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Over the past couple of months or so when we have argued badly, she will say that she is tired. She cant do this anymore. She says that I'm horrible to her at times and say nasty things. She says im wrapped up in my self to see how she is feeling. She says I don't see how this has affected her and that she hates what she has done to me and her family. She says she knows she has done wrong, but I cant expect her to sit there and take it. We have to move on and make a better life.

She says that I need to be careful, because just like I could leave at anytime, so can she. She keeps warning me that one day I might be on my own because she cant do this for ever. She says she wants me, she loves me but this has to stop. She doesn't want him she wants me and us.

First, let me preface this with how right on point I think TheEnd's above post was. I think you'd do well to read it again and again.

Next, even though it's not nice to hear, the above sentiment from your WW is valid. Obviously, I think there's some frustration there, same as when you engage in verbal steam-letting, but under it.. yes, WS's can become exhausted when they feel like they're not making progress. There's a big difference between sharing your feelings honestly and being "horrible" and saying "nasty things". We do that when we're angry and frustrated and when we feel like we're not being heard. It's understandable, but it's not conducive to relationship repair. A better tactic would be to sit with your feelings until you can describe and share them. Then, to choose your words in such a way as to convey your truest meaning. That's a tall order when we're under stress, right? At the bottom line though, we protect what we value. In R, we're still finding enough value in the relationship to put ourselves through a whole lot of emotional introspection and toil, so it stands to reason that we make the effort to connect efficiently.

I keep thinking, she wants him, but is stuck with me. Im standing in her way of being happy with some one she really wants.

Because lets face it. If she had to chose between an exciting affair leaving the problems at home or she has the stress of reconciliation. Which one sound more appealing.

Again, we protect what we value. During the affair, your WW did not value you the way she once vowed she would. My fWH didn't value me while he was cheating either. In fact, I think that we'd find this lack of care to be a universal condition among cheaters. But it's not static. It's not a state of being which is frozen in amber and never affected by change. TIME passes and it brings change with it for good or for ill. We tend to want to think of these kind of things in black and white. A person or an action is either good, or bad, or somewhere in between, but they are DEFINED as such, weighed and measured as this one thing forever. That's not the way linear time actually works though, is it? Like water flowing over a stone, it changes all it touches. The person I married was not the same person who cheated on me, and today, he's not the same person as that.

You appear to have this "Plan B" thought stuck in your mind, but nothing about infidelity and its aftermath is as cut and dried as that. We are, like it or lump it, a package deal when we have a history with someone. We've made an investment in them and they've made an investment in us. You seem to believe that you are replaceable, and yeah, on first blush, it sure does seem that way to all of us when we've been cheated on. For a while, someone else was in our place. That's just the bottom line truth of it. But no matter who that person was or what our WS was getting out of their relationship with them, that AP was NOT us and could never BE us. In the end, we are not interchangeable cogs in someone else's machine. We are unique. My fWH could have left me for some OW and even though it might have been a financial strain for awhile, chances are, he could have replaced all that he had. Hell, he might have even had more kids. But she would never be ME and those kids would never be OUR kids. She wouldn't remember him when he was eighteen, she wouldn't know all the old jokes or all the old hurts. She wouldn't remember his grandma who has passed. She wasn't there on the other end of every piece of furniture he ever moved or at every milestone in his adult life. We cannot be replaced, not really.

This is where you reframe you thinking. You don't necessarily have to trust your WW's assessment of your value. You can trust your own. YOU ARE ENOUGH. You are a unique and irreplaceable person. Once you've really wrapped your mind around that, you'll stop worrying about whether she agrees with that assessment or not. It will be enough that YOU know it.

You're going to be okay. Fourteen months is still early. These kind of thoughts and doubts are NORMAL and not necessarily a reflection of your OCD. Try to reframe and dig into YOUR VALUE.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 10:24 PM, Saturday, August 6th]

Most of the points made in the comments here seem spot on. However, I think this is also true: if you commit to R then at some point in time you need to find a way to limit a) the affair talk b) angry outbursts that feel like attacks to your WW.

I don't know when the right time is to limit those things, it's probably different for everyone. But despite the shit sandwhich a BS gets served, if you want R you have to try to work together to move forward. And if your WW is exhausted from the same questions being asked, I think moving forward together means finding a way to limit those conversations or have them in a different way. Yes, she betrayed you. But people do not magically gain an inexhaustible supply of empathy when they choose to R. Evennif they love you. They need a damn sizeable amount and they owe that to you for sure. But everyone has their limits.

Have you worked to decide the best time to have the A conversations? A time when she is prepared, rested and expecting it? That may help.

Have you negotiated frequency? If you are asking questions every other day, could you try to commit to once a week? Or if you are at once a week, try to move to twice a month. And so on.

Have you discussed "how" you have the conversations? What is helpful and what is not? Listening to her point of view on this could also help.

And if you want to R, you need to keep trying to stop calling her names or whatever you are doing when you argue. Discusss a strategy for this with your IC.

Are you in MC now? If not, that could also help.

All of the above is predicated on the idea that you still want R and she has made a lot of effort to help you. That is what I am reading in your posts.

I'm offering a thought that might seem random, but I hope might help you gain some perspective on your feelings toward your WW.

Many spouses jokingly discuss the concept of "celebrity hall pass" -- the idea that some smoking hot celebrity is so attractive and desirable, and the odds of a tryst with that celebrity are so microscopic, that if such an opportunity did present itself, the impacted spouse has a "hall pass" to go for it. In my case it's Swedish long jumper Khaddi Sagnia. If I were on a work trip and Khaddi Sagnia were to knock on my hotel room door wearing a filmy negligee and a come hither smile, holding a chilled bottle of Moet and a warm vat of coconut oil, I'd say yes ma'am and invite her in.

Clearly my example is silly and never going to happen. But I do think this sort of thing serves a useful purpose, which is to acknowledge that temptations are out there, real flesh-and-blood ones. If you don't think about the milestone where you might/might not consider giving in to temptation, then that line in the sand become ephemeral. In our wedding vows we promise "forever" and such, but the reality is that each of us is a fallible human. Each of us probably has some threshold over which we make bad choices.

In your WW's case, that bar is pretty low. A hot guy at the gym who offers up some NSA fun, and she goes for it. Being a spouse in a committed marriage means being in various degrees of "in love" with one's spouse. It's natural for the "in love" to ebb and flow over the course of a marriage. What sticks the marriage, the glue, is the other layer, the abiding sense of being friends/partners with one's spouse. Do you have each other's back? Can you rely on each other? Do you like each other?

Similarly, do you trust her? She crossed the line without a whole lot of trouble, for a hot guy at the gym. She could easily meet another hot guy at another gym and decide to go for a bit more fun. Sure, she went NC with the (known) AP, moved, and thus essentially cloistered herself away from this specific AP. However, what has she done to figure out what is messed up in her moral compass that would lead her to make that choice, and then what has she done to fix it? Is she different than she was? If not, how can you trust her?

Your WW is the kind of person who will decide to screw a hot guy at the gym just because she wants to have a bit of extracurricular fun. Then, she will become quickly irate and cross with you as you try to process your trauma, including trying to wrap your mind around her process of choosing to do this. Is she really somebody you can respect? Somebody you can even like as a person? What I hear in your posts is that you really don't like her. I don't blame you, by the way. If I had a friend who made those choices, I would seriously re-think whether I wish to remain friends with that person.

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 6:46 PM, Sunday, August 7th]

My WW says similar things. Even if the subject comes up maybe once a month, she acts as if Im always talking about it. Like my WW, yours likes to insinuate that she might leave you if you keep up all the talk and wont let it go. Yep, its the old "I cant keep doing this" line.

I feel like this is a subtle form of manipulation that waywards use in order to influence your behavior, to scare you into behaving the way she wants, which is to get you to stop talking about it. Quite simply because it makes her feel guilty and nobody likes feeling that way.

Although I do agree that there does need to be some limit within reason in order to give both people space and time to process. My WW and I have agreed to limit talk of her A to Monday nights at bedtime for one hour max. If I have thoughts or questions/ feelings between now and then that Id like to bring up, I write them down for our weekly talk. Some weeks theres nothing, others there is alot. I make sure my questions pass the "will this help me" test. If its simply a question Im asking out of spite, I will reconsider asking that or talking about it. I also need to be aware of getting into an angry or attacking state because then she will shut down and say that classic line.

This advice from ChamomileTea is spot on:

There's a big difference between sharing your feelings honestly and being "horrible" and saying "nasty things". We do that when we're angry and frustrated and when we feel like we're not being heard. It's understandable, but it's not conducive to relationship repair. A better tactic would be to sit with your feelings until you can describe and share them. Then, to choose your words in such a way as to convey your truest meaning.

Because lets face it. If she had to chose between an exciting affair leaving the problems at home or she has the stress of reconciliation. Which one sound more appealing.

Let’s clear this up right now. This isn’t true. Not a single word of it. Here are the facts:

Sure the affair was fun. It was fun bc it was new and it was an escape from reality. It’s also illicit thrilling sex. That’s what is so alluring about it.

That does after about 6-9 months. It always does. Bc you can only live in a bubble for so long before things get real.

Guarantee if she had to deal with bills, kids, life etc like she does with you then it would not be fun at all.

Please realize this. I’m confident your wife knows this

** Posting as a member **

I don't know what you actually say to your W. Maybe you do talk in a nasty way; maybe she hears your words as nasty because she's effed up. If you call her names, you'd probably feel better if you said, with appropriate emotion, something like, 'I'm furious that you did _____!'

As for cutting down on your desire for info about her A, well, yeah - but my d-day was in 2010, and if I have a question now, I ask it - and my W will answer honestly. I interrogated her for months every day. She answered every question. Sometimes she asked me to defer a discussion, but she never shut me down.

R is a process of resolving issues together. I urge you to talk with your W to figure out a way to get the info you want in a way she's willing to provide it. If she stonewalls, though, she's not a good candidate for R, and you can't R alone.

Is your W in IC? If not, what else is she doing to change from cheater to good partner?

*****

Part of reconciling is a conscious decision by the BS to just get on with it. Choke down the shit sandwich.

I don't see R as a shit sandwich; if I did, I wouldn't have R'ed.

I know many people do see it that way, but I wonder how many who do have actually R'ed - built the M that they want. Staying together is not necessarily R. (I understand staying together without full R may be the best bet for many BSes, and I don't mean any disrespect to them.)

I was a great H, although I didn't realize it until after d-day. My W, whom I loved, cheated on her own; the fault is entirely with her. I saw a high likelihood that we would build something better than we had if I chose R, and I saw a high likelihood that R was the best way to have a life that was both interesting, joyful, and satisfying.

There were times when I feared we wouldn't succeed at R, but I never experienced a time when I regretted choosing R.

Being betrayed is one of the worst things a person can experience in life. I have no doubt about that.

If you think R means eating shit, that's your opinion, and I respect it. If you can't imagine R without eating shit, though, that's a failure of your imagination. (ETA: that's not meant as a criticism. I'd bet a lot that those of us in R have our own blind spots.)

Don't argue with me about my opinion - just accept that you probably don't understand R and that R isn't for you. There's no shame in D - if you think R requires eating shit, D may be what you want, even if D isn't in the cards right this minute.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 8:14 PM, Tuesday, August 9th]

wow, we share a similar timeline. I get where you are coming from.

We got counseling in how we communicate with each other. It became evident we communicated differently I think it contributed to the affair.

Let me say I have those same feelings of there is three of us in this marriage. I get the rage, the sadness and frustration.

He knows I have forgiven him but he also knows I am not over it. I never approach him in anger as questions or feelings surface that I have. I have started my conversations with him that I am not trying to shame him or make him feel bad but I need clarity as my mind is still working through events. Sometimes I have to come back to the same question, I tell him I am still not getting whatever process I need to lay that part to rest and will ask a little differently. We talk and he has said we can continue as long as it takes me to process what happened. I never attack him, I admit to him I had short sidedness in our marriage, we both agree that did not give him permission to do what he did and ultimately he is responsible, but It does help him hear that cause he feels that now I hear him and his needs and I am too trying.

Keypoints; He will not sweep under rug what he did and will just keep helping me understand as things pop up. I still get so mad and angry but I do not direct it at him. These are unresolved feelings I need to figure out and work through. He does not sugar coat things about what happened or where the marriage breakdown from his perspective happened and I can not get mad at him. He is not telling me it for a tit of tat but to let me know his needs and where I missed things he needed. It is very hard but I do have times where in my head I just want to yell and scream at him. I still hurt, not as much and I realize it is rare now. Dont get me wrong, if I ever where to encounter his AP not sure what I would do, Yes I want to get a dog can call the dog her name, and I have those moments where I want to make him a batch of chocolate chip cookies filled with exlax. Hey I am human.

[This message edited by JustNonna at 7:15 PM, Tuesday, August 9th]

Hi @OP my heart goes out to you, it's obvious that the pain of betrayal is still raw for you even though you're 14 months into R.

I don't know your full story but are you both in IC or MC? If you're finding it hard to communicate effectively with each other, I would suggest you need professional counselling or mediation.

I remember from my own experience thinking my H and I could resolve the issues we were having and the aftermath effect of his infidelity on our relationship but realised that we were not moving forward at all because our emotions kept getting in the way. It wasn't until a wise and trusted mentor of ours came alongside us to offer us IC and MC that we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

When you're still hurting so much, R can be quite difficult. Maybe you need to take time to get into IC and focus on your healing for a while and not look to your wife for that.

I do want to encourage to remember that you esteem and worth is not a reflection of someone else's wrong poor choices. I also have to say that I have learnt that people are capable of changing for the better especially where there is sincere remorse for their past misdeeds.

I pray the near future brings complete healing for your emotions and true and lasting R for your marriage.

[This message edited by BellaLee at 8:17 PM, Thursday, August 11th]