SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

[This message edited by Obrien at 10:12 AM, July 31st (Friday)]

I had a post ready to go that I had to delete because it was, shall we say, unrestrained in its sentiments. I tried a second time and ended up in the same place, so I decided that for now, any response from me is ill advised.

I am commenting to bump the thread in hopes that someone else will be along to help who is not as triggered as I am by your story.

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 5:44 PM, November 30th, 2019 (Saturday)]

Your Post is very triggery. I read it this morning and was flooded with memories from my own affair. I will say what you have written shows that no affair is really special and unique. They all follow the same pattern. Lust, push and pull, guilt, fantasy. Living in anguish of "what you could have" and re writing what you do have. It's never going to be that fantasy you have built in your mind.

Your best option is to walk away, quickly, and don't look back. Go no contact. Keep looking for a new job and stick to IC.

[This message edited by pinkpggy at 6:33 PM, November 30th (Saturday)]

Consider the following as simply fact statements. They may sound harsh with where your head is currently, but they are simply factual statements.

1. OW is playing you like a fiddle.

2. You have not cheated career suicide.

3. You may want to consider changing jobs.

4. If this doesn't play out like OW wants, she very well may stop playing nice at work.

5. Your wife should be informed. By you. Immediately.

6. If this doesn't play out like OW wants, she very well may tell your wife for you.

If any of those sounded harsh, then you are not thinking rationally. What advice would you give your best friend/brother if he came to you with all this?

Please also consider:

The push/pull OW is throwing at you...manipulation tactic. If only she can make you miss her enough, then you'll leave your wife. If she can pretend she's pulling away out of guilt for your family, then bonus points b/c you'll see her as a better woman.

Is she better? Is she good? If her morals were what she says they are, would she help break a family? A true friend would ever help you jeopardize your marriage?

Another thing to consider:

You say OW claims to have trust issues. Do you think her trust issues could have anything to do with her own willingness to try and steal another women's husband?

What will stop her from finding yet another "other women's" husband once you are officially together? Will she ever trust you? I mean...you will have proven yourself willing to cheat just by the very pretence under which you found each other. Think her trust issues will be better once she's officially snagged a known cheater?

I should probably stop now. Look, I was a BS 11 years before I was a WS. I know your internal struggle has to be damn near the worst feeling in the world. Why keep torturing yourself? Stop pitying yourself, and start learning to be someone you can be proud of again. You know you can be better, so do better. It's hard. Really hard. The most difficult thing I ever had to do in regards to infidelity was admit to myself I was capable of inflicting the same kind of pain that was once put on me. You know, that thing you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy...you did it.

Guess what? Just because you did, doesn't mean you have to keep doing it.

I promise. I promise with everything I have in me, you will never be able to love yourself again until you do the right thing. It will be the most difficult thing you've ever done, and it will feel a million times worse than you felt when you were betrayed, but it's the only way you will ever feel like yourself again. It's the only way you will be able to really feel alive. Those pangs, that excitement, those "special" feelings...they are nothing compared to honest love. They are a band-aid. I think you know that. They're great right now, but they're not rational. You already know that regardless of how hard they tug at you...there is an underlying emptiness there.

That pit in your stomach, the one you're telling yourself is butterflies, is really just a freaking pit. It's a pit of self-hatred, sorrow, and your body's way of warning you that this will never be sustainable.

Okay. I'm really done for now.

[This message edited by Lostgirl410 at 7:56 PM, November 30th (Saturday)]

Thank you, all... It's all very triggery and terrible. I've been on the other side...though this is way worse coming ten years later after everything we went thru.

I'm here because I know I'm not thinking straight. That's the whole point of this forum and my post. I'm in the shit - literally as we speak with much more to come - and am hoping your experience as fellow waywards can help me.

Every single WS has been exactly where I'm at - deep in the fog...listening to our whacked out feelings and the OW, a mermaid on the rocks. If I could describe the life I'm risking (money, reputation, family), you'd be even more shocked and pissed.

I will see her on Monday and every day this week. I'm looking for help to snap out of this, actually BELIEVE in the right path, and actually take a step or two in that direction.

Former OW here.

I don't really know where to start with your post. Also want to apologize to any BS that might read this and be triggered. But I am just being blunt here.

Your OW is not a mermaid on the rocks. She is a piece of shit on the ground, just like I was when I was seeing married men. I mean really, how dare any of us OW/OM insert ourselves into someone else's marriage. Which she is doing and you of course are letting her.

I doubt you really love this woman you are more in the fog and in lust. Maybe part of you really wants to get back at your wife for what she did. Even if you left your wife for her the chances of your relationship being a success is very low. All the fun is in the hiding, sneaking around etc.

Not telling your wife at this point is stupid. These things ALWAYS come out at some point. ALWAYS. As LostGirl stated you need to tell your wife now.

This is a power trip to us OW's. How far we can make a man go and the idea that we can make a man cheat on his wife. How easy it is to manipulate you and watching how you guys stumble about trying so hard not to give in and the ego trip we have when you finally do. It's all about ego. You are putty in our hands, you are certainly putty in her hands.

"I want to get married and have kids I can't see you anymore.....but" that is just classic all her talk on "we have to stop doing this " etc. If she had any class at all and really wanted to end it she would actually move on and get another job and totally go no contact with you. She is working you good. I just hope at some point it is not too late for you and you see thru the facade.

I don't really have any other advice other than just giving you a view on how us OW's can manipulate. Because we are very good at it. We are not warm, loving people, we are cold, calculating and egotistical. You have to be in order to try to inflict pain on someone else. This is your OW. Inflicting pain on your wife and kids.

I sincerely hope you can get this all figured out. I really do cause the reality is your family will be the ones that suffer and feel the pain. Not you or your OW.

I will add, as a historian, that this script is nothing new under the sun. Hell, Anne Boleyn played the same song and dance with King Henry VIII 500 years ago. "I can't, I'm not that kind of girl." (She totally was, btw. Had a history of it in France.) "You have a wife and need to let me find my own husband. Of course, if you could make me Queen, it would be different, but I know you could never do that..." (Drops love poem from another suitor on the ground and walks away)

Cue years of everything-but-sex while Henry attempted to get a divorce from an unwilling Pope. At that point, Anne finally gave in and got pregnant, which forced him to declare himself head of the Church of England so he could annul his marriage himself. Surely, after tearing his family and all of Europe apart for this woman, they lived happily ever after... right?

No. Anne was utterly insufferable, having bought her own PR about having the golden pussy he just couldn't live without. Within three years, Henry tired of her tantrums and demands, not to mention her shrewish, vindictive behavior towards his ex-wife and daughter. He trumped up charges against her, had her beheaded, and married his third wife the next day.

I guess if you were a despotic king, you wouldn't have to worry about the eventual consequences of sticking your dick in crazy. As it is, you won't be able to be rid of her so easily if you get permanently snared by this very predictable routine.

[This message edited by BraveSirRobin at 10:22 PM, November 30th (Saturday)]

BraveSirRobin

Knowing this was your restrained version really made your post that much better. OP, I hope you're paying attention.

Hi Obrien,

I was where you are two years ago. Some tips I'll share.

You are a druggie, with dopamine pulsing through your veins. A good video to watch is Helen Fisher the Brain in Love. The intensity of the dopamine is as much as cocaine. The only way out is to stop feeding the dopamine creation and stop seeing this person. Changing jobs is your way out.

Possibly there was no PIV sex. One thing I learned from reading Shirley Glass.....Not just Friends is that the level of the depth of the betrayal getting to first kiss is way more than going from a kiss to PIV. You are a tiny, thin whisker away from PIV so you might as well say you are there.

You are super flattered from this woman feeding your ego and now basking in the ego kibbles. You can just move on now....know you've still "got it" and just keep your dick in your pants. Your shallowest instincts have beaten you.

There are so many things that I can address in your post, but one piece of advice I will give you is put your resume together and get out of there like yesterday. Get as far away from her as possible.

You are putting trust in someone not to blow your life up. I am here to tell you from personal experience what a mistake that is. She is likely to blow your life and career up in the worst way possible.

Your story is cliche. I thought my AP and I could ride off into the sunset until he chose to expose our affair very publicly. That day and how I handled it is definitely my rock bottom.

Take responsibility for your actions, especially before they get worse. There is no good ending to this.

First off R is not a death sentence of anguish and guilt for the rest of your life. You might think so, I get it. Your wife's affair was never resolved and worked out. So, of course you are saying not confess and get away with it and not set her up for anguish. Simply because you are still in anguish from her not telling everything. I seriously doubt you are all good with that as you claim. Otherwise, you never would have mentioned the unanswered shit.

Second off, you are simply to self absorbed to even see the reason why a person tells. It is because it is the right thing to do. To treat a human like a human and give them free agency over their life with informed decision making. They have the right to just know what they want to do with their lives. Not have it chosen by someone that claims to love them (even though you don't at this time) or to claim to have their best interest at heart. Ummm no you don't. You are looking at it from a selfish perspective. Yours. From your experience of not R and healing. You are not looking at it from the perspective of what she would want. What she is entitled to. What is the right thing to do with honesty and integrity. To tell. She has the right to know who she is married to and what her marriage is about. When anyone spouts stuff about sparing the other, it really is all about the wayward just wanting control in a very deceitful and selfish way. Even by default it becomes controlling. Intimacy, goodness, and trust can't be built on lies, manipulation, and deceit.

Third, this women is nothing but lust. Probably the same you felt when first dating your wife. The woman has trust issues. Bullshit. She has no problem getting into a relationship with a senior co-worker and with a cheater. She is spouting lines. To hook you along. She is a tease. She enjoys the chase. She enjoys being desired and not caught. She isn't stupid. She knows just what she is doing and gets a kick out of one-upping your wife in competition. You feed her ego. She plays the part of a vixen. Any woman can do it. Any man can do it. All you have to do is be easy and needy. Your wife did the same thing for some other man. It takes a real woman or man to be faithful. Same adage. Anyone can be a w*&^% (man or woman) not everyone can be a lady (man or woman). So, what exactly is special about being loose? About being the worst version you can be? Nothing. She caught a married man who claims to have had a better marriage after R, not a single one. Makes you wonder? She plays with you because you will play and not expect more. When you cut it off, she will turn her attention to someone else to feed the chase.

Christ man, they make movies about women like that. She will ruin you. You aren't special to her. You guys just have lust and physical attraction. You fill her need to be chased. The longer she plays hard to get, the more pull there will be. She does it on purpose. Don't be so blind and whipped. You think you have gotten something back, you really just destroyed yourself more. Here you are being easy, now add all that a cheater is and you still have unresolved issues from your wife's cheating on top of your character deficit that is using a dream as a scapegoat to just wanting your ego stroked.

I stumbled into the same exact spider web she did.

You didn't stumble into this. You chose to make this happen. A million choices for this outcome. Take back some control for your own actions and choices. This wasn't some spider web out of your control. It was a choice to cheat and for some reason you wanted to even though you claimed your marriage was good.

If your wife is still claiming dreams and things just happened like you are, then you two haven't learned anything from this so-called great IC.

Dear Obrien,

Future you depends on current you not to fuck up.

Quit fucking up.

Sincerely, Sundance

You never reconciled. You always had this as your due in your back pocket. Congratulations you evened the score. The thrill will go away and what will you have left? A wake of pain, resentment and misery. You are now everything you ever hated in others.

As you did in the past, your wife deserves to know. Everything. As you wanted to know all in the past.

I hope she is strong enough to see the destruction and disregard youve embraced and separate from you. Its not about your vhoice to leave the fog now. Its about your wifes choice to finally get out of the fog.

So, there is a lot to be addressed in all this.

One, you are by far not the only person on this site to experience any of this self-centeredness or self-programming. Many, many of us have been there done that. I would work on debunking your feelings about the AP and see them for what they are - projections of what you wish a relationship can be. The feelings you are having aren't really about her, but pretty common psychological responses that many experience in an affair. You need to work on this in IC. In many ways, I was very annoyed with my counselor at first who told me I needed to hold questions on how I could give myself those feelings. How could I find fulfillment in way that were not destructive? And, how could I build that feeling of excitement into my normal day to day life.

We often don't want to come back and look at those realities. The good feelings are easier to chase.

The second thing that will help is you do need to talk to your wife. You can not rebuild your marriage on your own, and she needs room to decide what she wants after having this knowledge. I think some of this will bust your self-centered bubble as a side effect as well. I was in IC for two months and was being advised not to confess. I decided in order for our marriage to thrive, I needed to be honest and committed, and I needed my husband to help me to build a new picture of something that we can both be excited about. That part had to come way later, because for a while things are rough and emotional and he needed a lot of time to process his grief.

Not telling is usually about our fears, and in controlling our outcomes. You need to give up that control. Also, sometimes the other woman ends up getting crazy and tells in the heat of passion, do not leave that possibility open that your wife would hear about this from the OW.

And, if you tell, tell everything. I have to say I am not buying completely this wasn't a physical affair. For betrayed men, often the sex is the biggest wound. So, when the man is wayward he looks for the sex to be the deal breaker as well. This is a generalization of course that doesn't fit all men - my own husband was more hurt by the emotional aspects of the affair. But, the reason I point it out is if you are being dishonest (and maybe you aren't, it's just my hunch) because you think sex is the point of no return, think again. Lying about anything is going to be the point of return. You can not try and continue to control an outcome though lying and manipulation, that will make things a whole lot worse for your wife.

If she really hasn't slept with you, then I think that in itself is likely a manipulation to get what she wants. Holding out on the sex could very well be a tactic. But, it doesn't make sense she was willing to blow you the first night and then you went on seeing her and was alone with her many times over a long period of time and you never had sex with her. Just be prepared your wife is going to have a hard time believing that story even if it's true.

This person is not your soulmate. This person will blow up your life and likely be nothing like you imagined. You must go complete NC and get a different job. Expect months of pretty painful shit, but be committed to it. It's not painful because of who she is though, you will see that later. It's painful because you have made a fucking mess of your life that was likely in a smaller mess before this all started. Going from being completely high to dealing with all that pain you were trying to hide from and now have piled onto is going to be a really shitty ride, I am not going to lie. But, if you do it, and really do it well it can be a tremendous opportunity for growth. Commit to figuring out what are the things missing, and how you have contributed to those things.

The awful part is most of us find out that the things we were lacking prior to the A were things we weren't investing in ourselves. Figuring out those pieces and how to use them isn't an easy thing to do, but it's well worth it in the end.

Thank you to everyone who's posted. You've already been very helpful. The fog is dissipating. I hadn't looked at OW's actions in those ways. Frightening.

Several have noted that it seems ridiculous that through all this we didn't have sex. I get the skepticism but it's true. Not that it really makes a difference... the lines that I crossed are so far in the rearview mirror, I can't even see them.

We were physical about ten times in the 90 days we were both all in. Everything but. I certainly wanted to...and as someone said here, the first kiss was the crossing the Rubicon, having sex wouldn't be. Maybe holding that back was a power play on OW's part. Looking back she said something early on that tells me that's likely the case.

Either way I don't think for one second that not doing it makes this any less terrible or that my W will be less hurt.

Again, thank you to those who are weighing in. And I'm sorry for the BSs that hate and are triggered by this thread. Nothing justifies the lies and cheating, but hopefully it gives you a sense of how completely twisted and turned around a WS can get. Bad choice after bad choice with absolutely no rational thought of the consequences I'll inflict on ourselves or those I love.

There aren't any BS's responding on this thread. You have a stop sign on, so only fellow WS can respond. I think some were saying it was triggering because it reminded them of their cheating and some of the types of thinking they had.

I am sorry for doubting you about the sex, but it had to be done. And, yep, likely a power play. Just remember the AP's in many of our situations were our "soul mates", "star crossed lovers", and so on and so forth. It's all just stories we tell ourselves to justify our behavior.

If we spend half the time elevating our spouse and investing in our spouse the way we did with our AP, many of our marriages might have been different already. (I don't think that's always the case, but I think it is often enough)