SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I’m saying that if this forum is intentionally pushing a message that may or may not be true (WS may have been duped) in a given circumstance in order to avoid a problematic outcome (rugsweeping) then that is the forum treating new BS’s as people who can’t handle the full truth and need a cultivated message to go where we think they should.

This sounds like projection to me. You need to convince others and yourself that your wife was duped because it's easier and less painful to accept the reality that she made the choice to be unfaithful to you. This is clearly evident by how you focus on all the "evidence" of other men on the Internet being predatory but are ambivalent toward or dismissive of all the proof in your case of how your WW was very much proactive in her pursuit of the OM and her deceit of you and OBS.

And I think that's all I have to say on this subject.

What data? Scribblings of aps? We know even less about aps as a class than we do about WSes and BSes.

The "data" in question is many many stories just like the we have here. And just like you learn to pick up on themes here that make you seem like a fortune teller to the shell shocked new BS’s on JFO, there are patterns there.

BSes are faced with solving a set of problems after being traumatized. The way a problem is framed helps guide us to a solution. So far, the best way of framing the problem of recovering from an A is to place responsibility fully on the WS.

Hating the ap ... sure. Blaming the ap for one's WS's choices ... I don't see that as fruitful, even when the ap targeted one's WS. (My W was essentially blackmailed step by step into her A. Her ap acted evilly. I still don't care about that - all my W had to do was say, 'No.')

It's not dogma. It's a theory that works well.

Your wife was blackmailed and you don’t care? You don’t think that matters. Man, I completely disagree. I don’t know what else to say.

that is the forum treating new BS’s as people who can’t handle the full truth and need a cultivated message to go where we think they should.

- brother, when did you get this impression that people here treat BS as infant who can't handle the full truth? Do you even know the meaning of rug sweeping? Rug sweeping is BS running away from the whole truth. So, when people here advise you not to rug sweep then that means they want you to face the whole truth. Without knowing the whole truth there is no healing and reconciliation.

I have never encountered any cultivated message in this website. Everybody agrees here that
-infidelity is bad.
-people who commit to infidelity are the culprits here.
-rugsweeping is bad.
-reconciliation after any kind of affair is totally possible.
-for reconciliation both BS and WS need to work towards it.
- without a remorseful cheater reconciliation is impossible.

Do you consider these to be cultivated messages which are untrue but said with good intentions?

[This message edited by Lurkingsoul12 at 6:51 PM, Thursday, February 16th]

This gets to one reason I know how my wife became a safer partner on her own — after the A, she didn’t trust anyone, ever, including me. She simply assumed all men were like AP, out there with a checklist or an agenda.

So your wife sounds like she was manipulated and assaulted by a practiced and skilled asshole but chose to take on all the blame and overcorrected by building walls against all men, including you. That is not the outcome I want.

My wife did the same thing when she was raped in college. She didn’t bother to parse out what happened. She did what many women do, say they put themselves in a compromising situation and just accepted all the blame. It was a crippling choice. Not saying she was raped here, but the notion of "playing it safe" and putting all the blame on a person doesn’t seem right to me.

this part of the narrative is still open.

Because the narrative you're desperately trying to believe..that your wife is a victim..doesn't make sense when you look at the entire picture. You want to dismiss your wife's predatory behavior..pretending to be the OBS'S friend, and involving herself in their children's lives..because you can not look at that,and still believe she was a naive victim. What she did..not what OM did..what she did to the OBS and their children..are not the actions of a naive woman. It was extremely calculated.

BTW, I'm not looking for a "rumble." My point in bringing up your wife's actions is to remind you that what SHE did can not be dismissed,because you need to see her as a victim. Doing so does an enormous disservice to you, and,frankly, to her.

You may not have known the statistics of sexual assaults and martial infidelity before, but you did know sexual assaults and infidelity do occur, right? Your wife too knew about this. It's not your job to lock her away in your house to prevent her from committing affair. It's her job to build strong boundaries and value system to not fall for infidelity.

Risk is a combination of how bad a thing is and how commonly it happens. An asteroid hitting my house would be really bad, but it never happens so I don’t build a steel cover over my house to protect from it. Sexual assault, I knew how bad it is, but I vastly underestimated the occurrence, so my assessment of the risk was way off. I guess that is being "naive". For infidelity I was wrong on both. I didn’t know how devastating it is, and I didn’t know how common it is, so that was way the hell off. We need to bring both of those together (severity and occurrence) to really make a call about how to respond.

I’m saying that if this forum is intentionally pushing a message that may or may not be true (WS may have been duped) in a given circumstance in order to avoid a problematic outcome (rugsweeping) then that is the forum treating new BS’s as people who can’t handle the full truth and need a cultivated message to go where we think they should.

Just my 0.02, but this this forum absolutely does NOT prescribe to the ws being 'duped'. Quite to the contrary, a lot of new ws's hit the wayward forum with that message and are quickly disabused of that notion by SI WS's who have done the work to figure out their why's.

It also doesn't treat BS's as people who can't handle the truth. In JFO, there's a lot of seasoned SIers who actively post to new BS's that they probably don't have the full truth and that they must get as close to that full truth as possible in order to heal/make a decision/R or D. One definitive truth here is that rugsweeping doesn't work, ever. And to avoid rugsweeping you have to be willing to dig and dig and dig until you get to the truth - for ws's that means figuring out their why's. For BS's, that means not allowing the ws to dodge accountability for their choice to have an A, whether they do that themselves or make IC for the ws a requirement for R.

And if it's true that your ww insinuated herself into OBS's life (and their children's lives!!!) to get closer to the ap.... sorry but that ain't naive behavior. That's cold and calculated and IMHO truly awful. I can't even imagine how much more painful my situation would have been if my xwh's ap had befriended me with the express purpose of building a relationship with my xwh.

You need to convince others and yourself that your wife was duped because it's easier and less painful to accept the reality that she made the choice to be unfaithful to you.

Man, I am just an anonymous voice on the internet, as are all you. I need to convince you of nothing. I am on the other hand trying to understand hard questions of the utmost importance in my life. I appreciate your participation so far, I understand if you choose to stop.

So your wife sounds like she was manipulated and assaulted by a practiced and skilled asshole but chose to take on all the blame and overcorrected by building walls against all men, including you. That is not the outcome I want.

That wasn’t the final outcome, it was just her way to dust herself off and attempt to move on.

My wife was duped. But she knew THAT for a lot longer than she was willing to admit to herself.

And I am not sure about what narrative you think members are trying to sell you here.

While my wife takes all responsibility, I don’t see her as less than or a horrific person. My wife is not only a good person, she is a great person. Just because she once failed her own standards, and mine and most people’s — doesn’t define her.

Hell, if we all defined ourselves by our worst moments, it wouldn’t allow for any improvement.

Personal responsibility isn’t a sin.

I appreciate the extenuating circumstances in my wife’s life at the time. AP’s machinations, manipulations and my wife’s diagnosed depression all made for a perfect storm. And yet, she holds to fact that she had agency, she could have been safer, had better boundaries.

I didn’t choose to stay based on any sense of moral superiority (me good, you bad example you mentioned) — I stayed becauseI wanted to see her recover from her worst days and be her best self — I kind of love her. I gave a little grace and have no regrets in doing so.

Because the narrative you're desperately trying to believe..that your wife is a victim..doesn't make sense when you look at the entire picture. You want to dismiss your wife's predatory behavior..pretending to be the OBS'S friend, and involving herself in their children's lives..because you can not look at that,and still believe she was a naive victim. What she did..not what OM did..what she did to the OBS and their children..are not the actions of a naive woman. It was extremely calculated.

Guys, I’ve said over and over again here that I’m not taking responsibility away from her, merely trying to judge the severity of the charges (murder 1, manslaughter, etc). And I was focusing this on how things started and you are pulling in her behavior in the affair. And that is fine, and I don’t have great answers. What she did was super fucked up. I need to get those answers. Someday, hopefully not too long from now.

And to avoid rugsweeping you have to be willing to dig and dig and dig until you get to the truth - for ws's that means figuring out their why's. For BS's, that means not allowing the ws to dodge accountability for their choice to have an A, whether they do that themselves or make IC for the ws a requirement for R.

Look, if this is a stance that we are collectively taking to the point of dismissing the roll of blackmail in starting an affair, I just can’t agree. I don’t want to pick on Sisoon, but that just really hit me in the heart.

I didn’t choose to stay based on any sense of moral superiority (me good, you bad example you mentioned) — I stayed becauseI wanted to see her recover from her worst days and be her best self — I kind of love her. I gave a little grace and have no regrets in doing so.

That is really beautiful. Thanks, that resonates.

Yeah, I remember doing these same mental gymnastics after D-Day (Murder-1, Manslaughter, Criminal Negligence).

There’s so much at stake. Not just children, entangled finances, a home, family, extended families, friend circles, memories and history, but also your vows of for better or for worse, sickness and health.

I remember trying to objectively assess the damage, the degree of betrayal, and my WS’s true non-pragmatic desires. Does she want to R for the right reasons or, for practical reasons that don’t particularly include love, chemistry and desire?

I finally concluded that I just don’t have enough information-for me, to make an informed decision. So I decided to hold off on summary judgement and just watch her actions going forward. It wasn’t long before I began to get the data I needed (4-6 months) and then another 8-months to finally get the conclusive data I needed.

During that time, I really gave R a go. I don’t think I sabotaged it. I just found myself making progressively more and more concessions to facilitate her, than her me.

Per her IC, she was wallowing in toxic shame and self victimization. She made herself a victim of her own post affair consequences, a victim of my natural BS symptomology, a victim of her insecurities, a victim of her FOO issues, her frumpy minivan mom status, a victim of our new post affair boundaries and transparency and list kept growing with her resentment. At one point, she had me feeling more sorry for her than myself.

It became just too overwhelming. I wasn’t seeing progress.

Rather than YOU doing a retrospective analysis of what led to the affair, perhaps you should leave that for IC, and you should focus more on the observance of reconciliatory actions. Actions are the only hard empirical data that you can measure.

You, clearly, are not ready for D. So why not progress towards R and see how it goes? If you’re not divorcing, you’re either in R or limbo. Of course avoid limbo, and start laying the groundwork for R. Start down that road and see if it sticks, if it sustains and eventually thrives.

I've had long threads on this board.

We all have to come to our own understanding. There is a lot of value in the collective wisdom here.

Back to one of the questions of whether she didn't "love you enough". My potentially post-modern-navel-gazing opinion is that most cake eating cheaters carry a belief that they love two people. I think a person *can* love more than one other person. So then the self deception comes in again. The fog/confusion/etc. Love for the AP isn't a genuine love, but a false one, one the WS willingly allows into their life against their better judgment because it feels good. I don't think it's an indictment of how much WS loved BS. I think it's just shitty wayward logic at work.

I do buy the line "I never stopped loving you" from the WS in most cases. Maybe I'm still naive.

[This message edited by This0is0Fine at 7:59 PM, Thursday, February 16th]

Look, if this is a stance that we are collectively taking to the point of dismissing the roll of blackmail in starting an affair, I just can’t agree.

I'm not saying that blackmail doesn't happen. I'm sure it does in a few cases. But if I had a nickel for all the times I have heard a new BS on here say their ws was 'blackmailed' into an affair.... I'd have quite a few nickels at this point. And more often than not, their ws wasn't blackmailed at all. Likewise with new BS's who say their ws was 'tricked' into having an affair.

And I was focusing this on how things started and you are pulling in her behavior in the affair. And that is fine, and I don’t have great answers. What she did was super fucked up. I need to get those answers. Someday, hopefully not too long from now.

Ok but the point I am trying to get across here is that really in the bigger picture, HOW it started (or indeed who started it) is not nearly as important as that IT HAPPENED AT ALL.

Let's say for the sake of debate that he started it. So your wife only gets... manslaughter for your marriage. How does that help YOU? Your marriage is still dead either way and you have to figure out for yourself whether you're gonna go for marriage 2.0, keep trying to revive dead M1.0, or call time of death and move on - there's no "right" answer there either, it's unique to each BS and something they have to figure out for themselves. Any way you go, that decision is incredibly HARD to make and it's okay if it takes you time to make it.

Just my read, but you keep focusing on who started what, and skipping over 'her behavior during the affair' that people are 'pulling in'. I get this. I really do I promise you. Early in my infidelity journey, I did much of the same and felt the same kind of wtf when posters here were focusing on totally different things than I was. But that's the point. They saw him waaaaay more clearly than I did, because they had the benefit of objectivity that I couldn't have back then. Of course it's hard to be objective when you're dealing with your spouse and all the history you have with that person. It clouds your ability to apply rationality and logic. Engineer or not, you're likely experiencing some of this too (tho probably less than I did).

I'm just saying, from over here with no history with your ww, your saying 'my wife was naive and was preyed upon by an evil om' does not line up with 'your wife deliberately insinuated herself into another woman's marriage and a relationship with said woman and her children to conduct an affair with her ap'. Those two things just don't match up to me.

You are very focused on the agenda of this site/community being something other than support, and locked into so very black and white thinking.

If you can't reconcile with your wife because she knowingly betrayed you then you're just playing a delaying action.

You are very focused on the agenda of this site/community being something other than support, and locked into so very black and white thinking.

I am interested in identifying and understanding the sort of unspoken rules and assumptions of this community. I am letting it guide me in one of my most vulnerable times of my life. It seems reasonable to know what you are letting in, right? And my thinking is anything but black and white, I’m pushing all of us to consider the gray.

We can consider whether Ester Perel is right. Maybe she is, but it doesn't help make you safe or progress in R.

I finally concluded that I just don’t have enough information-for me, to make an informed decision. So I decided to hold off on summary judgement and just watch her actions going forward. It wasn’t long before I began to get the data I needed (4-6 months) and then another 8-months to finally get the conclusive data I needed.

During that time, I really gave R a go. I don’t think I sabotaged it. I just found myself making progressively more and more concessions to facilitate her, than her me.

Per her IC, she was wallowing in toxic shame and self victimization. She made herself a victim of her own post affair consequences, a victim of my natural BS symptomology, a victim of her insecurities, a victim of her FOO issues, her frumpy minivan mom status, a victim of our new post affair boundaries and transparency and list kept growing with her resentment. At one point, she had me feeling more sorry for her than myself.

It became just too overwhelming. I wasn’t seeing progress.

I see a lot of wisdom here. Trying to parse all this stuff out is never going to be an exact science, but I also need to do what I can for the insanely high stakes. I am watching her closely. I see progress in her. She isn’t shifting blame, she isn’t playing the victim card. She has shown new self revelations that she’s never had before. It gives me hope and a willingness to take another step of faith with her. I’m sorry your story didn’t look like that.

I can tell you one thing - if I were your wife I would ABSOLUTELY play the tee-hee vulnerable woman, abuse victim, the evil man made me do it card, too. You seem very susceptible to it. In fact you seem eager to run down the ramp to the slaughter yourself.

See, it's not that women are vulnerable - men are vulnerable, too. We're just susceptible to different things. I just read some of your posts and don't know any other thing about you, but I could easily scam you knowing that one of your vulnerabilities is you're easily manipulated about sex and gender, so the first thing I'd do to scam you is exactly what your wife has done - play the victim card, the injured gazelle limping at the back of the pack while the mean hungry lion eyeballs me and targets me. Were I your wife, I'd encourage all talk of my affair that made it sound like a takedown of a little prey animal on the African plains by a dick-swinging predator. And then I'd pretend to take responsibility for it "OMG, husband, I'm too strong a woman to have been deceived! I'm taking back my power, this was all my fault, no matter how much that dick swinging predator tricked me, I should have been stronger!" and sit back and wait for you to admire my attempts at faking power as it would intensify your belief that I was a victim 'trying to be strong'. Your wife is far from naive, she's actually very clever to have you at this point.

But having someone come along and intentionally deceive you is a really dangerous situation.

Gosh, how did the OM deceive her into thinking she wasn't married? Did he hypnotize her? Give her amnesia? Put on a mask and pretend to be you, her husband? Did he tell her you died and then she thought she was single and free to have sex with him? Is there anything at all that an OM could say that would literally deceive someone into having an affair?

It pisses me off so much that we are at our most vulnerable when we find out that our vows were a joke, and at our most vulnerable our WS believe they can bend reality and we'll swallow it because we want so much to believe in them. Look at the illogical hoops that we'll go through just to look anywhere but at the person who hurt us. And like all people who have had our trust abused, we reach out for some way to cope. Any story, any narrative that puts us in a safer place. When the unsafest place for that abused trust is with the very person who violated it, and yet that's the only place we want to turn.

Sucks, man. It all just sucks.