Cary, you're on fire this week -- 2 days in a row you've given such fantastic advice to nebulous, unfocused problems. Bravo!

To the letter writer: good luck -- I think Cary's advice has got to be right. I hope you can sort things out within yourself and with your husband.

I don't understand the LW's snooping around on the husband's computer. Wanting to know every little detail just constitutes obsessive wallowing, and that's not the way to rebuild a marriage.

Every cell phone has a number of ways to hide an affair (hidden contacts, secret call logs, etc.), and the internet makes clandestine cheating extremely easy. The LW is never going to be able to keep track of her husband's every move, and trying to do so is going to damage the marriage even further.

Neither of them is innocent, but the way to a stronger marriage is through continued counseling and cultivating voluntary openness, not through policing.

Good luck to the LW.

I don't usually like your answers but this is brilliant. Insightful and right to the point. It is one of these rare cases than, when I finish reading something, I am wiser than when I started.

My wife had several actual affairs, but I didn't find out until years later. I had a cyber affair where I never actually met the woman, but had planned to run away with her.

We're getting over it pretty much using Carry's proposed methods and they seem to work.

And I think you're all - and I include your ex in this - trying to find the escape hatches to the situation you're in. And that situation is a very challenging phase including parenthood and career difficulties. Who wouldn't, if they could, want to run off on a fantasy cruise where lust and passion and connection ruled the day?

I think you need to find a way to incorporate elements of that cruise into your life with your husband. You two need to have an affair with one another.

I'm often struck by the way Americans do therapy the way you might do homework. In some ways it seems fantastic. I really admire that commitment and outlay of resources. But on the other hand it often sounds like punishment, and more stress and strain being applied to a place where there was too much stress and strain that caused the problems in the first place. How about leaving your child with the grandparents and going to a resort for a week?

I think it would be a terrible idea to have another child. I hope this is off the cards now. What a marriage struggling under too much stress and responsibility doesn't need is more stress and responsibility. Although it might be nice for your child to have a sibling it would be even nicer still to have mum and dad living together and loving one another.

A few weeks ago, Cary counseled a man to leave his girlfriend because he didn't trust her anymore, but had no reason not to other than a letter she wrote to an ex-boyfriend in a drunken haze and never mailed.

Now he counsels a woman whose husband actually did cheat on her to stay. Why the difference?

My husband has been involved not in what I would label an "affair", but in sexual acting-out with various partners met online. We are now in counseling and doing better, and the rebuilding of trust is definitely a gradual process. I agree completely with Isi's comments on snooping--I started out feeling the need to do that to police my husband's activities, but now realize that no amount of investigation could prove that his "innocence" and thereby reassure me--if I found something, his guilt would be proven, but if I found nothing, I would continue to wonder if he had just found a better way to hide it.

If you can't trust -you need to leave with all that that entails. If you're going to stay you have no choice but to trust the person you are sharing your life and a child with,Their is absolutely nothing but mind games in staying with someone you don't trust. Mind games lead to madness and insanity for all concerned,

.No one should live like that - not you, not your husband and not your child. You think you can guard against pain and hurt in life, by becoming distrustful, coniving and suspcious. its not worth the price- you can recover from pain, but paranoia and suspician actually degrade your soul and eat away your view of the whole world.

I really like Cary's answer. It seems to me that both the LW and her husband are making a real effort here to keep their marriage together, and that they're both learning something about themselves and their response to the myriad stressors in their lives.

I have to say, though, that I don't see the LWs checking out the husband's computer as a way to get closure. Despite her assurances to Cary I suspect that she may not entirely believe her husband's version of his "affair" and she's checking the story. She may also be, consciously or not, looking for evidence that will help her decide whether she should stick with the marriage. As it turns out she didn't find anything of concern, however when she questioned her husband he lied to her.

The LW asks if she has lost the capacity to trust. This is not a failing on her part. Trust is earned. The LW initially trusted her husband (one presumes) until the affair. Knowing that he has lied to her violates that trust further. Its hard (and at some point self-defeating) to trust someone who is not, by his words and actions, trustworthy. It is up to her husband to regain her trust, and lying to her isn't the way to do that. The question she should be asking is not, "Can I trust my husband?" - it is, "Is my husband worthy of my trust?" If the answer to that is "no" - well, only the LW can decide if she can live with that or not.