I confessed

[deadsoul]

I think what you are feeling is normal and I Am guessing you had intense emotions for the OM. The best thing you can do aside from NC is to be 100% committed to your marriage. Start picturing yourself with your husband walking hand in hand. Start creating those moments with him where you are talking even if it is painful communication is creating intimacy. You are closing the door to your affair and opening it with your husband.. this takes time and effort.

 

Love is a choice . Real true love doesn't always feel so intense like affair emotions and that is okay because at the end is the day it is real and it is good. But you have to make a choice and some days it is harder than others but you can get that passion back. We are finding ours and it is amazing.

 

Also have you checked out Podcasts on limerence and Healing Broken Trust listen to these. You need perspective and a lot of that will

Come with time but you can start gaining some now.

 

Thank you for this. I really needed to read this because I do have some feelings that confuse me still. I will definitely check out those pod casts. Thank you again.

[deadsoul]

Of course you lost love for your husband. You in reality belonged to the other man for a year. Your marriage ended Then. You cannot love two men at the same time. An affair is very destructive. It sucks all the life out of a marriage.

 

Can it come back? Yes, but only with time and a lot of effort. Don't think that just because the affair is over you'll return to the marriage immediately or even short term.

 

An affair is like a drug addiction. The yearning or pining for other man doesn't just go away soon.

 

Hence, you cannot ever have contact again. If you do you'll be right back in the affair. If you get an addict around the source you always get relapse. Even a phone call or message will set you back

 

No. I will never have contact. Because I think I'd end up right back in it. And I hate myself for admitting that. But I do still have the yearning for him and it makes me mad that I still feel that way. But I recognize it as an addiction and not real. I had a little setback last night (no contact!) but I'm straightened out again. But I HATE that I did something so destructive to my family... and yet still have "feelings" for the OM. This is something I'll bring up to my IC this week. I realize I may get bashed for admitting these things, but I'm keeping it real and the only way I'll get through this is owning the bad... and the more bad.

[Marc878]

It's day two and guess what? You're still there. It doesn't mean much but it's a start.

 

One day at a time.

[deadsoul]

The heartbreak your family feels is due to the affair, not the telling of it.

 

ya think?

 

Sorry. But I could've kept quiet. And no one would've ever known (hopefully... the truth has a way of getting out). But I knew. And it wasn't okay. I truly believed it was my "cross to bear." But I couldn't do it.

[Marc878]

No. I will never have contact. Because I think I'd end up right back in it. And I hate myself for admitting that. But I do still have the yearning for him and it makes me mad that I still feel that way. But I recognize it as an addiction and not real. I had a little setback last night (no contact!) but I'm straightened out again. But I HATE that I did something so destructive to my family... and yet still have "feelings" for the OM. This is something I'll bring up to my IC this week. I realize I may get bashed for admitting these things, but I'm keeping it real and the only way I'll get through this is owning the bad... and the more bad.

 

Unfortunately this is normal. It doesn't just go away. Good time to reflect on the damage it wrought. You do need to find something to concentrate on to keep your mind occupied. The only thing that will cure you is time and strict no contact. You might consider a no contact letter informing him that everyone has been too and he's never to contact you or your family again. When the time is right. I'd give it to your H to mail/send.

[Marc878]

ya think?

 

Sorry. But I could've kept quiet. And no one would've ever known (hopefully... the truth has a way of getting out). But I knew. And it wasn't okay. I truly believed it was my "cross to bear." But I couldn't do it.

 

You'll find the truth is always best. It does have a way of fixing things.

[deadsoul]

It's day two and guess what? You're still there. It doesn't mean much but it's a start.

 

One day at a time.

 

These days it's one hour at a time. I've probably had a total of 3 full hours of sleep the last two nights... so the days seem even longer.

 

But thank you. I never thought I would start posting here. I was a long time lurker while I was in this mess.

 

What am I saying? I'm still in this mess. But you know what I mean.

[deadsoul]

Unfortunately this is normal. It doesn't just go away. Good time to reflect on the damage it wrought. You do need to find something to concentrate on to keep your mind occupied. The only thing that will cure you is time and strict no contact. You might consider a no contact letter informing him that everyone has been too and he's never to contact you or your family again. When the time is right. I'd give it to your H to mail/send.

 

I'm considering this. I've eliminated all ways of contact and to be honest, I don't expect to hear from him again. But I think I'll let my H decide if and when we send him a letter because I don't want to initiate contact at all. He doesn't even know my H knows, but that's not my problem.

[Marc878]

From what I've seen most will at least make an attempt at R. Don't squander it. If when it comes put your best foot forward.

 

During the affair did you cut off intimacy with your H? Most often you see this.

It will add more to the problems now that the truth is out.

[deadsoul]

You'll find the truth is always best. It does have a way of fixing things.

 

It sure doesn't seem that way right now... but deep down I think i believe that to be true.

[deadsoul]

From what I've seen most will at least make an attempt at R. Don't squander it. If when it comes put your best foot forward.

 

During the affair did you cut off intimacy with your H? Most often you see this.

It will add more to the problems now that the truth is out.

 

No... it was after the A that I cut off intimacy as much as I could. I'm still not sure he will make an attempt at R, but I'm following his lead and told him I will wait and honor his wishes, but that I want to try to fix this and will give everything I have to do that.

[Marc878]

These days it's one hour at a time. I've probably had a total of 3 full hours of sleep the last two nights... so the days seem even longer.

 

But thank you. I never thought I would start posting here. I was a long time lurker while I was in this mess.

 

What am I saying? I'm still in this mess. But you know what I mean.

 

As you've seen you'll get some solid advice. However, as with any forum take it to suit your needs and the direction you want to go.

 

Glad you're posting it can only help and you will gain some wisdom and help.

[Marc878]

No... it was after the A that I cut off intimacy as much as I could. I'm still not sure he will make an attempt at R, but I'm following his lead and told him I will wait and honor his wishes, but that I want to try to fix this and will give everything I have to do that.

 

That's odd was there a reason?

[deadsoul]

That's odd was there a reason?

 

I'm still trying to figure that one out. I don't know.

[Owl6118]

Some night thoughts for you.

 

1.I beleive it has been alluded to, but I wanted to single out for your consideration the value of making a time line of the affair. The goal is to put down as exactly as possible the major events -- boundary crossing moments, meeting times and places. There can be a just the facts version initially. Maybe an R rated version later.

 

The reason is twofold. One is to be able to offer it to your husband. People who have been betrayed suffer grievously with the fissure between the reality in their minds that still feels real, and their knowledge that what they thought was real and complete was missing life changing information, that they were living a lie. This is an oft-cited article on their struggle

 

Great Betrayals - The New York Times

 

True information about their life is often the most important gift you can offer for their healing in the long run no matter how immediately painful.

 

You write very clearly so I suspect you are a very organized thinker with a good memory. But if you struggle to remember the key is first to gather information-- any emails you have, any calendars you keep, credit card statements. And then get to work. You will often find it hard to remember a date. But if you are working at it your will remember something-- I had to get home for kids recital or game that day, the meetup was a few days before the business trip to X, thus meetup was at the same time when husband was worried about Y upcoming meeting at work. You can use those associations to look up hard dates or get close.

 

Your husband may or may not accept the timeline. If he does not there is still value in the reconstruction for you. You will have realizations as to your motives and state of mind that will be worth exploring.

 

2. On the subject of addiction

 

I pretty much only post these days to people like you who are at rock bottom and struggling with accepting who they have become, are sick on to death of who they have become, and who want to be different going forward.

 

As an alcoholic who has now been sober for two decades, maybe I can offer a thought about the addiction analogy. First of all, I very much beleive in it. It is not a perfect analogy. Chemical addition is a very direct biological mechanism, though not a fully understood one. Someday it may be curable by some kind of direct medical intervention. It could happen. I doubt, by contrast, that there will ever be a "stay faithful" pill or gene splice.

 

But setting that aside, there are clearly a lot of behavioral analogies between the behaviors of addicts and the behavior of many waywards.

 

Perhaps if we look at the way the question of addiction was actually handled as I was wrestling with alcoholism, it would help salvage some of the utility of it for thinking about infidelity too.

 

The key thing is, in its context in AA, addiction is ALWAYS presented as one side of a paradox, NEVER alone.

 

Yes, I was addicted to alcohol, so in a very real sense, I was suffering from a disease and was doing things that were a result of the disease process. Tbis is important, as it offers hope that you can become different, and hope is a very important thing to have at rock bottom.

 

But it does not releive us of responsibility. Yes, I can make an abstract argument that I had a disease, and addiction, and I was therefore not responsible. And there is some dry, abstract logical merit to that argument. BUT, and the but is critical, AA taught me from Day 1 that the ONLY way I would recover was if I accepted total responsibility for my actions and decisions anyway, and owned them and the damage they caused 100%. They ONLY way. NO other.

 

So, it's a paradox. I am an addict. Yet I would not be sober and enjoying the unspeakable blessing of being fully present in the lives of my loved ones if I had stopped there and just laid it all off on a disease. No, I got and stayed sober through voluntarily accepting responsibility for the decision to drink and all the outcomes that came from it, and choosing to make a different decision forever going forward, and working to apologize to those I harmed and make amends through different actions going forward, forever.

 

Perhaps thinking of it this way would help get the right lessons out of it for thinking about infidelity. In "the fog," waywards show addict-like behavior. They hold mutually-contraditory ideas and deny any contradiction. They cannot connect behaviors to consequences. They do the same deviastating things over and over and expect different results. Their thought process, is, from the outside, irrational--clearly impaired and disordered. Yet that no more lets them off the hook than it lets off the chemical addict. The road to recovery is the same: it starts with accepting total responsibility for your choices and all their consequences.

 

Or to boil it down to a sentence: even if waywards do suffer from something akin to addiction during their affairs, it doesn't let them off the hook one damn bit, not if they seek any kind of healing and wholeness and health and joy in life

 

I have a profound personal belief in the possibility of redemption, becuase I have experienced it in my own life. I AM an alcoholic, and when I was drinking, I forsook my career and my friendships and my duties to pursue the easy relief from inner pain and uncertainty I found in drinking. But I got sober, and with sobriety has come a new life more rich than I ever could have imagined in the days when I beleived with all my soul that I could not survive another day without a drink.

 

3. Some thoughts on compartmentalizationand empathy

 

I'd like to offer you a few other things I learned the hard way that may be of help to you.

 

The first is the idea of compartmentalization.

 

When we give ourselves permission to do that which is deeply wrong and harmful to ourselves and those around us, we do so by putting it into a compartment. We wall off that self and what it is doing off from the rest of us. We put all the bad, secret stuff in the bad self compartment, and we pretend that compartment doesn't exist when we are in our normal life. We pretend there is no connection between the two. And we focus on all the good things we do in our normal good life to reassure ourselves that we are a good person.

 

Part of the work in front of you is tearing down your compartments. This is hard work. You built them lovingly, brick by brick, and put a lot of energy into maintaining them. Even now, when you are under such terrible stress, you are going to turn to them for comfort. The line of thought is, "but I was a good mother, a good friend, a good employee. All the good stuff has to outweigh the bad."

 

And you will also think to yourself, now I will just throw out the person in the bad compartment. She will go away, I will be again and only the person in the good compartment, and that is how I will change and be safe.

 

It is important that you start to work against this line of thinking.

 

The hard truth is there never were two compartments, two yous, a bad secret you and a healthy real you. There was only ever you. The hard work now is accepting that all of it, the bad as well as the good, was you. Your choices, your needs put first.

 

One of the biggest reasons that you have to fight with yourself to tear down this wall between the compartments is becuause that wall does not exist for your husband and your kids. They are going to be struggling to understand how you could "pretend," as they see it, when you were with them, to be someone you weren't really. They will not accept any answer that starts with "that was not the real me." They will want to understand how you could live with them while hiding so much, that would affect them so much when the truth came out.

 

The only way to answer them is after the compartment comes down. It won't come overnight. Your consellor will help you.

 

For the short run, I just want you to recognize that all those "but I did this, that, the third thing in my good self compartment" are ultimately not going to help. They will offer you a hit of short-term comfort, but they are not going to help you understand who you really are, or understand what you need to change about yourself.

 

The other point I want to raise for you to think about is empathy. I sometimes think all affairs are, at bottom, a catapstrophic failure of empathy.

 

When we are functioning as well-integrated people with a well-functioning emotional range, our sense of empathy is sharpest for those closest to us. A very clear statement of this is the old cliche, "cut him or her, I bleed." When you first bonded with your husband and I imagine for many years thereafter, this would have been and I am sure was true for you too. The thought of an affair would have been repulsive, because the very thought of it would have caused you to feel, like an advance echo, his pain, if you were to betray him. Imagining his pain would have caused you pain. Cut him, you bleed.

 

In an affair the first thing that happens, long before other boundaries are crossed, is that natural flux of empathy for your life partner gets attenuated. ... You still think of him being cut--that after all is why affairs are kept hidden--but you don't FEEL it. You think of him being cut (if he finds out that is, which you put a lot of effort into ensuring won't happen) but you don't bleed at the very thought. This is the first and greatest betrayal, of your true best self and of your partner. Its the self-betrayal from which the others flow.

 

In many cases that sense of empathy gets transferred to the affair partner. In other cases, I think it gets transferred to yourself. You got to a place where you felt only your own pain over something your thought others had and you didn't and no longer had any empathy for anyone who would be hurt by acts you took to address that.

 

Rebuilding empathy, like tearing down compartments, doesn't happen overnight. It is hard to stay engaged with someone in terrible pain, when you caused it. You will want to retreat, either to close yourself off or to push your shame to the foreground to put the focus back on you and your feelings and needs. There is no quick road. But awareness can help. Be aware that, in a thousand subtle ways, you have been blunting your sense of empathy for your husband. Having it come back is like having pain when a dead or numb nerve comes to life.

 

Good luck. I hope you find something in this that is of help.

Edited February 7, 2017 by Owl6118

[deadsoul]

Some night thoughts for you.

 

1.I beleive it has been alluded to, but I wanted to single out for your consideration the value of making a time line of the affair. The goal is to put down as exactly as possible the major events -- boundary crossing moments, meeting times and places. There can be a just the facts version initially. Maybe an R rated version later.

 

The reason is twofold. One is to be able to offer it to your husband. People who have been betrayed suffer grievously with the fissure between the reality in their minds that still feels real, and their knowledge that what they thought was real and complete was missing life changing information, that they were living a lie. This is an oft-cited article on their struggle

 

Great Betrayals - The New York Times

 

True information about their life is often the most important gift you can offer for their healing in the long run no matter how immediately painful.

 

You write very clearly so I suspect you are a very organized thinker with a good memory. But if you struggle to remember the key is first to gather information-- any emails you have, any calendars you keep, credit card statements. And then get to work. You will often find it hard to remember a date. But if you are working at it your will remember something-- I had to get home for kids recital or game that day, the meetup was a few days before the business trip to X, thus meetup was at the same time when husband was worried about Y upcoming meeting at work. You can use those associations to look up hard dates or get close.

 

Your husband may or may not accept the timeline. If he does not there is still value in the reconstruction for you. You will have realizations as to your motives and state of mind that will be worth exploring.

 

2. On the subject of addiction

 

I pretty much only post these days to people like you who are at rock bottom and struggling with accepting who they have become, are sick on to death of who they have become, and who want to be different going forward.

 

As an alcoholic who has now been sober for two decades, maybe I can offer a thought about the addiction analogy. First of all, I very much beleive in it. It is not a perfect analogy. Chemical addition is a very direct biological mechanism, though not a fully understood one. Someday it may be curable by some kind of direct medical intervention. It could happen. I doubt, by contrast, that there will ever be a "stay faithful" pill or gene splice.

 

But setting that aside, there are clearly a lot of behavioral analogies between the behaviors of addicts and the behavior of many waywards.

 

Perhaps if we look at the way the question of addiction was actually handled as I was wrestling with alcoholism, it would help salvage some of the utility of it for thinking about infidelity too.

 

The key thing is, in its context in AA, addiction is ALWAYS presented as one side of a paradox, NEVER alone.

 

Yes, I was addicted to alcohol, so in a very real sense, I was suffering from a disease and was doing things that were a result of the disease process. Tbis is important, as it offers hope that you can become different, and hope is a very important thing to have at rock bottom.

 

But it does not releive us of responsibility. Yes, I can make an abstract argument that I had a disease, and addiction, and I was therefore not responsible. And there is some dry, abstract logical merit to that argument. BUT, and the but is critical, AA taught me from Day 1 that the ONLY way I would recover was if I accepted total responsibility for my actions and decisions anyway, and owned them and the damage they caused 100%. They ONLY way. NO other.

 

So, it's a paradox. I am an addict. Yet I would not be sober and enjoying the unspeakable blessing of being fully present in the lives of my loved ones if I had stopped there and just laid it all off on a disease. No, I got and stayed sober through voluntarily accepting responsibility for the decision to drink and all the outcomes that came from it, and choosing to make a different decision forever going forward, and working to apologize to those I harmed and make amends through different actions going forward, forever.

 

Perhaps thinking of it this way would help get the right lessons out of it for thinking about infidelity. In "the fog," waywards show addict-like behavior. They hold mutually-contraditory ideas and deny any contradiction. They cannot connect behaviors to consequences. They do the same deviastating things over and over and expect different results. Their thought process, is, from the outside, irrational--clearly impaired and disordered. Yet that no more lets them off the hook than it lets off the chemical addict. The road to recovery is the same: it starts with accepting total responsibility for your choices and all their consequences.

 

Or to boil it down to a sentence: even if waywards do suffer from something akin to addiction during their affairs, it doesn't let them off the hook one damn bit, not if they seek any kind of healing and wholeness and health and joy in life

 

I have a profound personal belief in the possibility of redemption, becuase I have experienced it in my own life. I AM an alcoholic, and when I was drinking, I forsook my career and my friendships and my duties to pursue the easy relief from inner pain and uncertainty I found in drinking. But I got sober, and with sobriety has come a new life more rich than I ever could have imagined in the days when I beleived with all my soul that I could not survive another day without a drink.

 

3. Some thoughts on compartmentalizationand empathy

 

I'd like to offer you a few other things I learned the hard way that may be of help to you.

 

The first is the idea of compartmentalization.

 

When we give ourselves permission to do that which is deeply wrong and harmful to ourselves and those around us, we do so by putting it into a compartment. We wall off that self and what it is doing off from the rest of us. We put all the bad, secret stuff in the bad self compartment, and we pretend that compartment doesn't exist when we are in our normal life. We pretend there is no connection between the two. And we focus on all the good things we do in our normal good life to reassure ourselves that we are a good person.

 

Part of the work in front of you is tearing down your compartments. This is hard work. You built them lovingly, brick by brick, and put a lot of energy into maintaining them. Even now, when you are under such terrible stress, you are going to turn to them for comfort. The line of thought is, "but I was a good mother, a good friend, a good employee. All the good stuff has to outweigh the bad."

 

And you will also think to yourself, now I will just throw out the person in the bad compartment. She will go away, I will be again and only the person in the good compartment, and that is how I will change and be safe.

 

It is important that you start to work against this line of thinking.

 

The hard truth is there never were two compartments, two yous, a bad secret you and a healthy real you. There was only ever you. The hard work now is accepting that all of it, the bad as well as the good, was you. Your choices, your needs put first.

 

One of the biggest reasons that you have to fight with yourself to tear down this wall between the compartments is becuause that wall does not exist for your husband and your kids. They are going to be struggling to understand how you could "pretend," as they see it, when you were with them, to be someone you weren't really. They will not accept any answer that starts with "that was not the real me." They will want to understand how you could live with them while hiding so much, that would affect them so much when the truth came out.

 

The only way to answer them is after the compartment comes down. It won't come overnight. Your consellor will help you.

 

For the short run, I just want you to recognize that all those "but I did this, that, the third thing in my good self compartment" are ultimately not going to help. They will offer you a hit of short-term comfort, but they are not going to help you understand who you really are, or understand what you need to change about yourself.

 

The other point I want to raise for you to think about is empathy. I sometimes think all affairs are, at bottom, a catapstrophic failure of empathy.

 

When we are functioning as well-integrated people with a well-functioning emotional range, our sense of empathy is sharpest for those closest to us. A very clear statement of this is the old cliche, "cut him or her, I bleed." When you first bonded with your husband and I imagine for many years thereafter, this would have been and I am sure was true for you too. The thought of an affair would have been repulsive, because the very thought of it would have caused you to feel, like an advance echo, his pain, if you were to betray him. Imagining his pain would have caused you pain. Cut him, you bleed.

 

In an affair the first thing that happens, long before other boundaries are crossed, is that natural flux of empathy for your life partner gets attenuated. ... You still think of him being cut--that after all is why affairs are kept hidden--but you don't FEEL it. You think of him being cut (if he finds out that is, which you put a lot of effort into ensuring won't happen) but you don't bleed at the very thought. This is the first and greatest betrayal, of your true best self and of your partner. Its the self-betrayal from which the others flow.

 

In many cases that sense of empathy gets transferred to the affair partner. In other cases, I think it gets transferred to yourself. You got to a place where you felt only your own pain over something your thought others had and you didn't and no longer had any empathy for anyone who would be hurt by acts you took to address that.

 

Rebuilding empathy, like tearing down compartments, doesn't happen overnight. It is hard to stay engaged with someone in terrible pain, when you caused it. You will want to retreat, either to close yourself off or to push your shame to the foreground to put the focus back on you and your feelings and needs. There is no quick road. But awareness can help. Be aware that, in a thousand subtle ways, you have been blunting your sense of empathy for your husband. Having it come back is like having pain when a dead or numb nerve comes to life.

 

Good luck. I hope you find something in this that is of help.

 

Wow. I think i need to read this 2 or 3 or 100 more times. Seriously. Thank you for taking the time to write things I need to hear.

 

I do want to point out, while I recognize my feelings for MM are a form of addiction, in no way are they an excuse. I have to call it an addiction, otherwise I want to call it love and it was definitely not that. But no, calling it an addiction does not free me to say, "I did this because I was addicted." I have to take responsibility for my addictive behaviors. I have to get to the bottom of why I did these things.

 

What you said about compartmentalization? I felt like you just peeled back all my layers and read me like an open book. That's exactly how I justified it in my head. There was this bad part of me that had these needs, but I kept that part separate from my good parts.

 

I need to read this again and think about it some more. I think I'm going to cut and paste it into my journal because I really want to process this more and right now my thoughts feel jumbled.

[Owl6118]

It is OK to admit to yourself the right now you still feel feelings for AP that feel like love.

 

I am sure he has real attractive qualities, like you do, or I do. Things that were objectively attractive.

 

But remember the compartments. You compartmented yourself to him, too. Showed him only your wittiest and most empathetic and interested and attractive self. And kept your doubts and warts, and dirty laundry and unwashed dishes and work stress all safely away from him in your real life compartment where he never had to deal with them. For the space of a text or an email or an assignation you could be wonderful.

 

And he did exactly the same thing to you. Exactly. The. Same.

 

But outside the affair compartment you had become many ugly things. Like someone who lied, fluidly and easily and repeatedly, to thone who had utmost faith in you. This is a very ugly thing. Most of us don't choose to trust or associate with people who do this. But that is who you became.

 

And he was and is just the same. As easy and fluid a betrayer as you.

 

When you take the compartments down you will see him as who he is in whole. He will seem a lot less lovable.

 

I think you will find, with time, that you did not love him really. The person you really loved was yourself.

 

Real love is the actions we take. The actions of an affair -- the lies, the betrayals -- show mostly a crisis of monstrously metastasized self-love. A love that will sacrifice real character for a hit of self esteem.

[Marc878]

Your H's perspective upfront was to divorce. Most will attempt R.

 

However, he needs time/space to determine if he's capable. Many are not. If he can't learn to live with this it will be a fruitless endeavor. You can waste years of time and life you can't get back with no guarantees.

 

Infidelity is the gift that keeps on giving forever. If you both work hard it'll help to dissipate it over time but it will forever be there. You can't see or completely understand the depth of this because you aren't on the receiving end. If R is attempted your tole will be key.

 

many try and stay for the kids, etc but long term you both need a good life.

 

As you look further it takes 2-5 years for recovery. Both of you need to know what you're up against

[Marc878]

The other man was a part of the betrayal but he was only taking what you were giving.

 

He never took vows to your H. However, ask yourself this. Is that the type of person you would want around your family and in your life. Can you picture seeing your H associating with a woman of his character?

 

Just to give you some perspective.

Edited February 7, 2017 by Marc878

[aliveagain]

No. I will never have contact. Because I think I'd end up right back in it. And I hate myself for admitting that. But I do still have the yearning for him and it makes me mad that I still feel that way. But I recognize it as an addiction and not real. I had a little setback last night (no contact!) but I'm straightened out again. But I HATE that I did something so destructive to my family... and yet still have "feelings" for the OM. This is something I'll bring up to my IC this week. I realize I may get bashed for admitting these things, but I'm keeping it real and the only way I'll get through this is owning the bad... and the more bad.

 

Girl it is time you start to think about the other man in a less favorable way if you want to save what's left of your relationship. What was so great about a guy who pretends to be a friend to your husband but then doesn't hesitate to have sex with his wife? What is so special about a man like that? Start thinking about your children being shuffled between houses and only with you part time, having another woman potentially raising your children(there is likely to be another woman in his life at some point if you divorce), selling your home and adjusting to something more affordable. You need to wipe all those nice and loving memories of the man that is helping you destroy your family and start instead fighting for your family by getting into the right mindset. HE IS AN ENEMY TO YOUR MARRIAGE. You need to wake up, do not waste a second chance(you are still there so lets call it a second chance), second chances are earned so do something to earn it. Your husband lost a marriage and a friend(you, other man was never his friend).

[aliveagain]

deadsoul, I know I came across as harsh in my last post(intentionally). I was sending you a 2x4 because you were sliding down the same slippery slope that got you here. You need to see the O/M for what he really is, your future with your husband depends on it if the marriage is what you truly want.

[BetrayedH]

ya think?

 

Sorry. But I could've kept quiet. And no one would've ever known (hopefully... the truth has a way of getting out). But I knew. And it wasn't okay. I truly believed it was my "cross to bear." But I couldn't do it.

 

Yes, I do think that.

 

Keeping quiet would have resulted in a life-long sham of a marriage. Your husband would only have been with you because you tricked him into being with you. You would have been a liar for a lifetime, and with those you supposedly loved the most. He would have been denied the opportunity to make an informed choice.

 

Thinking that the ends justify the means (if he never knows, he'll never be hurt) is the same wayward thinking that got you into the affair. Now you're just thinking that if he never knew, he'd never have been hurt.

 

In truth, your marriage would have been doomed for life to be one without true intimacy because you would have had a huge lie (a huge wall) between you. You would have been deciding to be dishonest with your partner for all things in life, for the rest of your lives. For those other problems in your marriage, how do you think marriage counseling would have played out? Would you have been comfortable criticizing your husband for his faults in the marriage while you sat there with a huge betrayal in your lap?

 

Your confession was the only choice to provide you both with the opportunity for a marriage worth being in. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't. But that was a consequence of your decisions a year ago. There is no time machine to correct those. And lying about it for life would have had its own set of consequences (with no guarantee that it would have even worked).

 

Your confession also sets the stage for potential forgiveness. It's the single largest step you could have possibly taken to show that you won't lie to your partner for life, that you can learn from your mistakes, that trust can be redeveloped because you chose to value and respect others more than yourself, even in the face of extraordinary consequences. It shows your husband that you just might be a person worth forgiving. Statistically (at two years post Dday), twice as many couples remain together when a voluntary confession occurred compared to a discovery. A confession doesn't solve everything but it speaks volumes about your potential as a safe partner in the future. If you had stayed a liar, you wouldn't have deserved the marriage you might have kept.

 

I realize that much of this may seem a moot point as the telling of the affair has already occurred. But don't discount how it signals a huge change for the better in you. And don't doubt that honesty is the best policy.

 

And lastly, don't let yourself be too discouraged in these early days. It takes a while to divorce. And your actions in the interim can be powerful. Your action of making a confession was powerful. Even if your husband cannot find it within him to stay in the marriage, your children will be impacted by your willingness to bare yourself, warts and all. You've given yourself the best possible chance of being forgiven, and deserving it.

[Cephalopod]

Interesting that you post this based on what I've written here, rather than knowing me face to face. I'm actually thinking a lot about this because I do admire and love him. This is something I'm working on in therapy. And you're right, if I don't love him as a wife, he deserves better. Well, he deserves better anyway. Thank you for this comment. You really gave me something more to think about. But I stand by my original plan that if he wants to do MC, I am 100% in favor and will give it my all. Maybe some of the things that got lost along the way can be rekindled. I have to try.

 

Please don't take offense. Some people don't write the way they talk, or act, and so I have to glean what I can by your prose. I'm sure this is devastating to you.

 

As far as evaluating your love for your husband, you need to take some time doing that, because you are still very much in the fog over your feelings for the OM. A year or so down the road, your total love and limerance towards your husband may return full force, and if he divorces you, you will truly be devastated when the reality of what you gave up finally hits you.

[Cephalopod]

I'm still trying to figure that one out. I don't know.

 

Maybe shame?

[deadsoul]

deadsoul, I know I came across as harsh in my last post(intentionally). I was sending you a 2x4 because you were sliding down the same slippery slope that got you here. You need to see the O/M for what he really is, your future with your husband depends on it if the marriage is what you truly want.

 

Yes! Bring the 2x4s. I do not want to go down that path again. Ever.