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How many of you met with AP? Did you feel the need to meet and get their side of the story? I spoke with her the day I found out and I feel like I have the whole truth from my husband and our R is going great but part of me wants closure. I feel like I want to sit down and hear her side of it. I want to stop worrying about running into her or getting seated next to her at a restaurant, I just want to get it over with. Did any of you do this? Is this terrible idea?

I relate to your post a lot especially the ‘let’s get it over with’.

On DD my H confessed but not all, I knew it and could feel it so went digging and that was not a good idea, I got to know the truth but a whole bunch of lies, fantasy, fabrication and she tried manipulating me too. I

I feel I need to face her like you do incase I bump in to her unprepared, I don’t know why this is?. I know I could get in the car right now and face her, I know exactly where she is but I fear myself and control over my emotions.

IMO I think the best thing to do is just live our lives, if we bump in to them then we do, everything happens for a reason. We can’t live in fear of wondering if we will be seated near them etc.

AP has no reason to be honest with you and several reasons not to be. At best she will minimize her part. She may throw all blame on your WS. Either to escape repercussions for herself or to get back at your WS for perceived slights. She may also exaggerate what was done to punish him or shake him free from you.

Just treat her as a stranger or someone you used to know. No need to engage with someone who for at least a time didn't have your best interests at heart.

Speaking as a FWW, I think it would be extremely unusual for an AP to make themselves vulnerable by telling uncomfortable truths to a BW. If they agree to meet with you at all, it will be with the goals of justifying themselves and/or mining you for information about your WH.

Think of this encounter from an AP's perspective. When you ignore them, you are in the power position. You're demonstrating that their time is over and their attempt at ongoing relevance in your spouse's life has failed. When you try to engage with them, you remind them that they and your spouse are the only two people in the world who share personal knowledge of the specifics of their affair. Can you think of a bigger ego boost for an unremorseful AP than the wife coming to her for answers that the husband refused to provide? If you have so much as a single fact wrong or missing, she'll be thinking, "He still hasn't told her. That part is still ours." She may flaunt that, or she may lie to destabilize your reconciliation. You'll have no way to know.

I'm a madhatter. I understand the desire to confront. By reaching out to her, though, you'd be proving her relevance and lasting impact on your life. It restarts the clock and gives her an excuse to try to contact him.

The only good news would be her refusal to talk to you, because at least you can hope that that means she's moving on for her own sake. Meanwhile, she'd have confirmation that you are struggling to do the same.

Thank you all for the good advice, it is exactly what I needed to hear. I need to keep my focus on us and not her.

I DID confront the AP and like many have stated it didn’t do a damn bit of good. He lied and denied. In the end, they are as selfish in protecting themselves as they were in participating in the affair for their own benefit. The world isn’t fair and this is just one of those things. It sucks the not knowing, but can we expect the AP to become our ally?

What do you want to hear?

It meant nothing? That won’t help.

We are just friends and nothing is going on. That won’t help.

That your H started it? That won’t help.

For all of the above reasons you should not talk to the OW.

There is nothing they can say at this point that can help.

FWIW my first call with the OW was 2 minutes and I found out why my H was acting so erratic. The cheating continued for months (when I thought it had ended). I called to ask her what was going on and she was honest. I thanked her. She also told me he admitted to her about his first affair (which he never admitted to me) and that was it.

Months later she’s still trying to contact him "for closure". More like trying to restart the affair IMO.

Lesson learned. Some people are not worth your time and energy and cannot be trusted.

If I ever meet AP, there's a good chance I'll end up a convict.

I did, however, exchange several emails with his now ex-wife. That didn't help much. Still, knowing she knew felt righteous enough.

I did talk to the OW, but just over messaging and on the phone. OW was my first and primary source of information about xWH's many many affairs.

What I think I did right: I asked her for verifiable facts - dates, times, websites, pictures. Everything she told me that I could verify checked out, which was mainly dates and geographical locations where xWH took 'solo' bike trips. She gave me the dates and places she saw him in person, the dates he told her he was getting STI tested, she gave me his username on the website they met on, she sent a screengrab of a text convo where they were going back and forth working out dates to meet up at an AirBnB, and sent a screen grab of one of their video calls with xWH clearly pictured laying in our bed and her scribbled out face in the small window.

Later, I called her using the sketchy Telegram app she and xWH had used for affairing (you don't have to give the other person your number, they can call you or video you using a user name) and I tried to trip her up a bit by repeating a few things back to her incorrectly, but she corrected me with the info she'd given the first time.

What I wish I hadn't done (but maybe was for the best): I asked her what xWH had said about our marriage. And what she told me did track with some of his posts on the cheaters chat board (good marriage, he just 'wasn't monogamous' in his heart), but I also discovered he'd told her all about me. Where I grew up, went to grad school, my career, siblings, things like that.

Back to something I think I did right: I asked her to send me copies of their texts in which he talked about me/our marriage and she took a few screen grabs of their texts while we were still on the phone (so she had no time to edit, photoshop, etc) and sent them to me.

I don't know nor care what her motives were - if she wanted to get back at xWH for something, if she wanted to hurt me, if she was a drama queen trying to insert herself into the chaos of affair discovery - I didn't care, because all I wanted from her were facts. I've reached a point in healing where I am nearly grateful to her for being SO damn creepy that she downloaded and saved two years of affair texts and pictures and regularly took screen grabs during their video sex. Maybe she wanted to financially blackmail him, he said no and she pulled the trigger on telling me, I will never know. She told me she was sorry, but she didn't sound sorry, she sounded like she wanted to keep me on the phone and dish some more about the affair. That's when I hung up and have never contacted her again.

On balance I'm glad I got the information and I don't regret talking to her, but my xWH was the kind who stonewalled and did not give me any information I didn't already have proof of (and denied a lot of things I did have proof of), so everything she told me was, for a while, everything I knew of his affairs.

If you're in R, I'm wondering if you want closure in the sense that you want to hear her motivations, or if you want to know if you do know everything, if your husband was totally honest?

Because I think talking to the OW is great for fact-finding, as long as you are asking for facts you can verify, check, or ask her for proof of. But I think it's a bad idea if you want to understand the affair by hearing her side of it. I don't think there's anything they can say that will make you feel like 'oh, that makes sense, I see how that happened now' and you might instead hear things you can never unhear.