SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi all,

I found out about my husband’s affair 2 years ago next month, I was 4 months pregnant at the time. Not many people knew I was pregnant as we hadn’t wanted children and he hadn’t wanted me to tell people even though his affair partner knew (before my parents) and he had been pushing me to have an abortion. Being in my mid 30s I had decided I was keeping the baby and thought that I’d be raising it alone anyway so my mindset was that we were splitting up anyway. According to him the affair had ended exactly a year before, with a few slip ups in the meantime 🙄

Fast forward two years and he is the most amazing dad to our little girl and a great partner to me. We have so much fun together- we always did which is why I was so confused as to why he was telling another woman he loved her and being mean to he as an excuse to go out and have sex with her. Obviously had my suspicions- he wouldn’t come home at all some nights and would blow hot and cold with me. But he’s not like that now, he’s so attentive other than the normal marriage bickers about who takes the bins out etc.

My issue is that even when things are good I’m still thinking about what he’s done. We could be having the best sex and I’m thinking about him having sex with her. We could be laughing at a tv show and I’m thinking about the tv shows he’s watched with her. It doesn’t help that she’s an absolute fantasist who has been spreading lies around town about me, I’m a mother now and I’m trying to keep the remaining bit of dignity I have and not publicise the real truth about her. So I’m just putting up with her telling lies about me. I’ve come to realise as much as I love him (I do genuinely think we are made for each other we really just get each other- heartbroken he doesn’t feel the same way to be sneaking around) I just can’t forgive him. He had sex with her in my car. He let me find out by her taking me to her house on the hottest day of the year to tell me and not answering his phone to me, I was pregnant with his child why couldn’t he just tell me? He would leave me at home crying on our bedroom floor to go out and meet her. He stayed at hers while I was pregnant! (He said nothing happened but who knows, I’m choosing to believe him as it’s better for my mental health). He betrayed me and lied about our relationship- it was great til he started being sly. He told her it wasn’t. According to her he talked about my body and my looks and my personality, again I’m unsure as she’s a fantasist and a lot of things she said about me weren’t true. I had the police outside my house for days on end cos she was threatening to have me beaten up while I was pregnant. He could’ve stopped this by telling me himself. He gave me HPV and I constantly had thrush even though he knew I was allergic to thrush medication (ironic!) he slept with her knowing his friend had and had caught chlymidia from her.

So my question is can you ever move on from this? I’m still so hurt and so angry! Her pictures keep popping up on my social media or she drives past my house and I think about all the times he said she was so pretty or he loved her legs and I feel so insecure about my appearance and my personality it physically hurts my heart. Part of me thinks I should go get revenge so he knows how it feels but I couldn’t bring myself to do it then that hurts even more cos he was quite happy to do it regardless of me and my feelings. But we are such a happy family unit and our little girl adores him, how can I tear that up?! Will I ever feel better? I think he thinks I should’ve just moved on by now because he is like a different person but he’s not a different person it was still him that did all these horrible things to me.

Thanks.

[This message edited by UnfinishedSympathy at 4:51 PM, Monday, June 12th]

First,forgiveness isn't a requirement for reconciliation.

What actual work did he do on himself to become a safe partner?

It looks as if you both rugswept the affair, and simply moved forward.

It could be that,because you never properly recovered from the affair, and his behavior, and you rugswept, you can't properly heal.

It's ok to start reconciliation over, and recover in a healthy manner.

It would be very difficult to forgive a man who cheated while you were pregnant, and knowingly exposed his pregnant wife,and unborn child,to stds. Some stds can seriously harm,or kill,an unborn child. That's a lot to deal with.

[This message edited by HellFire at 4:55 PM, Monday, June 12th]

I’m glad you think so because I will never forgive, his actions are unforgivable.

I don’t feel it was rugswept as such- we had over a year’s worth of counselling although now he doesn’t want to talk about it at all as if we should just be over it. He may be but I’m not.

I don’t know whether I’m supposed to just resign myself to spending the rest of my life feeling hurt, angry, betrayed, sickened, unfairly treated. Is this just how it is now?

It takes 3 to 5 years to heal.

What work did HE do on himself? Because him not wanting to talk about it at all, is a sign that he didn't work on himself at all.

MC can be helpful. But it should be in addition to the ws working on himself individually.

It's very hard to heal when you aren't allowed to talk about it.

My perspective on forgiveness may be different than others. It works for me because it does not require that I forget.

Here is how it has worked for me for 10 years:

I met a brilliant woman in a marriage recovery program we were in.

She said "You can forgive. Maybe even over and over. BUT God did not design our minds to forget. You NEVER will. And you NEED your memory for healthy boundaries.

Forgiveness is demonstrated by NOT wanting the other person’s life to be bad. By NOT taking revenge.

But, you have to have boundaries to not only protect yourself, but ALSO because letting them harm you also harms them.

In denial they will say boundaries are a lack of forgiveness. In reconciliation they will say boundaries are their protection too."

You can forgive by not causing harm, and using what you can’t forget to build healthy boundaries for yourself AND in marriage.

That is how I empower what I can’t forget in healthy ways and give the memories purpose and myself a good life after pain.

This may or may not be a match for you, but it works for me.

It sounds like your definition of forgiveness is not thinking all the time about what he did to you, and I don’t think that’s realistic only two years out from a huge betrayal like this.

My husband’s betrayal was much less messy, and it ended more cleanly, and I was in a much less vulnerable position than you, and it still took me longer than two years to get to a point where I didn’t think about it all the time. AND, I had the luck that it wasn’t known in my community, so I didn’t have to deal with the affair partner spreading shit about me or other people in my community talking about me. I’m three years out, and only in the last year has the trauma of it started to recede from my mind.

I think it’s too early to be wondering whether you can forgive him. You need to be focusing on healing, on parenting your beautiful little one, and assessing whether your partner is working to become a person who won’t treat you this way again. Doing what he did is a sign of serious, serious character flaws. If he doesn’t acknowledge, understand, and fix those flaws, he doesn’t deserve to be your partner.

If your reconciliation proceeds, you can think about forgiveness down the road and figure out what it means to you. My thoughts about forgiveness are closer to Uxor’s—I don’t think it’s about forgetting, but about letting go of the desire for revenge or harm, and embracing healing and healthy boundaries. If he’s not a changed person, it may be that you forgive him, but decide that you can’t be with him. Your brain is remembering the things he did for a reason. It’s a protective mechanism. Don’t block it out—acknowledge it, ground yourself, feel the feelings, watch him, and breathe.

I’m sorry you were hurt in this way. Take care of yourself and your little one first. Healing is a long, slow path.

We all love our spouses. But love, alone, isn't enough to overcome betrayal. You mention he's a good partner now, but you don't advise what he did to be a safe partner. If he simply switched back to doing the stuff he did previously, without digging into why and how he gave himself the permission to betray the person he purportedly loved, it's no wonder you don't feel safe.

I'm worried that perhaps a lot of this has been rugswept rather than fully processed and dealt with. Healing from this is a two-way street. What have YOU done in order to heal? I know that once you have kids, they tend to become the #1 priority and your own needs and issues become secondary but these types of things tend to fester. Focusing on yourself and YOUR healing is also imperative. TO this end:

Her pictures keep popping up on my social media

Do yourself a favour and block her on everything. I know it can be hard, because you probably feel the need to keep tabs on her and are probably morbidly interested in her life, but I promise you, speaking from experience, that you will have fewer triggers if you do.

Part of me thinks I should go get revenge so he knows how it feels but I couldn’t bring myself to do it then that hurts even more cos he was quite happy to do it regardless of me and my feelings.

This comment suggests to me that you do not believe he fully grasps the enormity of what he did and he does not empathize with the pain you have, and continue to experience. This certainly occurred to me too in the depths of my pain. I concluded that a) it wouldn't make me feel better; b) it would probably make me feel worse (one of the ways I compared myself to OW in the early days was to remind myself that while she was X, Y, and Z, at least I could feel confident about my ethics, and that counted for something; and c) it would be like dropping a bomb on our reconciliation.

I think he thinks I should’ve just moved on by now because he is like a different person but he’s not a different person it was still him that did all these horrible things to me.

Has he said this? If so, this is a major red flag. But if he hasn't, what makes you feel this way? It worries me that you are not communicating about it with him. In the first 2 years or so post-D-day my H and I spoke about the A on a near daily basis. If you're having these thoughts and feelings and ideas you should be talking through them with him. If things are not addressed, they will fester. You're also depriving him of an opportunity to comfort you, which is something that can actually bring the two of you closer together. It may feel counterintuitive but for me, talking about it MORE not less, was a better way to heal.

It take 2-5 years to heal from infidelity. You're still IN IT right now. I don't think forgivenss needs to be the goal. When I set out to reconcile with my husband I didn't set out with the intention to ever FORGIVE my husband for his A. To me it was unforgiveable, and what I needed to do was figure out whether I could live with it and whether he could be a good and worthy partner. What was more important to me was that a) he (and I) figure out WHY it happened; and b) that it never happen again. Somewhere along the way, in that, I realized I had forgiven him.

You have already had most of the advice I would give, everyone has been thorough.

I will only add that I recently saw on a podcast that what makes a lot of marriages fail is our partner trains us not to talk about certain things. And we eventually give up, we eventually say to ourselves it’s not worth bringing it up anymore because of the resistance I face. I am never going to be heard here.

And it festers.

This is so true of my pre A marriage. (I am not blaming cheating on this, I should have addressed it head on) but it did have a stranglehold on our connection. My husband still struggles with this, but I no longer allow it. I can’t fix these things by myself. If he doesn’t like it, he is free to leave. That sounds cold, of course I don’t want him to leave by any stretch if the imagination. However, my boundary is I will not be shut down on talking about the things that are important to me. If his boundary is he can’t sit and listen to me, then he is making a decision not to contribute what is needed to our connection.

I would never say “if you refuse to listen to me I will divorce you”, and I will agree that if he doesn’t want to talk about something in the moment that we can do it in the next few days. But if he begins a big trend of pushing me away, then I have to decide how to enforce my boundary.

I would consider going back to MC for some maintenance. It’s normal that you aren’t feeling healed here, and a safe partner will recognize that it’s not going to get better if you can’t talk about it.

I am sure it brings feelings of shame to him. But that is something a ws has to heal too. (Really anyone carrying shame needs to work on that) yes, shame and guilt are important emotions to have to precipitate change. But holding into those things rather than trying to work through them hinders both of you from being able to move forward. He is hiding.

The forging of two hearts back together after infidelity requires presence to all he feelings, even the ones you may feel are irrational. Give yourself permission, trauma damages your brain and this is how you heal it.

Forgiveness: no I don’t think it’s required. And it means different things to different people. But self compassion and compassion with one another is required. Your husband is not providing you with that and to me this is making a true reconciliation impossible. You will not reach compassion with him until he does so with you because he broke it. And he can’t start that process until he works on his shame and extends compassion to himself.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:51 AM, Thursday, June 15th]

You have received great advice from previous posts.

If he refuses to discuss it, THAT may be the reason you are struggling.

The nature of the cold hearted behavior both he and the OW inflicted on you is a trauma that is not being addressed either.

The fact that the OW is still torturing you with lies means you are continuing to be traumatized.

Your H is a great father blah blah blah. But you can see it’s not enough to heal you from what happened. There’s an affair and then there’s an affair that occurs to victimize you. Many people are cheated on. But it’s not done with viciousness and torment purposely against the betrayed spouse.

I think you need professional guidance to help you heal.

Hi @UnfinishedSympathy I'm so sorry you had to go through the pain of betrayal in your marriage especially at such a precious time in your life. Reading your post and I have to say that it does like you are still dealing with a roller coaster of emotions with your H. You said your H is now a good partner and you're a happy family unit but then also say you're still so hurt and angry which in reality means you're not part of the happy family unit you mentioned.

Rebuilding broken trust takes time and I'm not sure how or what your H has done or is doing to rebuild the broken trust in your marriage. During the many counselling sessions you had, were you able to really share how hurt and angry you were at your H for all he did and how he made you feel?

My heart really goes out to you because I understand how difficult it can be to bury feelings on the inside because you just want things to go back to 'normal and have a happy family'.

I do want to encourage you to remember that no matter what has happened, you are worthy of love that can be trusted and your self worth is not a reflection or dependent on the poor and wrong choices your H made.

Please seriously consider IC for yourself so you can really process how you're feeling and be able to get stronger emotionally.

I pray that the near future brings complete emotional healing for you and wisdom for your decisions.

Sending you much hugs )))

Sorry that sounds horrible and totally unforgivable. He’s disrespected you enough don’t you think? And continues to by expecting you to move on. Treating a pregnant vulnerable wife like that has to be a different level of a**h***.

Why is AP continuing with her bad behavior? What is he doing to address the nasty rumors? What he put you through will need a lot more therapy, addressing and accountability for his terrible actions.

Please don’t let a facade of a happy family life distract you from addressing issues. I did that for many years and boy it took a terrible toll on my physical and mental health. You have a precious daughter to raise. She deserves a truly happy healthy mother. I would address this now when your child is too young to understand. You don’t want to be bitter and explode when she is a teenager and looks up to her dad and have her world crashing down knowing what a scumbag he has been. Address issues now and maybe he could be someone that will be slightly worthy of your daughters adoration. If he resists, you have your answer. He never changed.

I hope you have a good therapist. You sound like a kind, compassionate and strong woman. You do not deserve to be treated like this. Take care,