Hi AH
I told you I’d give some thoughts later. So here i am. I can tell, it’s gonna be long. At the very least I hope you’ll consider it because it took me a couple of hours to write. But I understand how overwhelming all the advice from different posters can be.
Like others here, when it comes to post DDay, I’m big on honesty. Even if that honestly is “this is a deal breaker, i don’t want to discuss it, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer”. If that’s the case, skip what I’m gonna say the next 1000 words and go directly to GO, spend more than $200 and file. I’m not against D. It can be a healthy option in an unhealthy situation.
As is to be expected, you are riding a roller coaster of emotion, changing your mind a million times a day, cannot process everything being absorbed in your brain. It’s normal. Don’t feel like you are not doing this correctly. You are doing better than most and NO ONE (except in fiction… and we do get that here sometimes) does it perfectly.
That said, I’m going to talk about what i see as how you should be approaching things with her. How i would do it does not have to be how you would do it. And honestly, a lot of what you are doing is what i and others here would do as well.
So back to honestly. If R is ever going to be possible, both you and she need to be completely honest. And that means you too. You need to be clear about how you feel and what you need. Don’t leave it to chance and wonder. State it once and tell her you are moving on until you see it happening. And even then, no promises of reconciliation.
Now for all who at this point will chime In And say, no matter what she does you will never get past this and your life will be miserable, I DONT NECESSARILY DISAGREE, I honestly think that the road is to hard to recover and rebuild when you have a truly remorseful WW, and in your case she’s not yet showing the awareness of what she has done and what she has to do to make R possible.
So because of that, at the end, I’m gonna support your decision to get advice from (multiple) lawyers and actually start the paperwork toward D.
But I think it’s always best to keep your options open as long as you can. And filing for D does not necessarily close the door on the possibility of R. Each actually follow the same path for a long while until down the road you decide to complete the process or stop it.
So since the D process is pretty straight forward and you have already said you’re gonna talk to lawyers, I’m going to focus on the best approach on what to do on the R side. And it definitely starts with NOT committing to R in any way. Which you have not done so that is good.
But there are a few additional things I would say to her after your conversation yesterday that could help show her what it’s going to take for you TO EVEN CONSIDER staying in this relationship another day week month or year.
So let’s discuss them and talk about the things to say to get those thoughts across to her so she very clearly understands where you are coming from.
I think everyone here can see that her approach is to make her doing any work to rebuild conditional on you meeting some “terms” about committing to work on the marriage. AH, I hope you agree, that is not going to fly one bit. I want to tell you, if you go read some threads here on the wayward side, the Wayward Spouses that truly GET IT, are the ones that completely let go of control of the process and work to become as selfless as possible toward their betrayed spouses.
The act of the affair is completely selfish. The only way to even try to counteract it as The WS, is to become completely selfless. And by that I mean, for the short term (6 months, a year, perhaps more) the happiness of the WS has to become secondary to that of the BS. They have dropped an atom bomb on the relationship. If they want a chance to put what they destroyed back together, bit by bit, they can’t start demanding anything. That’s not how it works. That will never be successful.
The WS has to come to feel their BS’s pain more clearly than their own. They have to care about what they did. Pure empathy. And be as mad at themselves for doing it as the BS is.
Now that doesn’t mean the WS won’t be focusing on themselves at all. Oh hell no. They are going to have to go deep inside themselves to figure out Truly how they had such awfulness inside them to be able to do what they did.
The answer to why is NOT “my husband stopped paying attention to me”. That may have been an issue, but that’s not the reason they did what they did. That’s a child’s answer. She’s a grown woman. She knows better and can do better.
If someone goes on a mass murdering spree the reason is not “because my husband cut the neighbors lawn”. They may have used that to trigger the event or justify it in their mind, but they need months and years of self analysis to ever figure out how to fix what was broken inside themselves to think the solution To having your spouse do acts of kindness for others was to shoot up a post office.
That’s what we are dealing with here. Your wife wants to be able to look herself in the mirror and be able to say “the ends justify the means”. That she was right, if you had only paid more attention this never would have happened. But if you guys were ever going to be able to reconcile and find happiness together again, in A different way than before but hopefully in a way that’s fulfilling to each of you going forward, her telling you what you did wrong all those years, demanding you fix those things and her simply saying “my bad… sorry for cheating on you” is not going to make that happen.
So the goal would be to very clearly get across to her that the first steps on the road to rebuild require her, not you, her alone, to find humility and selflessness in helping you heal from the marital crime she committed for a very long time and in such a devastating way. The focus right now needs to be on the A, not the marriage.
And if she can’t do that, without any guarantee that you will stay and not D her, then you will realize very quickly that there is not chance for the two of you to find a happy and satisfying life together and it’s best to go your separate ways.
Most of us can tell when a WS “gets it”. We can see it in their approach to trying to desperately undo what they have done. Your WW has mixed In A few good words with an approach to trying to control everything about the narrative and process. It’s important that you clearly communicate to her that her approach is not going to fly and if she truly wants a chance to keep you in her life, she needs to understand the following things.
Below is how I would say it to her. Others may do it differently. Being NC and 180 is fine right now and if you definitively decide on D then you never have to say this to her. But if you want to show her that the path to redemption, albeit a narrow one, exists, this is how I’d phrase it.
I’d probably put it in a letter so there is no interruption. Whether you read it to her or let her read it is up to you. (Oh an I put “wife” where you should substitute her name)
“Wife. I’m glad we talked. I learned a lot. I will tell you I understand 10 times more now about what was happening between us than I did a year ago or even in 2018 before you started your relationship with your boyfriend. Your words yesterday told me more about what you were feeling than all the words you said to me during that time.
The thing is though, i was in the same marriage, wife. You think every day was a happy one for me? You think I enjoy each and every moment the past umpteen years when I have physically worked on a hot day or a cold winter night to get others some comfort? You think i felt loved every moment of every of those days since we got married?
Now I won’t say that everything I did and do for our family was selfless. I wont say that I busted my ass for only you and the kids. But what I have done over the years as part of the team I thought we were, was to work my hardest to give us all, me included, the chance to have everything that I thought we deserved. That’s what I thought your goal was as well. That’s what I thought we wanted, were working for together together, for our relationship.
I can see now that perhaps we were not speaking the same language. That the way i showed you love was not how you wanted to receive it. Perhaps that explains my own frustration with why we were not connecting.
But here is the deal. We could have worked on that, if you hadn’t made the choice, and yes it was a choice, to do what you did. I was in the same marriage wife, and I didn’t think once that the solution was to start a whole new relationship, emotional and physical, with someone else, and at the same time, actually do everything I can to humiliate you while I was doing it.
You see, I don’t think you fully comprehend yet what you did and what you are asking of me. Maybe this will explain it better.
You chose (every day while you gave to him instead of me the things that were special between us) to pick up a revolver, walk over and stand close to him, across the room from me and tell me to take off all my clothes. Then you recorded me pissing myself in fear of being held at gunpoint and laughed together with him while it was happening. Then you jointly held the gun together, kissed and pulled the trigger, pumping ten rounds into my chest. And while you were doing it, you rubbed up against him and stroked between his legs, looking at him and laughing together as I fell to the floor.
And after all that, after seeing what you did, you now come to me and say, “I understand why that is so painful. I talked to my pastor and he helped me to understand. So if you promise to agree to work on a few things that were missing from our relationship, I will put a compress on your chest to try and stop the bleeding, call 911 and help you to get to the hospital. But while you are in there the next 3-6 months, if they get you out of intensive care, can you read this book on being a better husband while you recover from that heart transplant?”
Now you are probably rolling your eyes, but quite honestly that kind of physical wound to the heart would be preferable to me than the emotional one you delivered to me. (Don’t get any ideas, now that I have one type of injury I don’t need the other).
Wife what you did during the affair was one of the highest act of selfishness a wife can perpetrate on her husband. If I wasn’t hearing you about what you needed, your job was to yell and shout and tell me that I was losing you. You should have had D papers drawn up and set in front of me at the dinner table. You should have ended the marriage before starting a new one with someone else.
Instead you decided to pull that trigger and do irreparable damage to the relationship you claim to still Want. Marriage Counseling is for a Marriage under stress. We now have a marriage destroyed.
And by asking what you are asking of me, you are still being selfish. You are still being a cheater with wayward thinking.
What you need to be, if you truly want what you say you do, is to be SELFLESS. You are no where near that state of being right now. You still want to be in control. You still want to tell me what to do. STOP TELLING ME WHAT TO DO!
We are now two separate broken people. Broken people cannot fix a marriage. Broken people cannot do anything until they fix themselves. Stop telling me that you will work on fixing things from the affair as long as I agree to work on being better husband. I AM NO LONGER YOUR HUSBAND! I am on paper only. You fired me from that job the moment you made that piece of shit for a human being more important in your life than I was.
And that is what you did. You gave him my place. You thought about him each day more than you thought about me. You improved yourself for him, not me. You dressed up for him. You thought about what you could do for him. You did things for him, emotionally, romantically, sexually for him that you never did for me. And you told him things and went further in doing so than you ever did for me.
You did all that for you. You did it because you wanted it for you. Don’t ever again say to me that you did it to make our marriage better or even to keep it going. It was all a lie. It wasn’t real life. You dont think I could go and do that every couple of days or weeks for another man’s wife if she was Interested in me? There’s no downside. It’s easy to be the knight in shining armor when you do t have to deal with real life things!
And here’s the part I don’t understand. Why are you torturing me saying you want to be with me? He has more money. Can wine, dine, sixty-nine you the way you want to be, does it for you emotionally and sexually, and from what I read he’s your soulmate and you love him.
It was quite clear. So why are you here saying these things to me? Go be with the man you love. Even if we can work hard to get thru this, i don’t need a partner that forever pines for the man that got away. Who now choses me as plan B.
For cripes sake, you still let him message you. If you didn’t want that you’d be down at the police station right now getting a restraining order against him! Why haven’t you? It still feeds your ego having a man fighting for your love. He’s everything you wanted Wife. And he’s probably gonna be single real soon. Why are you here saying you want me?
How are you ever gonna make me feel safe? How are you ever gonna prove to me that you won’t just bounce back to him as soon as his D is final.
Are you only here because saving face to the rest of the world including our kids and family is the most important thing to you? Are you trying to prove to everyone and yourself that you are not a bad person, a piece of shit like him, and were justified in what you did? That is not being selfless. That’s continuing to be selfish.
Let me be clear this one time and tell you exactly how it is. We cannot be together while you continue to be selfish. We cannot have a chance to be together until you give up the narrative you are clinging to and grasping to keep control.
You need to let go Wife. You need to let go of the outcome of whether or not we will ever be together and just do the right thing by me and for you.
You keep saying “I’ll do whatever it takes”. I don’t really think you understand or truly have thought thru what that means. The things you need to do to get me to even consider trying to rebuild a relationship with you, those things are so far out of your comfort zone, I don’t ever see you being able to get yourself to do them. You want to do anything and everything “that is easy” to save face and your marriage.
Let me talk about the truly hard things, the “anything” that needs to be done, for a minute. These are just a few things i would need to even someday consider trying to rebuild. They will be uncomfortable and in some cases, humiliating.
To start, i need every detail. Every interaction. Each time you were together. Written down. No high level overview. I need to know how you planned it, what you were thinking, who set it up, things you said and discussed, how you felt about him, how you felt about me and yes, who did what to whom. Which body parts fit where. Each instance over the 18 months.
Let me tell you why. First off, if I don't know what I’m healing from, I can’t heal. Don’t worry, I can imagine equal or worse than what you did. If I don't know what you did and said, i will imagine you did EVERYTHING. Don’t ask the things I can dream up that you did. You know the whole truth, I know a Sliver. If you want a chance to reconcile with me, we need to know the same things otherwise we will never get to a point where we can work through it together. Write it all out and let’s review it.
The second reason is that if you truly want to be with me, then there can. be NOT ONE THING Secret between you and the piece of shit. If you still have a place in your heart for him, there is no place for me in it at all. So every thing you did needs to become common and boring. Discussed ad nauseum. And it needs to be no longer a secret. So I need to know it all.
And to be honest. Not just me. We need to find others to be in on the secret. What? That would be humiliating you say? Well welcome to my world. We can discuss who to bring in on these dirty secrets.
Wife, You need to metaphorically put a billboard up at the center of town with your and my picture saying “I hurt this good man, I don’t deserve him, he deserves all the happiness in the world and I’ll spend my lifetime trying to make sure he gets it, with me or without”. And then tell them why. Tell them why you are disgusted by it and how you want the whole world to know that you hurt the best man you ever knew. Why have you not already thought of this if you are willing to do anything?
Could you ever see yourself being able to do that? You say “I’d do anything”. Well I’m being honest and clear. This is what honesty is. You dont just get to say, “my bad” and we all of a sudden fall back in love, attend Marriage Counseling, and say we will promise to do better next time.
And no more telling the kids that this is all because how i neglected you. Could you see yourself honestly telling our kids that your choice to cheat is what has ended our marriage and feeling alone in a marriage is absolutely not a reason to cheat? Could you do that selflessly? I Personally don’t think you could. Do you want our children to grow up thinking that it’s ok to coldly stab your partner in the back if he or she isn’t giving you what you need? Is that the message you want our kids to take away from this?
They will think more highly of you and learn from you and respect you if you are honest with them and don’t try to blame shift what you did onto the person you did it to. Again, this is what “I’ll do anything” looks like.
And wife, I understand you have breached the faith you hold so dearly. So I understand you reaching out to your pastor. But religious leaders are notorious for suggesting that these things are best swept under the rug. I would never keep you from seeking such guidance (although honestly I would feel more comfortable with ALL Interactions to be with women instead of men going forward no matter who they are) but your affair was carried on in the secular world, and I absolutely require that you find support from a non religious therapist as well. This needs to be a female counselor who specializes in Infidelity. This is an absolute must.
You need to work with such a person on a weekly or twice weekly basis for at least 6 months to start. You need to figure out why what you did, in your mind, was a proper response to any marital strife you might face in the future.
I will be reaching out to one myself. I will be working on my pain. Healing this metaphorical chest wound. And figuring out what I want the direction to be for the rest of my life. I can’t tell you, 3 weeks from DDay, that I truly know what that direction will be. I also have a lot of work to do to figure that out.
Honestly Wife, you asking for Marriage counseling is so far premature I can’t even conceive of it. We can’t counsel a marriage that doesn’t exist. I may still be in love with you, but right now, I do not like you. I can’t even tell if I want to be married to you anymore. Right now, you are a bad person to me. Not just a good person who did a bad thing. How can I be married to someone who when the going gets tough, they make choices like you did. I don’t know how long it will take to ever feel safe with you again.
And it’s not just the cheating. It’s the way you felt you could talk so badly about me. I read the texts, again and again. It never occurred to me to ever say words like that about you to someone. And never occurred to me to say things like that and then tell that other person I love them instead and then spread my legs for them. How? How could I ever trust you again enough to sit with you and a marriage counselor and say that I will make changes.
Before I suggest how we proceed I want to give you a few more examples of what “I’ll do anything really means”. You have to understand these things before you truly say those words. Honestly when you hear these things I suspect you’ll retract what you said and go running. You can’t really want this can you?
Your job. How can I ever trust you again to work with men. And alone with them in furnished homes? Your breach is so impacting on our relationship I can’t ever feel comfortable with you doing that. Do we hire another woman to chaperone you each time you need to interact with a man? It’ll be years before I dont throw up knowing you’re meeting a dude alone at a walk thru. How are we going to handle that.
And are you prepared to include me on every text response you give to a man? I shouldn’t have to play PI on your phone to know what you are saying to guys. How can we handle this? You need to figure this out. This single set of choices you made have gotten us to this point.
You said you are ALL IN. If you truly are that means you’d want to provide me peace of mind at every point of your day week month year. You need to drive that! Not me.
What if I need you to quit your job in which you obviously can’t be trusted in that environment. What if I need you to find work in a more female based industry. You prepared to do that? How come you haven’t offered that yet if you’ll “do anything”? Why do I have to come up with these things?
And for now, how am I to believe you're not just settling for me. I can’t give you the material things a multimillionaire can. I was busting my ass to try and get us to a place where we can someday do the type of things you’ve now experienced with the PIece of shit. I can work for 20 more years, how will you ever be satisfied with the type of life I hoped to spend with you when you’ve done far more already with him. You’ve already had more fantastic moments with him than i can ever give you. Tell me how your gonna convince me that doing anything with me is superior to the things you experienced with him. I’ll always be feeling I’m not measuring up.
And finally, the humiliation I suffered preparing a house to be suitably comfortable for another man to fuck my wife. I will say it, you’re lying. You did something with him there that day. As I said above, I need to know it all. On this and other points you need to take a polygraph to ensure I have the absolute truth. I’d rather know what you did truthfully than a lie to spare my feelings. I’m humiliated enough as it is. Don’t add to that pin by lying about what happened. Tell me the absolute truth and then we will confirm it. You should want to do this for me. Again that is what “doing anything means”. You should be suggesting these things, not me!
Wife, these are just a few examples of the type of things I will need to be able to even consider working to rebuild with you what you have now destroyed. Are you sure this is what you want? It doesn’t sound fun to me. It’s no quick fix. Are you sure I’m worth it when I’m not even sure you like me?
No, if you truly want this, and I still dont understand why you would, then we need to slow this process way down.
And in doing so you are truly going to have to learn to become selfless. You are going to have to change how you need to be in control of this process. You are going to have to do these things, without guarantee. I cannot promise you that even if you do these things I can find a way to stay with you.
A truly remorseful cheating wife would want, above all, for me to find happiness out of the devastation i've been inflicted with, whether that happiness was with you or not.
So here is what I propose.
First of all, any new cheating means we stop contact with each other for good and work to complete a divorce.
If you truly want this because you really honestly love me, then Monday you go to the police department and file a restraining order on the POS. You do this because it’s what you want for us, not just because i want it. Be honest. If you can’t remove him from our life then you just need to honestly tell me that and we will, again, work to end our marriage so you can go be with him.
Then next week we find individual counselors that must specialize in infidelity (mine also will specialize in trauma) and start working with them each week. We need to figure out who we each are now. This will take a while.
Then after six months, If we are each in the same mindset and feel we see the good work each other is doing, then we can discuss adding marriage counseling to what we are doing to rebuild. If we are in such a good place, then we can use it to start discussing what we each need in a new marriage. However, perhaps we will decide we are not ready and need more Individual therapy first. Or Maybe we will decide nothing is working and we need to go our separate ways. No guarantees about anything.
And to that end, there is one more thing. Im still going to talk to a lawyer. I need to. I think I may even start the divorce process so we know and understand what it is about. If we are both doing what we need to do, we will take that process real slow. We can even pause it if things are going well.
Wife, this is the leap of faith you are going to need to take if we are going to have a chance. I cannot promise you a thing right now except to do exactly what I said above. Think long and hard about this. You can’t do this half assed if life with me is what you truly want. If it’s him you desire, go get him. I don’t need any more dishonesty in my life. If I’m to heal alone, I’d be much better off starting to try and do that now instead of continuing to work with you for months when your heart is elsewhere.
I’m convinced the only way to find love with you again is to gain it through the pride I feel that you did these things, this hard work, for me. Only for me and no one else in the world. Of course For you too. But you did it, without a net, selflessly to help me heal and to become the person I deserve as a partner. I can truly then say that is something you never did for that POS or any other man. That is something i could consider special and try, only try, to build on.
These are my terms. I fully expect you to tell me to go to hell. I dont think you love me enough to do this. I honestly think you love him more. I 90% expect you to dump me now and chase your dreams with him. And if that’s what you need, go do it. Only do these things because you want to do them, for me, for you, because you truly do love me.
I’m glad to discuss, but there is no negotiation. I love you, but I will not settle for less. I want to be a great husband to you, but until I can get off life support from the wound you inflicted, I’ll never be able to honestly work on the marriage especially if I’m still emotionally teetering between emotional life and death.
I’ll be moving forward with finding a lawyer and a counselor for me. If you want to talk, you know where to find me.
I have nothing more to say”
Then AH, let it go. She’ll do what she’ll do. You cannot control what that is. Focus on you. If you need to tell an abridged version of this to your daughter to get her off your back do so. You don’t owe anybody, especially your wife, confidentiality.
I’m sorry this was so long but I saw it in my mind and I had to get it out the way it came into focus for me.
You may hate it, or disagree with parts of it. Use any of it that works for you. Again, I suggest sending it in writing.
Some here will agree with me. Some will say stop talking to her even one more time. Whatever, the beauty of this place is all the opinions to choose from. But it’s yours to choose what you do.
Above all, please clearly state what you need to see from her to even try someday. Don’t settle for what she demands. Think about your happiness years from now and what it takes to get you there with her or without her.
Communicate it. Then begin to move on. Her saying she’ll do it IS NOT the starting point. Rebuilding the relationship starts only when SHES DONE IT. So let her know what she needs to do, then tell her your moving on til you see it happen. Actions not words.
I wish you well.
[This message edited by Stevesn at 10:58 AM, July 25th (Saturday)]
