SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I have been with my husband for 16 years and married for almost 8 years. Unfortunately, I ended up having A with a common friend (for my husband and I). I won't go into the details of why I had to resort to this because no matter what, the act and the hurt I have caused are inexcusable. It lasted for close to 3 years. It was EA and PA. The first couple of months felt like an absolute fantasy. But then I soon realized that I did not want to pursue this AP as my life partner in any sense and that I was not out of my life with my husband. So, shitstorm created within me. But I didn't come out of the A. It fantasy had become too big in my head that I thought I would have the void so I was in and out of it. But the last year, I felt so guilty and ashamed that I did not know what to do and wanted to phase out of it. It was not a great year on the A front and I had decided this can permanently stop if my husband and I moved away to start new beginnings (because I really wanted to have a good life with my husband).So, we decided to look for houses and even finalized on one after some search and were ready to sign for the house. But at the same time, it was important to me that I ended it amicably with AP because we have a lot of common social circle and the chances of bumping into him was quite high and I did not want to be bitter and out of bitterness make harsh decisions or make it more awkward. So, AP and I had agreed to end whatever it was on Dec 25, 2023. But my husband found out on Dec 21. He asked me for my phone. I refused to give password because I was afraid and looking forward to our new beginnings. (In hindsight, I should have come clean myself then). My husband got aggressive, drove to AP's house and asked him to share his messages with me. AP shared all our private messages to my husband. Things have turned topsy turvy since. He has informed both sets of families and some friends. So, you can imagine how everyone is reacting now and what they must be telling him. However, the fog has lifted for me and I am really in love with my husband and would do anything to make our relationship work. But he has asked for space and time, understandably so. But now, he has moved completely to a different place and has not told me where he is. He does not want to try couples therapy yet. He did invite me to his therapy sessions and he got mad that he does not want to be in his own therapy session and hear what is wrong with him. I said we were discussing underlying issues in marriage and he felt it is the same. All he speaks of whenever he does is he has no feelings for me, he is indifferent to me and only gives scenarios of separation and if we were to reconcile he would have to deal with a bigger hell of marriage repair which he isn't ready to do. He still says he has not made a decision yet. It has been 1 month and 10 days since the Dday and he only seems to be worsening. I am requesting him to take some more time to think through and that I am not that person anymore and willing to do whatever it takes to work on our marriage and for us. He won't communicate and only texts when in rage or to say something like above. He does not want to MC (yet?). He is not ready to meet. He has not made a decision yet. Has anyone here ever bounced back and reconciled from situations like this. Is this all too fresh for him and hence his reaction and responses or is this how it usually will remain? How can I help him heal? How can I show that I am not that person anymore (which I am not. I absolutely loathe and ashamed of the person I was during A)? Please advise. I am willing to do whatever it takes to wait for my husband, make amends and to keep him happy.

NO STOP SIGN.

Why, after all you put your BH through, does he even owe you a second chance? You seem really frantic to get your needs met, but what about your BH and what he is going through at the moment? You can't empathize w his pain and his need for space from you, even now, right after he found out about your affair?

ETA: Gently, I notice you said that you "had to have" an affair. You really should explore this first and foremost as this is just not true. If you and your BH were having problems, there were other potential remedies, up to and including divorce (if no other courses of action could fix the problem).

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 8:16 PM, Friday, February 2nd]

BS here.

You took away your BS autonomy. You continued to do that when you wouldn’t disclose what happened with your AP.

The first step to letting him know you respect him is respecting him and stop trying to change the outcome.

Give him his autonomy.

And what happens from there is for him to decide.

If you love him, let him make decisions for himself. Tell the truth, and give him what he asks for.

I’m sorry you’re going through this. In the mean time, work on your whys and get into a good therapist.

@3yearsout - I have gotten into therapy and trying to work through myself.

The STOP sign prevents BSes form posting. It's highly appropriate here because your thread is very likely to trigger BSes, and triggers don't lead to the most insightful or helpful posts.

I think you removed the STOP sign inadvertently. I'll lock this topic until an admin can turn the STOP sign back on.

Sorry, I am new to this forum and do not know what the STOP sign means. How can I put it on? I completely understand and respect that he needs his space and time. I am not disturbing him there. That is why my question, if there is a way, how can I help him heal? Everytime I think of what I have put him through, it feels like punch in the gut and no I am not looking at getting my needs met. I am only looking for ways to help him and somehow if possible revive our 16 year relationship! I was looking to see if anyone else has gone through phases like this and been able to bounce back again?

Please note the Stop Sign has been added to this thread. Only WS's are allowed to post from this point on.

Thank you for adding the STOP sign back on.

I completely understand and respect that he needs his space and time. I am not disturbing him there. That is why my question, if there is a way, how can I help him heal? Everytime I think of what I have put him through, it feels like punch in the gut and no I am not looking at getting my needs met. I am only looking for ways to help him and somehow if possible revive our 16 year relationship! I was looking to see if anyone else has gone through phases like this and been able to bounce back again?

I think the problem is you’re frantic and that energy is too much for him. And you’re putting all the focus in you… You want to get back together. You want to reconcile. You want to help him heal. When you think of what you did you feel bad. You have things you want him to know. You told him to go back and think about things more. You want to talk about your problems with him with his therapist. You aren’t the same person… But what about him?

Your marriage is in the place where it is now because you prioritized your wants and disregarded his needs. You will not get to a place of common ground if you approach reconciliation with the same you-centered methodologies. You need to let him get in the drivers seat, let him be mad, let him say he doesn’t know what he wants, let him decide without frantic attempts to influence him, drama, and emotional responses.

The you things you can do are accept accountability… You were discovered, you didn’t confess. You were going to end it, but you hadn’t. He was on to you, and instead of coming clean then, things got to a point where he had to go to AP to get them to share what’s going on because you weren’t doing it. You can say you aren’t the same person but the fact is, from where he is sitting, he has no reason to believe that. You need to be able to approach him in all humility and confess to and accept that you are actually a person who could have a long term affair. The person he thought he knew isn’t the person you are. And for all you were going to do, be accountable for the fact that you didn’t do them, and so he had a right to believe that despite saying you were going to end things, you really weren’t.

This is not a "can we bounce back" scenario. What happened for your husband was the death of a relationship and the death of the perception of the person he thought you were and invested himself with. Bouncing back implies you fell, hit the floor briefly, then came right back up.

My friend, you may not have even hit the floor yet and, if you have, you might be rolling around there for awhile before you come back up. Things will be different, if you reconcile or not, from here on out for a long time, if not the rest of your lives. He needs that truly acknowledged and you need to take true accountability for that.

A good start would be examining the disassociation verbiage you use surrounding your affair.

[This message edited by DuchessVivian at 11:57 PM, Friday, February 2nd]

Gently, his may have been a deal breaker for him.

You need to focus on what you can change right now. Read the healing library. The pinned posts on this thread are also great resources.
Focus on your therapy, finding your why and making yourself a safe partner. Read "How to help your spouse heal from your affair" by Linda McDonald. Make sure it is the McDonald one the other ones leave a lot to be desired. "Not just Friends" is also a good read

If you haven’t yet write out your timeline of the affair. Have one with just the cliff notes and one with all the gory details. If your husband comes back he will want one of those and he won’t want to be waiting on it.

If you are invited to his therapy again try to be there to focus on his pain. Learn empathy for his pain, learn his pain points and that will let you know how you can try to help. Trying to go through the marital issues at this point is going to be a bad idea as you have already experienced.

Give him the time and space he is asking for.

@ChampionRugsweeper He is definitely still in shock. He is still processing it all. Not sure yet. But he is extremely mad is also something I know. After having thought through and realized what I have done and the immeasurable hurt that I have caused, I can imagine it could be a dealbreaker in marriage. I am trying my best to work against all odds and hoping to help him heal and yes, he is the absolute driver of the decision.

Thank you so much for the book suggestion. Have ordered it.

Your best move going forward is to assertively identify what enabled you to have a 3-year affair so that when you talk with him you can provide answers with the help of a professional therapist on how and why. It's obvious his pain will not allow you to help him at this moment, so it's best to release this as a possibility until he says otherwise.

If he wants no contact, it's important to honor this wish even if you feel the marriage is being lost. It's an unfortunate consequence of your actions. Your outreach to him could be viewed as further selfishness.

I realize no contact feels counterproductive to helping him, but you'll just have to anxiously be patient, while using the time to prepare to answer questions if or when given the opportunity.

SI WS and BS can help identify the questions and thoughts your BS is living with, but from my experience it was shock, denial, anger and clarity. The degree of anger differs in people. For me it was disrespect and disloyalty, but for others it might be something else.

Your marriage status cannot be predicted right now. I've read worse and the BS reconciled. Just take one step and one day at a time and let go of the outcome. This allows healing followed by peace. Peace as in, I'll be okay no matter what happens.

He did invite me to his therapy sessions and he got mad that he does not want to be in his own therapy session and hear what is wrong with him. I said we were discussing underlying issues in marriage and he felt it is the same.

At this point, he's right. It is the same.

There's a line in "Game of Thrones" that "everything before the 'but' is horseshit." The structure of a sentence illuminates what the speaker's actual priorities are. You're trying to say "Yes, I cheated, but there were underlying issues in the marriage," when reconciliation requires a mindset of "Yes, there were underlying issues in the marriage, but I cheated." Your affair kicked those issues way, way down the priority order. You frankly do not get to bring them up at all for at least a year, more likely two. If that seems like an unfair amount of time to wait, remember that you spent three years actively betraying him. And you will be very busy while waiting. You will need to study your own brokenness. You will need to rebuild trust through consistent action. You aren't a different person simply because you got caught and had to face the music. That's regret, not remorse. Fear of loss can be a useful tool for triggering growth, but it's not the same as growth. You can get terrified in a instant, but growth is a long haul process.

Now, you may decide that setting aside your grievances is unacceptable to you, and that you don't want to even try to reconcile if you don't get to present and advocate for your side of the story. That's your choice. If you feel that way, I recommend you rethink your desire for reconciliation. It most likely makes sense to cut your losses rather than sign up for the grueling work of rebuilding a marriage that you believe was deeply flawed. If it wasn't that bad, then you aren't going to get anywhere complaining about your hangnails to someone you just shot in the chest. They have to heal for a long time before they'll have the bandwidth to launch an improvement project.

reconciliation requires a mindset of "Yes, there were underlying issues in the marriage, but I cheated." Your affair kicked those issues way, way down the priority order. You frankly do not get to bring them up at all for at least a year, more likely two.

This^ My marriage had severe underlying issues. However, they actually took a back seat. It took 3 yrs, a lot of counseling, me fixing myself before really addressing it with my wife.

Think of it this way, your marriage may have issues that are just like cancer and will kill the marriage eventually. But, before you can work on them, you crashed your marriage into a wall and now it's on life support and may not survive. It's not the time to start treatment for the other issues. It sounds to me that your desire to work on the other issues first is a deal breaker for your husband.

Work on yourself, get to the bottom of your issues. You need to save the marriage first. Then, you can work on the other issues. It takes two to reconcile, only one to divorce. Good luck.

I cheated on my ex-Wife several times over 45 years ago. After a separation, we reconciled and I then cheated 2 more times. My affairs was short in duration little more than ONS. The ex-W divorced me. That was the best for her and I.

You are frantically acting out of fear to being alone/divorced. An LTA such as yours is horrible deal for your spouse. It is most likely a deal breaker for him. You need to let your husband go for his sake and yours.

Good luck to you.

I won't go into the details of why I had to resort to this

You can't go into the details of why you had to resort to this, because there is no scenario on earth where you "had to" resort to double betrayal. You made a choice to do it. You weighed the benefits, decided that it was easier and more pleasant to take what you wanted from both your husband and your AP instead of asking for a divorce. You didn't have to do any of that. You chose to, and you used whatever resentments you built up in your own mind to create entitlement to do it.

Remember: all of us here, anyone who is able to post under this stop sign, did the same thing. We're giving you straight talk because we've heard those justifications from inside our own minds and know they're counterproductive. You've asked for help in the goal of reconciliation, and this is a bedrock premise of successful R: nothing and no one made you cheat. Some of us didn't let go of that entitlement until it was too late for reconciliation. Some of us are married to people who used their resentment over our affairs to justify cheating of their own. If you really want to save this marriage, you have to let go of that narrative.

You've gone from three years of holding all the cards, wanted by two men, and that's trained your brain to see yourself as the prize. Read over your post and look at the "I" in it. You're not going to tell us what was wrong in your marriage, but still, you want us to know you were somehow unappreciated. You had fun with the affair but eventually tired of it when you realized AP wasn't worth dumping your husband for. You kept hitting AP up for ego boosts until you were done with him and ready for a fresh start. Then you attempted to engineer an exit that left you with zero consequences, not even social awkwardness, and it blew up in your face... so now you believe you're a totally different person who has learned the error of her ways.

You're still in the fog. We see it. Your husband sees it. If your therapist is worth a damn, they see it. Take a step back and look at this objectively, because you have a great deal of work to do.