Hey Newyorker (I'm a NYer too!)

If your husband is anything like mine was (and I'd say he is), talking to him won't work.  If he's lying to himself, he won't suddenly turn honest for your sake.  His instinct will always be to protect himself.

My advice is to start snooping, honestly.  If you can figure out the password to his cellphone, that's how my journey started.  The smartest thing I ever did in terms of self-preservation was to let go of the idea that I had to be a perfect, noble, and trusting wife. 

In a better world, you could just ask, but it sounds like that door is locked shut for you.  

I didn't even begin to recover until after I discovered this site.  And in the beginning I was convinced I could keep my marriage and all that.  There's an awful lot of bad advice out there -- including the advice of this "expert" who (full disclosure) is a gay man.  The comments run the gamut, but more often than not they misread the letter and blame the victim.  

You'd earlier posted this:
"If you are apprehensive to throw out an otherwise good relationship just because your partner's sexuality is different - I hope our story will inspire you. "

I don't know whether you realize it, but that came off sounding pretty judgmental.  You do you.  Many of us discovered the hard way that our spouses had a pattern of dribbling out tiny bits of truth, one bit at a time.  In other cases, our spouses only ever confessed to things they'd been caught at, and only as far as they knew they'd been busted.

Marriages are complicated, I'll be the first to admit that.  

Why was it changed in the first place?  

I don't know if that's the kind of "scared" I think about.  

I have to live with my own inner dialogue.  So in that sense, it's not quite true that "he" can't hurt me, because "I" can still hurt.  Nowadays it's anger with myself for getting so flustered during the divorce mediation that I got locked into a terrible deal.  I'm angry with myself for being so gullible that I didn't realize I should have gone full-on scorched earth with him.  When he asked me if he could keep the house -- I should have held out.  I should have known not to just accept his valuation.  I should have known I was entitled to much more than he would ever part with.

When I saw how poorly my lawyer was doing, I should have fired him and gotten someone who wasn't so easily manipulated by the other side.

I should never have wasted my life with this man.  I should have realized that trying to do right by my daughter was actually going to make my life infinitely worse: if I'd divorced when she was still young, I might have salvaged my own career before it was too late.  Instead, I thought I had to wait until she was out of the house -- and at that point, it was too late for me to build any kind of meaningful stream of income.

So yeah, I don't need to see my ex.  Running into him will bring back everything.  I don't care what he's doing with his life.  He's likely making the same dumb mistakes he's made over and over and they're not my problem any more.