SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am secretly in touch

Just for clarity, I learned this in the first few weeks of MC, "secret" and "private" are different things in marital lives.

Our MC explained the language we needed to develop:
-a secret is something with negative impacts on the marriage relationship, that one or both of the partners have, that they keep from the other person to give them an advantage in the relationship over the other person.
-something private is something that does not have those negative impacts, may have positive impacts, or be neutral, but does not give the person an advantage over the other person.

Her professional viewpoint, and mine, is that "secrets have no place in a marriage or friendship", privacy does have a place. The difference, in some instances, is in the effect on the marriage of maintaining them and the intent sometimes.

My FWS had a lot of secrets in our marriage. One secret was that she had been raped by different people on 4 separate events. It was a secret, not just private, because these past events before I met her were having negative impacts on the marriage, that she was literally blaming me for. This information transitioned from "private" to "secret" because she didn't tell me because she thought I would leave if I knew about these events, and what she had really been doing when they occurred, which would have come out (and did) if they were disclosed honestly.

Just for clarity, I learned this in the first few weeks of MC, "secret" and "private" are different things in marital lives.

It doesn't bother me what term is being used. I keep my secret, or my privacy not because the person I get precious advice from is a man, but because we are talking about my feelings related to the affair. In theory with my husband we agreed not to talk about it anymore, we had discussed it at length and there comes a time when honestly you need to speak about something else, otherwise he will always be the betrayer.

I saw that continuing to talk about it was not doing us any good. We surely have different "languages" and surely for my husband words are very difficult. He demonstrates his love in acts of service more than anything. So if I need to speak a lot, I need to find other "ears".

As I am writing here I do not pay attention if the person who replies is a man or a woman, I am totally focussed on the content and not where it comes from.

In theory with my husband we agreed not to talk about it anymore, we had discussed it at length and there comes a time when honestly you need to speak about something else, otherwise he will always be the betrayer.

This is what we call "rugsweeping." He's still betraying you. Secret, private, whatever you want to call it, he's still talking to the AP and you only know about it because you snooped. You can allow that, of course, but it usually doesn't bode well for long term marital intimacy and health. Unless you don't really care about authenticity or transparency and just want to remain married, which is a choice that some people make.