, and that doesn't even include all the conversations that took place when she called him. And the hours! Sometimes they would talk as early as 6-7am and as late as 1-2 in the morning.

I have found hope in these letters. I believe there is more out there for me. I figure I can stay, and be guaranteed an unhappy existence, or I can leave, and have some chance at finding truth, clarity, and a meaningful connection with someone who is capable of understanding the meaning of "we" instead of merely "me"

Honestly, I do not understand why some people get married. What the fuck did they expect??? I'll never be able to figure out what people want out of life. Mystifying.

First off, I don't know where Cary was going with this one. Love may be crazy and blind and all that jazz, but this is a marriage, and to live in the real world with a real marriage, it helps to have some sense of boundaries and stability. There are plenty of marriages where this sort of thing would fly: the "emotional" flirting, the other men, the flings. Open relationships exist, and they work. But not for you. Know how I know? Because you wrote to an advice columnist asking for help. If it bothers you that much, then you do not have one of those marriages. Thus, this is a big problem. Obviously. You know that. Now you have to deal with it. You've tried the defensive path, spying presenting her with evidence. You've been made a fool countless times. So why put up with it? Why should this woman single handedly choose the path and tone of your relationship (one of suspicion). Will you let this misery (that's what it seems to be) continue forever? Do you really think that in 25 years you will still be able to deal with her cheating? Why would you want to? Eventually this is going to end the relationship, like it did her others. Let it be on your terms. Tell her to shape up or ship out. And mean it. Everytime she fools you, she gets a little braver. ANd why shouldn't she? She's basically getting the green light to continue. You are obviously a caring man who deserves better. Be strong. Dont't let her get away with it anymore. Choose yourself.

Like I said, flings, and flirting may work in some marriages, but lies and deception shouldn't be a part of ANY marriage.