SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Let’s propose a classification for types of affairs (A):
1. Flirting, "testing the market" (social media, Tinder, etc.)
2. Emotional affair (EA) / limerence
3. Sexting (some categorize this as group 4)
4. Physical affair (PA)
Other factors should also be considered, such as duration, how it was discovered (e.g., whether there was a confession), etc.

-As for the "limbo" experienced by the betrayed spouse (BS), it is more complex to classify. The parameters here would be:
A—The extent and duration of codependency, "hysterical bonding," the "pick-me" dynamic, etc.
B—Symptoms experienced by the BS: insomnia, asthenia (fatigue/weakness), muscle tension, irritability, obsessive doubts (mental scenarios, nightmares, jealousy, hypervigilance), an inability to concentrate, etc.

In reality, the duration is more concerning than the specific symptoms of this "limbo" state itself.

So, my theory is: the milder the affair, the longer the "limbo" lasts.

What do you think?

I think every situation is different. Hard to rank things b/c an emotional affair is as detrimental as a physical affair. For some betrayeds it doesn’t make a difference if it was physical b/c sometimes the emotional connection is far more damaging than a physical affair.

For context I rate my H’s last affair as a 10 (in terms of how bad it was on a scale of 1 to 5) because he was kicking me to the curb for the OW.

For others NSA (no strings attached) physical affairs are just as bad as affairs with an emotional element.

Take a flirting emotional affair. Devastating impact when the betrayed sees how much time and effort the cheater gave to the AP - but barely made an effort to speak to their spouse. Just as bad as a long term physical affair IMO.

Curious to hear other opinions and thoughts.

I get what you want to say.

From my perspective they are all the same, the abuse both sexual and emotional causes the same kind of trauma no matter the "sordid degree" the infidelity reached in practice.

Your question has some logic, the "mild" I would rather call cognitive dissonance between uncertainty and expectation the betrayed partner feels.

You are going to torture you to find out why you have been betrayed by your closest person for a while, that’s inevitable.

If the cognitive dissonance is kept by uncertainty if what it was done to you was "awful enough" to run away and save yourself, then the limbo is longer than to cut ties from, and your abuser out of your life.

The damage is the same, but the trauma may get you stuck.

If the degenerate debauchery of your wayward is so obvious that it gets you to feel a visceral disgust, then it’s easier to sever the toxic connection with your abuser.

Not easy but easier, when you can see the face of evil you can unfreeze, when the evil hides under a guise of human flaws and false remorse, you question yourself.

Then the limbo is longer.

That’s how I can see the answer to your question

My wife's affair was pretty bad. I didn't last a real long time, about 6 weeks, but it involved both physical and emotional elements. There were 3 physical trysts, 2 at a motel, and "I love you's" exchanged. She was convinced she was in love.

D day was especially brutal. Some of the details are in my bio, but suffice it to say, it's up there with some of the worst d days I've read about here.

I went through a period of about a month that I would consider "limbo," but once I'd had enough and put all my cards on the table that period ended pretty abruptly. That didn't end a lot of the negative feelings and emotions that come with being betrayed, but I felt relatively early on that her affair was officially ended and we'd made our choices to reconcile. It's been a year and a half since d day, and while I'm still working through the pain of betrayal and some ruminating still, I'd say we're on the path of reconciliation still. She's been rock solid since I made some phone calls to divorce lawyers.

I don't think it's so much the conditions of the affair as it is the individual(s) involved.

My affair was similar to Pogres wife other than it happened on a business trip and I confessed on my own.

The way infidelity effects a person and whether they stay in limbo I think has a lot of influences:

The condition or experience of the Pre A marriage.
The way it’s discovered.
What types of details are involved.
Was the ap a stranger or w friend of the bs
The value system and beliefs of the bs
The way the ws approaches repair, or the absence of any desire or effort to to repair
Financial situation
Children situation

I could go on and on.

The worst betrayal is the one your experience. And I think there are conditions within the bs that may help impact it the biggest one is their relationship with themselves. Maybe a side shoot if that is the narrative they put around the affair. Some bs look for blame or think it was something they were lacking. I think that’s never the actual case though but it’s a normal human reaction.

Littlepuppet, interesting theory and one that I think is worth exploring. However, I would respectfully challenge the premise that the severity of an affair has an inverse relationship with the duration of limbo. My own experience would suggest that the relatinship is considerably more complicated, and in some circumstances, the exact opposite may be true.

For context, my wife had two long-term affairs (1st 2 years long with a man 40 years her senior, 2nd 1 year long), approximately fourteen years apart. The first began before we were married and continued into our marriage, she even brought him to our wedding to "share HER special day". The second lasted approximately a year, nearly two decades into our relationship. Both involved emotional and physical infidelity, extensive deception, and a level of manipulation that fundamentally altered my understanding of my own life. The disclosures came in stages, with additional truths emerging over the following year. I have experienced what I would consider an exceptionally severe betrayal, if not one of the worst I have found, yet here I am more than a year after D-Day, still navigating aspects of limbo.

What I find particularly interesting about your theory is the suggestion that a more severe betrayal might make the decision easier. Intellectually, I can understand that reasoning. The more egregious the betrayal, the less ambiguity there should be about whether the relationship is acceptable. But I think this overlooks something fundamental about betrayal trauma.

The severity of the betrayal does not necessarily diminish the attachment to the person who committed it. Sometimes it makes the psychological conflict exponentially more difficult to resolve.

For me, the difficulty has never been determining whether what happened was sufficiently terrible to justify leaving. That question was answered a long time ago. The difficulty has been reconciling nearly twenty years of love, memories, commitment, children, and shared identity with the realization that much of what I believed about my marriage was fundamentally untrue.

I didn't simply discover that my wife had cheated. I discovered that the foundation upon which I had built my understanding of our relationship was compromised before we even exchanged our wedding vows. That is not something you simply process, categorize, and move on from because the severity makes the decision obvious. It forces you to reevaluate your past while simultaneously trying to determine your future.

I think The1stWife makes an important point about the subjective nature of betrayal. An emotional affair can be equally devastating to someone whose understanding of intimacy places enormous importance on emotional exclusivity. Similarly, a brief physical encounter can completely destroy another person's sense of safety. The acts themselves are only part of the equation. The meaning attached to those acts by the betrayed spouse matters enormously.

I also think hikingout identifies several of the variables that make this difficult to quantify, particularly the betrayed spouse's values, the history of the marriage, the presence of children, and the wayward spouse's response after discovery. Pogre's experience illustrates something equally important: a relatively clear decision about reconciliation can happen early, even when the betrayal itself was devastating. But that decision does not mean the trauma has been resolved.

And BackfromtheStorm raises an interesting point about cognitive dissonance. I would take it one step further, though. Sometimes the cognitive dissonance isn't about whether the betrayal was bad enough to leave. Sometimes it comes from knowing beyond any reasonable doubt how unacceptable the betrayal was, while simultaneously recognizing that you still love the person responsible for it.

You can know someone has destroyed your trust, recognize the enormity of their choices, understand that you owe them absolutely nothing, and still grieve the possibility of walking away from someone you genuinely loved. Those realities are not mutually exclusive.

Something I have come to appreciate over this past year is that limbo is not necessarily an indication of indecision, weakness, codependency, or an inability to recognize the severity of what happened. Sometimes it is the uncomfortable space between understanding what has been destroyed and determining whether anything worth preserving can realistically be rebuilt.

I also think we need to distinguish between the duration of limbo and the duration of trauma. Someone can file for divorce the morning after D-Day and spend years recovering. Another person can spend two years evaluating reconciliation and eventually arrive at a healthy, informed decision. Neither timeline tells us much about the severity of the original betrayal.

I know I can be excessively analytical. My own life experiences have taught me to dissect situations, question assumptions, and search for understanding before making consequential decisions. That approach has advantages, but I recognize it can also keep me examining questions long after other people might have reached their conclusions.

Ultimately, I don't believe the duration of limbo is proportional to how mild or severe the affair was. I suspect it has far more to do with the collision between attachment, personal values, the destruction of trust, the availability of truth, and whether the betrayed spouse can envision a future that remains consistent with who they are.

My limbo has never been about not knowing how badly I was betrayed. It has been about knowing exactly how badly I was betrayed, and understanding that neither staying nor leaving can give me back the life I thought I had.

And perhaps that is the distinction I would make. The severity of the betrayal may influence the decision, but it does not necessarily determine how long it takes someone to make peace with that decision.

EDIT to add: There is another variable I think deserves consideration: what happens after D-Day. When the truth is delivered in installments, when significant details continue emerging months later, and when the actions of the wayward spouse create further uncertainty, are we really measuring the duration of limbo following the original betrayal? Or are we measuring the cumulative effects of repeated injuries? I think there is an important distinction between someone struggling to make a decision with all the facts available and someone trying to make that same decision while the reality they are evaluating continues to change beneath their feet.

[This message edited by Gemmy at 9:20 PM, Wednesday, October 28th]

Thanks for the replies.
Well, rather than talking about "severity," it’s more accurate to speak in terms of stages of infidelity (with the exception of one-night stands, where there is no emotional affair). At each new level, the unfaithful partner makes one or more poor decisions—or "mistakes"—which carry consequences, such as time stolen from the betrayed spouse. This creates a chain of events. Some of these actions are more painful than others; they accumulate, and that is where the betrayed spouse’s "pain threshold" comes into play. As *BackfromtheStorm* puts it: "If the cognitive dissonance is kept alive by uncertainty—wondering if what was done to you was 'awful enough' to justify leaving and saving yourself—then the limbo lasts longer than it would if you simply cut ties and removed your abuser from your life." (That is exactly the point I’m referring to!)
-Pogre, I’ve read your story on your profile, and I admire you for everything you’ve had to go through; you are a great example. I always follow your posts with the utmost attention.
-hikingout, "The worst betrayal is the one you experience"—how very true that is.

I've been reading through infidelity forums here and elsewhere since dday nearly 4 years ago, and I haven't observed and inverse relationship between the type of affair and the duration of limbo. All infidelity is painful, and as others have said, the behavior after DDay also matters a lot.

If anything, I would say that the duration of limbo is proportional to the duration of the relationship prior to dday, but even that is imperfect because people who reconcile often say that they will be "reconciling" for the rest of their lives. People who stay don't always recommit on a particular day (like with a wedding) to stay forever. It's easier to evaluate the end of limbo for people who divorce/break up. In that case, I think it makes sense that people who have less invested in the relationship (dating->long term dating->engaged->married->long marriage; kids; joint property, etc.) might find it easier to exit the relationship and therefore might do so more quickly, but I've seen plenty of exceptions to that too.

My case is also a pretty egregious one (3 year long-term affair, dead bedroom, EA, PA, False R, unprotected sex without birth control), and I stayed in R/limbo for 2.5 years because I hoped to salvage a 30 year relationship and spare our family the pain of our divorce.

I think I see 2 types of 'limbo' - active and passive.

I associate passive limbo with waiting for somethin or someone to get one unstuck and moving.

I associate active limbo with recognizing that healing takes time, that the decisions one makes after d-day will affect decades of one's life and uncertainty is an essential part of the process, etc. In fact, I don't think 'active limbo' is limbo at all.

My experience was that I lived in major uncertainty for 2-3 years, but I did not get stuck in passivity - rather, when I felt passive, I reminded myself of my strengths, resources, and especially options, and I made my choice all over again.

My reco is to stay mindful and keep monitoring yourself. Healing from trauma takes patience. Giving oneself time to heal isn't limbo, IMO.

I think I see 2 types of 'limbo' - active and passive.

I associate passive limbo with waiting for somethin or someone to get one unstuck and moving.

I associate active limbo with recognizing that healing takes time, that the decisions one makes after d-day will affect decades of one's life and uncertainty is an essential part of the process, etc. In fact, I don't think 'active limbo' is limbo at all.

My experience was that I lived in major uncertainty for 2-3 years, but I did not get stuck in passivity - rather, when I felt passive, I reminded myself of my strengths, resources, and especially options, and I made my choice all over again.

My reco is to stay mindful and keep monitoring yourself. Healing from trauma takes patience. Giving oneself time to heal isn't limbo, IMO.

Trauma triggers many issues that were previously outside of one's awareness. My sense is that the amount of patience needed directly varies very much with the issues that get triggered and with the facts of the A(s).

This is interesting, sisoon is onto something

I do think there are "degrees" of infidelity. That is, some infidelity is "worse" in that it inflicts more pain. However, I also think those degrees are personal and subjective to the betrayed spouse. Details matter. As an example, my current marriage is interracial. I have no desire to cheat and have not cheated, but I do know, just from marital chit-chat over the years, that if I were to cheat with a woman of my own race, my wife would feel more injured than if I were to cheat with another woman of her race. She's insecure about her attractiveness as a woman because of her race, which is why the pain would be greater. That, I think, is the crux of it -- the personal insecurities of the BS. IF a detail of the affair pushes an insecurity button of the BS, it's way harder for the BS to deal with it.

Hmm I think it depends on the person, sometimes the things that don’t cross into the physical still can feel just as "severe". I also think it might have to do more with how the WS acts afterward with their remorse / how much hope you have for things to get better, etc. for example for me on previous d day my limbo was quite short because I had a lot of hope that we could work through it so I felt more open to working together to rebuild.. now on this most recent d day I don’t feel any hope anymore and I feel more that the limbo is just actually wanting to end the relationship but having a hard time letting go. Also this affair was a lot more physical than previous but I went into more of a mental spiral the first time ? But I can see what the original poster is saying that for some people , if they don’t perceive the affair as super extreme , it might be harder to mentally come to the conclusion that "this person isn’t right for me" therefore prolonging limbo.