After spending an hour I don’t really have on a reply, my reply was nearly ready to be posted when it accidentally got deleted. I’m in work crunch mode right now and doubt I will have time to reconstitute it fully for a week or two. I am sorry.
I hope your beliefs are wrong there.
Why?
Because I want both women in my life.
I will humor you:
Objectively, the smart play by me would be: I should commit purely to my wife, build new friendships, & lay down my hope to reconnect with my friend.
However, I would hate that.
Maybe it would be of some comfort to you to turn back to your faith. …is she not also God's child? Do you doubt that our Heavenly Father has a Divine Plan for her? Lift that anxiety up to Him, so that it may burden you less, and see what He does with it..
God can definitely be a comfort. What I want now, though, is to feel the pain and worry of loss.
Do you think you might be stuck in a mutually reinforcing cycle where having to go NC has caused you grief, pain, and loss... But if you hold on to the hope 
that you might someday get OW back, then you don't have to accept the loss... And then because you don't accept the loss, you decide to cling to the grief and the pain, so that you don't forget her... But of course that keeps you stuck with the feelings of grief, pain, and unprocessed loss, still...and you reason that the only thing that will stop the grief and the pain is getting OW back... So you cling to the hope... round and round you go.
How you got that from what I wrote is kinda scary… but I’d say… fundamentally "yes."
The place you interrupt that cycle, if you agree it exists, is….
Buuut… I want the agonizing pain and worry. Without those, it’ll be too easy to let my friend pass from my consciousness and never be recruited back to friendship. She might become… like my very first girlfriend… whose last name I swear I once knew. If you were to ask me about her, I’d say: yeah, I liked her once. Limerence does funny things to the psyche. I was head over heels for her. She was my first kiss. I remember being so distraught when she broke up with me. Oh well…. moving on….
Now… you’ll assure me that’s good! That’s healthy! That’s exactly what you should do with "your AP"! And I will respond: never will I let that happen.
you don’t have to forget her or rewrite the story so that she's a villain. You can lie in bed at night and think, "The relationship with this person was wonderful. I miss her. It hurts that she's gone from my life... But, she isn't coming back, and that's for the best." That would be consciously deciding to move out of the denial and bargaining phases of grief and into acceptance.
I abhor the thought of having those thoughts. 
More eventually…
[This message edited by Unconventional at 12:55 AM, Wednesday, September 30th]
