SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Choice, Mistake, Accident. Perhaps there's some inconsistency in how we are interpreting these terms. An accident is something that was not on purpose. The A was absolutely NOT an accident. A mistake is a choice you made that didn't work out in a positive way. I can see my WW's choice to have an affair as a mistake but not an accident. At the time she began it she wouldn't have done it if she thought she was making a mistake. It felt like the right choice at the time for her for whatever reason she gave herself. In hindsight, it was a terrible choice and can be viewed as a huge mistake. That's what regret and remorse grow from. The realization that you fucked up and made a huge mistake. I guess while I hate the shoes I'm in, I'd also hate to be in hers. How can I expect her to show me empathy without my ability to do the same.

If this doesn't make sense, it's probably because I'm tired right now. My mind is a mess. Don't worry, I'm not communicating any of this to her. I'm just lost in my own surreal thoughts right now. Time to get some rest...

One day at a time, one moment at a time.

You are correct. It takes two together to make this work.

You fix your side of the fence and she has to fix hers. Any good marriage takes a lot of time and effort. They don't just happen. The relationship must be balanced.

You have a long way to go. As many say this is a marathon not a sprint so pace yourself accordingly.

Get some rest and try to stop thinking too much.

Easier said than done.

it might be useful to consider / ask her how she (in all honesty) would have reacted if you had been the one to have had the affair? would she give you any chance of reconciliation?

I guess I know the answer, but is this normal? Anyone else able to shift perspective so much?

No, it's not normal, in that most people struggle with it. But it is desirable if not absolutely necessary to successfully and fully R.

An A is a product of a stew of causes, from lots and lots of issues with the WS, to environments for the marriage, to particular society's expectations, and so on. Perfectly happy WS cheat. Spouses with lots and lots of military deployments have way high rates of infidelity (are military husband bad at picking wives?) Some societies train everyone to look the other way.

In the aftermath of an A, you might as well look at all of it. Fix it all. Even stuff that didn't directly cause the affair, because... Why not? Why not make the marriage better?

The only reason not to is out of fear that recognizing a shortfall in one aspect might be perceived as somehow justifying the affair. If you can move past that (and you need to, to actually R) then you can maybe end up with something better, at least with wife#2 if not wife#1.

Can't we hold the two thoughts in our heads at the same time?

There, but for the grace of God, go I.

And

I need to heal and she needs to become safe for me and help me heal or this will never work.

The first reminds us that good people can make terrible decisions when under pressure. And we are capable of that same failing even if we have not succumbed yet.

The second reminds us that there has to be accountability, serious longterm effort and action.

I don't think they are mutually exclusive ideas.

She says she didn't love him. She said she cared for him and wanted him to be happy just as spending time with him had made her happy. She said the sex was just sex and she never felt connected to him. It felt foreign and was just an escape to feel good, not to feel love or connecting with him.

This is a big thing that she needs to unravel in IC, how her selfishness and compartmentalization carried over from her high stress work life to seriously fucking up her family life. The affair drug made her happy, until the guilt and shame set in, then she craved the next hit.

[This message edited by MickeyBill2016 at 2:55 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

but is this normal? Anyone else able to shift perspective so much? Perhaps it's just a defense mechanism at play. Thoughts...

Yes. Or at least I did it too. It was my way to distance myself and compartmentalize. It's much easier to shut off my emotions and look at the situation objectively. But time helps with this too. I can look back now and say, yes, this really shitty thing happened to me and yes, it is very common. That didn't make it any less shitty to go thru.

I'm NOT taking the blame for her decision to have an A. However, if we want to recover and possibly reconcile, it is going to be important to explore what was wrong with our marriage that led to her saying yes to an A. I know that an A can happen even in strong happy marriages. I thought ours was bulletproof, but perhaps I'd become complacent in this thought and allowed conditions ripe for poor choices to exist. Again, this is going to sound like I'm taking responsibility. I'm not but I also can't ignore details present.

This is the reason that she needs IC. She needs to figure out her 'whys". It's possible that your marriage had the same normal stressors that any marriage has (meaning..no big problems), but she chose to deal with them in unhealthy ways. It's up to her to figure out why she did that, and how to deal with things differently in the future. I'll share my experience with you because I see some similarities. My WH came from a family in which his father had an explosive temper and his mother encouraged him and abetted him in not telling his father things that might upset him. At the same time, his mother was also lying and cheating on his father. But on the surface, the family was happy and intact. My husband learned to always be affable, always be even-keeled, to not show stress. Instead he stuffed it all down and compartmentalized. And he learned that it was good to hide feelings, and to lie to not upset people. The problem is that when you stuff your feelings down and shove them away, they have a pesky tendency to bleed into your life and try to take over in other ways. So when we had additional stressors in our marriage (a baby that wouldn't sleep, a wife that was always tired and stressed, he had a high stress job - he is a C-suite executive) he felt neglected and pulled away and started trying to seek comfort in unhealthy ways. By the time I realized that we weren't doing well and tried to reach out to him, he had already shut down and thought that I didn't love him anymore.

It took almost a year of intensive IC for him to open all those parts of himself that he had compartmentalized. It was grueling, intense work. It was often painful and exhausting for him. And then it took over a year of MC for us (while simultaneously still doing IC) for us to work on first healing the trauma of infidelity and then working to improve our marriage. My husband has learned to be honest with his feelings, and to turn toward me instead of away from me when he's feeling stressed and/or neglected. I can honestly say that my marriage is better than it was.....but...(there's always a but) it still hurts sometimes. There's a wound there that's not completely healed. I think about the cheating every damn day. I don't regret staying, but there's always going to be a part of me that still pays for it. And reconciliation is f'in hard. It's the hardest thing I've ever done and it was harder for him.

I know the general advice on here is to keep distance, look out for number one, and to never trust a cheater. It's my flaw perhaps but I'm going to help her get through her pain as I work on mine.

I don't think these things have to be mutually exclusive. You love her obviously you can support her thru her pain and be there for her. But...also take care of yourself (and your kids) first. You don't have to trust her to support her. She will stumble, and there will be many painful days ahead. And she may not be reconciliation material, so you must still be cautious.

A "mistake" is not paying attention in the grocery store and bringing home the wrong olive oil... This was deliberate, Sir. Dates as a "couple", carnal episodes (which I'll wager you've had severely minimized to you), a whole series of decisions and deceptions, all designed to allow your wife to conduct a sexual relationship, in fact a whole other "marriage", as it were, with another man behind your back. Actually, right in front of your face. He became her de facto husband and confidant while you were treated with utter scorn, disrespect, and outright cold contempt.

Sir, you had better develop some mental toughness which you have heretofore not exhibited. You own exactly 0% of your wife's illicit activities. You seem to be gaslighting yourself, creating some sort of "path of least resistance" to the reconciliation you so desperately desire. It can be very difficult to face the truth, the hard vicious truth, about someone you love, but that is precisely what you must do.

[This message edited by LtCdrLost at 3:42 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

A mistake is a choice you made that didn't work out in a positive way.

Nope.

A mistake involves a degree of not being conscious or aware of the actual action being done. Putting in 1/4 tsp of baking soda when you meant to put in 1/4 tsp of salt. Forgetting to change your clock to DST and being an hour late to work.

Picking up a kitchen knife and stabbing your unwitting spouse in the back with it because you wanted to see what it would feel like, and enjoyed the illicit thrill, that is not a mistake. That is a choice.

It doesn't work for her to now say: "If I had actually thought about how much those knife stabs would wound you, all of the blood and the punctured lungs and the surgery and pain, I wouldn't have stabbed you in the back." That's bullshit. The reality is that anybody contemplating stabbing a spouse in the back with a kitchen knife knows it's gonna hurt them badly. If they choose to do it, they made a wicked, unforgiveable choice. Period. Not a "mistake".

[This message edited by Butforthegrace at 8:08 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

I can see my WW's choice to have an affair as a mistake but not an accident. At the time she began it she wouldn't have done it if she thought she was making a mistake. It felt like the right choice at the time for her for whatever reason she gave herself.

Do you not see the problem here ? Of course we all agree this was no accident but I'm more concerned about the other part of your statement, if she at the beginning didn't feel she was making the wrong choice by cheating on her husband (not cheating seems an easy choice to most people), it means she wanted to and meant to have an A, she knew this was the ultimate betrayal and that it would totally crush you, if she knew this (and she did) one must conclude that she willingly and deliberately chose the path that she knew would inflict soul crushing pain on you, therefore she must have expected to D you as a consequence of her choice since she admitted that she knew she would eventually get caught, this contradicts her statement that she/they rejected leaving their M, otherwise what else did she expect would happen or at least be a very real possibility after being caught cheating on her husband (double betrayal) ? make no mistake about it, she's a grown woman and knew cheating on you and getting caught could very much mean D, she simply didn't care much about you at the time, she willingly chose and meant to hurt you at the time by deciding to cheat on you and her priority was no other than to please her AP and herself, regardless of the logical possibility of D as a result, of course she now claims she felt guilty at the time but simply kept going back for more, if true she obviously didn't feel enough guilt and willingly and eagerly kept making the same obvious wrong choice by any decent standards repeatedly, and for many months with no real intentions to stop.

A mistake is a choice you made that didn't work out in a positive way.

If you honestly believe that she, an intelligent grown woman thought even for a second that cheating on her husband and having an A with your friend and also betraying her own friend (OBS) would "work out in a positive way" (therefore not a mistake by your definition)then we have much bigger problems here, if she didn't think she was making a mistake and that having an A would work out for her, the only way I see that is if she intended to leave you for the OM, otherwise how else would it have worked out in a "positive way"?. I hope we're just caught in the semantics and that the situation is different but I still think it's a valid question for you to ask her at some point, being that said, I like your "one day at a time" approach.

A "mistake" is not paying attention in the grocery store and bringing home the wrong olive oil... This was deliberate,

If you Google on "greatest mistakes in history" you'll see that the definition of"mistake" is pretty broad, and includes starting various wars, choosing to drink while operating oil tankers, and shacking up with the wrong persons.

She says she didn't love him. She said she cared for him and wanted him to be happy just as spending time with him had made her happy.

Did she love you, Bahama? Did she care for you? Did she want you to be happy? How would her fucking another man make you happy? Why was it more important that POS OM be happy than you?

Bahama - i do think you need to confirm to yourself whether you physically still desire your WW. What does your basic instinct tell you? Heart not head. other stories of BH's seem to go down the road of physically being 'robotic' with their WW's, flinching at their touch etc.

Hi Bahama,

Yes, if your marriage had otherwise been strong I think it is normal to have the feelings of care that you have for your W, at least I felt the same way you do about my H. It is easy to put ourselves in their shoes and we feel how terrible we would feel if we had had the A because we know how badly they have hurt us. I look back on our first six months after I learned about my H's multiple As, and I think that I was too concerned about his pain from feelings of guilt and didn't push him enough to really look at what he had done.

It has almost been 2 years now, we are likely to R and our marriage is much better. But my H has also finally started to really look at how he used affairs to get the attention he wanted with little effort or sacrifice on his part, not because of something missing in our marriage. I think that the care that I have for my H allows me to forgive - you may be in that place. I also do know that my H really does love me. But I think that you shouldn't assume that it won't happen in your M again if your wife sees the A as an abberation or something that happened because of a circumstance.

[This message edited by Babette2008 at 7:19 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

[This message edited by Babette2008 at 7:12 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

We can argue definitions all day.

What I think is clear is that the affair was a consequence or result of a series of decisions. I don’t care if you call the decisions “mistakes” or “strategic processing faults” or “brain farts”. They are wrong decisions made by a mind that we deem capable of rational and logical thought.

It’s very seldom only ONE decision. There is an event or happening where the WW responds to a stimulant with an inappropriate (marriage-wise) response. Might be as innocent as accepting and responding to an inappropriate complement. That might lead to another stimulant that is again responded to with an inappropriate response and so on and so on. At each point the WW has more than one option, including the option to say “no”.

To me it’s a fundamental basis for any chance of reconciliation to realize and accept that the affair wasn’t a “mistake” – as in it just happened and there was no intention for it to happen. Heck… there is even a legal term for sex with no intent: RAPE!

We have free will. We have choice. We have the ability to analyze, choose and decide. Even wrongly.

To use a comparison: We aren’t surprised to see the sweepers behind the mounted police at a parade and we aren’t surprised if a horse raises its tail and leaves some mementoes for the sweepers to deal with. We would however be outraged if the trombone player in the marching band dropped his trousers mid-tune and had a crap. We don’t expect horses to have ethical values and manners, but that trombone player should have known better!

[This message edited by Bigger at 7:32 AM, March 7th (Thursday)]

If you Google on "greatest mistakes in history" you'll see that the definition of"mistake" is pretty broad, and includes starting various wars, choosing to drink while operating oil tankers, and shacking up with the wrong persons.

I have no need of a lesson from you in the etymology of commonly used words. Just please make whatever point you wish to make, in a direct manner.

T/J over...

Sometimes I feel like an outside observer and it all seems clear. Then I swing back to being soul crushed again...

The first sentence is actually a very healthy perspective for you. While the A impacted you severely and hurts worse that anything in your ever has this really wasn't about you.

Of course your are impacted to the point that you can never be the same. Very true.

My point is that your W choose this, despite knowing it was wrong and then felt guilty for doing so.

A person with a conscience has to perform some mental gymnatics to alleviate their cognitive dissonance, google it, it explains it better than I ever could.

My point is your W look at the M issues as being caused by you. However once you begin to pick those apart it becomes clearer the were as much her issues as yours. The difference was you did not cheat. That you keep your values, integrity and character intact. That will matter one hell of a lot later.

Not a single Pre-A issue I had was 100-0 or even 50-50. They are the result of two making decisions and performing actions that create that issue.

Right now you are in crisis and rebuilding a M is not a wise move. You both need to do some IC to regain your indentity outside of the M. THen you can negotiate what M 2.0 looks like.

Just work on getting past the trauma right now. Baby steps. M issues can be worked out later.

BS ONLY

[This message edited by SI Staff at 7:22 PM, October 14th (Monday)]

I analyze it, the psychology behind it, and it seems to lose it's power. I look at my situation and all the players in it. Sometimes I feel like an outside observer and it all seems clear. Then I swing back to being soul crushed again...

I guess I know the answer, but is this normal?

Totally normal. As you swing between empathizing with your WS's perspective and empathizing with your own, it becomes a kind of dual view with each perspective in confusing opposition. I actually feel more in control when I'm viewing from my WH's perspective because I can step back from my own emotional response and be more clinical. But... we still have to process the betrayal. It doesn't just go away on its own. Our own perspective remains and can drag us down into self-pity if we don't deal with it. I wish I could give you some easy-peasy way to do that, but it's just not that simple. Healing takes time and a proactive stance where we minister to our own needs and not just the needs of our WS. Hope that makes sense.