SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Can I ask those BS who have come through this hell successfully - thriving not just surviving, do you ever feel proud to be married to your spouse again, happy to celebrate anniversary and wear a ring without trying to hide it.

At the moment these 3 things are hard to imagine I will ever get to again. At the moment I pretend I’m not married when I meet new people or when I fill out paperwork, I definitely did not want to celebrate our anniversary last month but find myself so sad when I see friends in FB our celebrating!!!

I miss my engagement ring. I loved it so much as it was the most perfect ring I could have ever imagined and he picked it all by himself without any of my input. I just can’t put it in though as I feel like a fraud 😢

I would love to hear some positive stories so I have some hope 🤞🏻

I hear you!
My ring is in a drawer. I can’t imagine wearing it again.
I can’t even buy cards with husband on. I make them now. So they don’t have words that make me howl with laughter (better than tears).
I can’t see the point in celebrating our anniversary.
I don’t mention him to anyone except in passing even my parents or siblings.

My friends say ‘you guys are so cute together’. We have always been seen as a couple who really love each other.

I am pretty fed up with it all to be honest.

Why the hell he even wants this I don’t get. He didn’t think I loved him was part of his reason . He was wrong. Now my feelings for him are greatly diminished. He said a while ago he feels loved - no idea why! It’s non sensical to me. It would be funny if it wasn’t so very sad.

Sorry my reply hasn’t helped your question. But I am here hearing you and totally understanding you.

So I look at our marriage of 45 years. Punctuated with my husband’s LTA, a separation and back together again plus other traumatic events..
Am I proud to be married again? The quick answer is no. But I am very proud of the way I am handling this particular trauma. Before his voluntary path of secret and not so secret destruction, I was proud that we had overcome all the cheating around us and that our marriage was good. I was so, so wrong.

I don’t want to celebrate anniversaries. I don’t know how to celebrate something that broke apart with our separation. Instead, I am celebrating my choices and my decisions to stand up for myself and continue with our R together. The day I gave him a second chance at our marriage, is my private celebration.

I wear the earrings he gave me instead of a ring. They are a reminder that there were good times with him in the past. And I do cherish those moments. All was not horrid with him. And sometimes I wish I had an engagement ring!

I don’t talk about our marriage to others, except here on SI and one good girlfriend. I keep things private with acquaintances and friends who don’t know about his infidelity. And when we are together I leave him to answer questions about our marriage duration. This works for me. I no longer feel angst about our present marriage as I did for the first few years in R.

I believe that if two people want to , they will face all the ups and downs during R. I want to, so does my husband even after losing many of the privileges he had prior to his leaving me for her.
He stays the course.

I am content, at peace and am happy to feel joy for my life. I have learnt so much about myself, and I will continue to change the way I look at the same things in my life. Especially my husband.

In re reading this post, and I’d like to add with humour , that I do not always consider my husband a thing in my life.

Can I ask those BS who have come through this hell successfully - thriving not just surviving, do you ever feel proud to be married to your spouse again, happy to celebrate anniversary and wear a ring without trying to hide it

Rings aside (I’ll explain below why), yes the hell we’ve been through, the way we dealt with it and how we dealt with, made our marriage feel special again. The fact that we survived it and thrived in a lot of ways felt like climbing the Everest and more. I don’t feel pride and specialness in my marriage the same as before, that was based on romantic concepts such as soulmates and the belief that someone I happened to meet at a random point in my life could love me (and I him) beyond all else. This pride and specialness has more depth, we fought so hard to make it. My pride in him relates to things he’s done since dday (not always affair related) and how he acted in certain circumstances, he did manage to earn my respect back.

Now the ring situation- we never wore our rings before dday, we put them on after dday as a symbol of choosing to remain married, but once Covid happened and we spent all day at home we took them off and never put them back again. I don’t find rings relevant in affairs and I have never been attached to mine so I cannot answer that part.

We are just 2 years out, and slowly I stop being so consumed with all the thoughts and questions. The trauma is real though and resurfaces from time to time. I don't think that I can consider my self and wh as belonging to the successful reconcilers yet. I ll wait... And all the other responses testify to me that there is this thing that is forever lost. As with Luna10, I don't care about the ring, I never took it off, but he used to while, you know... Anyway.. I thought I could count on him to be a gentleman, like I thought he was. Well he is not. So now, I check, and most importantly if in the past I would let something slide, I don't anymore. That's good. It should always have been this way. 1)I should trust my gut 2)I should not think that people would do what I would. I don't expect the worse but I used to expect always the good. Well f*** that. I am OK. To return to the ring thing, well.. I wear it the last 14 years. Since I am not divorced I still wear it. It never meant much to us... To me... The old marriage is gone, my old self is gone. I am very happy with my new self. Plus I wouldn't be here if he was a total as...le. He's been one for a year. Now he makes up for that and I deserve it big time.

I'm 5+ years out from DDay at this point. I do celebrate us now. I celebrate that we were both willing to do the very hard work to recover and reconcile. It was never easy. But, we are reaping the rewards of those efforts. Does the fact that the A happen still make me sad....yes, sometimes. That intensity is diminishing. Our marriage is very different now than it was before. FWH obviously took me for granted. That is no longer the case. I find that we both listen to each other more carefully. We both look for ways to support each other. We didn't before. I was pretty much a people pleaser and he thought he could have his cake and eat it too. Things are very different now.

I look back on old wedding photos and think about how naive we both were. As for the wedding rings, I used to wear mine religiously. It was a symbol to me. It isn't anymore. I wear it when I feel like it. He wears his less often, but never really liked wearing jewelry. He will put it on more often now and make sure that I see him doing it. Like he's continuing to try to show me that he's choosing me.

He's not perfect. There is no new affair behavior that I can sense, but we both have days when we're not the best at supporting each other. I guess in some way, we both know deep down that there is no guarantee. I no longer stuff down or excuse his behavior if he's not at his best with me. I no longer have the tolerance for that sort of BS. We have learned much healthier ways of dealing with our inevitable conflicts. If things went south tomorrow, I feel like I could walk away knowing that I did my best.

I'm so sorry you're here. For me it has been time and a thousand little things that FWH has done over that time. And, me voicing what I need from him, with him showing up in that capacity for me. If I voice a desire or need for help...he's there. I have reached a point where I've learned that A's are so very common, whether we know or talk about them or not. Not saying they're alright at all....but common. I've learned that there is ALWAYS someone willing to stray with my husband. There is always someone who is willing to stray with me. Never occurred to me before. (I know...naive) .

Take care. Don't wear the ring, if it causes you pain. Treat yourself gently. Find the small things to celebrate, if they're there. I proud to be married to the man who messed up and took responsibility and made amends. It "grew" him into the spouse I'm glad to have now. Just wish it didn't have to had happened for us to get here.

Through therapy, I have thought a lot about pride in a marriage and whether or not it was ever really warranted in the first place.

Pride (when appropriate) is something you can only have in yourself.

Another poster here often quotes Epictetus on happiness, but there is another short passage that is worth thinking about.

Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own. If a horse should be prideful and say, " I am handsome," it would be supportable. But when you are prideful, and say, " I have a handsome horse," know that you are proud of what is, in fact, only the good of the horse. What, then, is your own?

Your marriage is only half yours. So, I would argue, being proud of your marriage is something you were only ever half responsible for in the first place. Maybe my attitude is a little to individualistic for some folks but this is my current way of thinking.

I'm proud of myself as a husband. I'm proud of myself as a father. I'm proud of my efforts in my marriage and in reconciliation. I am happy with my wife and happy with her efforts, but I'm not prideful of it.

In short. Perhaps a marriage is not something that you ever really ought to have pride in, and trying to restore pride in it is misguided.

I've never worn a ring; I find them very uncomfortable. My W asked me to do so after d-day, and I initially agreed. We looked a bit, and then I decided to withdraw my agreement - because I find rings uncomfortable and because I had never cheated even without a ring.

*****

Our first post-d-day anniversary came 9 months after d-day in 2011. I told my W that she could plan something and invite me. If I liked her plan, I'd go. She did. I did. We had a great time. Part of the plan were gifts of flowers and chocolate. I thought that was a great move by her.

In 2012, we were traveling on our anniversary, and I got her a high end chocolate bar at a stop on the Illinois Toll Road. In 2013, we had to 'celebrate' because we were with son, now XDIL, almost 4 year old GS, and my SIL and BIL. I put on an act, and my W was fully aware of that. In 2014, I was ready to celebrate again - that's 45 months after d-day.

Our 50th was in 2017. We had a great family celebration with son and GS. We co-sponsored lunch at our synagogue with the parents who were celebrating the upcoming M of their son and DIL2b. The kids asked us for wisdom WRT staying M and happy. I don't remember how we responded, but I believe they asked because we were pretty obviously happy with each other; no acting necessary.

Courage, effort, commitment, patience, time, Webbit. It takes a lot of (not unrewarding) work to R, and the work just takes time.

*****

I don't feel proud to be M. Pride is centered on other people, IMO. I'm married because I want to be married. That's true for my W, too.

*****

An observation:

R is a process of building a new M. You do that by building and living the new M. One thing that's absolutely required for success, IMO, is addressing issues as they come up. That's when issues are smallest and easiest to resolve.

At first, the issues that come up are related to the A. For us it was all A, all the time for at least 2 years. Later, day-2-day issues start crowding out A-related issues. Those day-2-day issues still to be resolved.

My point is that, in a very real sense, R morphs into M. R is M. Relationships need continual investment to keep in good repair. R is not a project with a start and stop date.

ETA: I forgot to add: JMO.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 4:42 PM, Friday, May 24th]

I have a lot of gratitude for my husband and I'm proud of the work we've both done and the marriage and family we've managed to build (even after the shit storm of infidelity). Even knowing all I know now, I'd chose him and us again a million times. I will never take our marriage for granted - it is both stronger and more fragile than I'd previously understood. Infidelity isn't really a part of our lives anymore for the most part. I know it sucks right now but I promise it will not feel so all-consuming forever.

If you are looking for positive reconciliation stories, there is a whole thread pinned to the top of the R forum for this exact purpose .

[This message edited by emergent8 at 6:17 PM, Friday, May 24th]

We celebrate our anniversary. We're still married; she broke it in a lot of ways but we never ended the marriage, and if I wasn't happy enough to stay in it I would have left long ago. So the anniversary dates stay the same with everything that accumulated between each, good and bad.

I wear a ring because I am a married man. It just feels alien to me to have it off my finger if I am being honest.

As for happiness in celebration.. yeah. Though happiness doesn't exist in isolation, still sad alongside that.

The sun comes up and shines on everyone again eventually.

Short answer is Yes absolutely.
How? They do the work. They figure out their why, they fix the broken parts of themselves and show they are a worthy partner consistently over time.

It doesn't happen overnight bit them anything worth much I'm this world takes time.

But yeah it can be done. I'm proof.

There's a reason that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. It all depends on how it's applied. I am in agreement with This0 and sisoon that pride may not be the best word here. Happy seems to fit much better.

In a quick description of my 30+ years of marriage(chronologically):

--For about 15 years I had a great wife
--For about 2 years I had an okay wife
--For about 2 years I had a shitty wife
--For about 3 years I had a below average wife
--For about 5 years I had a good wife
--For about 10 years I have had a great wife

So I had 2 years of a real bad wife, and another 3 of a subpar wife. Five years is a long time to not have a good marriage. But what about the good 5+ years? What about the 25 great years that are currently bookending the marriage? How does my performance add up in her mind over this time?

I think the best part of all of this, for me, is while it took some time, I eventually overcame any fears of leaving my marriage. I stay because I want to, which is a helluva lot better than feeling like I don't really have any other options.

I wouldn't call that being proud; but definitely happy. And not embarrassed.

I’m absolutely proud of my M or I wouldn’t be here.

I can comfortably hate the past, hate the A and completely hate what happened and still be very proud of how hard we worked to rebuild into loving, caring relationship.

We celebrate our traditional anniversary every year.

I can say that the first few years after dday, they were very subdued moments, but we’re both glad we fought our way back to the M we both want.

I think a fraud would be trying to pretend the Hell of infidelity never happened.

Have you read the "Positive Reconciliation Stories" thread that is pinned at the top of this Forum?! You will see several posts of mine on there...along with a couple of other posters from this thread . These stories may give you a little bit of hope like it did to me when I first came on here about 10 years ago .

I am so PROUD of the hard work my H and I have done to get to where we are at what I call our Mv2.0 . We could have chosen to stay wallowing in that crap of what was left over after my H destroyed our precious M. We could have chosen to go for D...like I did in my 1st M after I caught my H cheating on me then. But we chose to WORK at rebuilding a better...stronger...more faithful M...and we look back on all of that hard work with immense PRIDE !

Being HAPPY was one of my issues as well...until I realized that it wasn't happiness I was missing...it was PEACE. Once I found peace again...then happiness came back .

I miss my engagement ring. I loved it so much as it was the most perfect ring I could have ever imagined and he picked it all by himself without any of my input. I just can’t put it in though as I feel like a fraud

PUT THAT RING BACK ON!!! Don't you DARE let ANYONE take away something you LOVE!!! YOU, Dear Lady are NOT the fraud...FAR from that!!! YOU are the most sincere...kind...loving...trusting...LOYAL person in your M .

I learned that old saying rang true for me...when you fall off of a horse get right back on. That is because when you let your lizard brain take hold of that "object"...it starts to control your feelings about it. You become captive to those feelings. Get FREE from that self imposed prison...you deserve better .

That is how I saw triggers. I was determined to OWN...or take back...every one of them. It was rough at first...but after I conquered one trigger it started becoming easier to conquer more and more of them . Your engagement ring is a trigger for you...as it is for a lot of people. How could it NOT be...especially since he took such care to pick it out himself only to crap all over it later...figuratively speaking? BUT...as others have said...when you look at your M as a WHOLE...with just that small area of infidelity in there...MAYBE you can see things in a different perspective?

It seems like you may be triggering from all three of these things. Triggers SUCK!!! But the longer you allow them to stay in your thoughts...the harder it is to overcome them I have found. When you can find a way to take those triggers back...you will then probably have three more triggers take their place . But don't worry...because by then...you will KNOW how to combat them . Knowledge is POWER !!!

Getting to the OTHER side of infidelity isn't easy...but it is soooooo WORTH IT !! Here's to seeing YOUR story one day in that "Positive Reconciliation Stories" thread !

I am happy that I stayed and very proud of who my husband is as a person. He is kind and generous to people and goes out of his way to show love for me. Our problems have been his shame about the cheating and it took a long time for him to come clean. It is pretty obvious to me that he was shamed as a child and he doesn’t manage criticism especially well in the moment. As each year has passed, now 8 years, he has become more aware of how reprehensible his behavior was. He bought me a new ring two years post D-day and I love it. To me it represents his earnest wish to make me happy, however clumsily and imperfectly he has tried to accomplish this. I’ve always been a bit of a sucker for men trying hard. When I am buying my Valentines or anniversary card (yes I still buy them) I always look at the men there trying to pick something out for their wives. They are such goofballs but I find it pretty cute and charming. They seem to have literally know idea what will please their wives but they try anyway hoping this time they get it right. When I see men on the street carrying flowers home to their wives I pick up the same vibe. Maybe it’s because I work with a lot of men who are my patients. Most often they truly want to make their wives happy. Sometimes they f&$@ up big time. If they do this once and truly try to make things right I can give them grace. I don’t want to be angry at my husband anymore. He is truly broken by this experience. It has shattered his life and he knows his children will always know he failed them in some deep and important way. Also all of our friends and family know—though it is not discussed. He feels this acutely and I feel sorry for him for that as well.

We celebrate our anniversary. There are some good memories there and the painful ones sting less now. Our major problem is that I still get very triggered by his workplace. This comes up regularly and does set us back. He is empathic but also baffled. He doesn’t really understand why nine years of good behavior has not built more trust. His TT is part of the reason. Also I had prior trauma.

Sometimes I wish I had not been quite so hard on him over the past 9 years. He was in a toxic bubble when all this happened, certainly not "himself".

Only you can determine if you see the remorse you need. But I truly believe my husband worked for and deserved the second chance he got. I am very proud of him and even if we were to separate I would respect him.

I'm damn proud of my wife.

She's talented, smart, and funny. She's a great partner and I feel like I can confide in her and count on her.

Perhaps most of all though, she's discovered some nasty things about herself, faced them head on and in my opinion has conquered them.

Her work ethic is very high, higher than anyone else I know, high enough arguably to a fault. When our marriage nearly failed, she took this work ethic and laser-focused it on both helping to heal our marriage and to work on herself, to the point that I am actually inspired by her response.

Our marriage hasn't since been tested in the way it was years ago; At this stage I don't realistically think we'll find ourselves in that situation again.

I can honestly attest my WW and I are at the best we have ever been, as we come up on our 20th anniversary, but it was a long road of pain, regaining trust, recommitment, and forgiveness. It takes time, and I hope for you it will just be a matter of being patient and giving it time.

After DD#4, which was the last one, something changed in my feelings for WW. I did not feel the same amount of love for her as I had before, and it felt terrible. We had just moved into our dream home only 9 days before, and I told WW I wanted a fresh start after the madness of the previous months, and what I discovered on her phone that night was such a huge betrayal. I was also overwhelmed by the mind movies and triggers, and it was all too much. But I stayed. I had already promised her after I walked out on my family on DD#3, one of the worst nights of my life (though I came back soon after), that I was going to try to make our marriage work if she would.

Thankfully, my love for WW came rushing back a few months later, I am not really sure why. I think it was partly her showing me I could begin to trust her again, as her wayward behavior totally stopped, partly a lot of deep conversations in which she was willing to answer all my questions honestly and openly. I even admitted to her how my love for her decreased for a time, and she thankfully totally understood and was not very upset.

But it took a long time, about 14 months, for my trust of her to once again reach 100%. I decided that if I cannot trust my wife 100%, who can I trust in this world? When my trust for her was less than 100%, I asked my therapist if our marriage could succeed if I felt less than 100% for her, and she said it could, but it just still felt wrong. But I finally got there, as my wife proved to me I could trust her again, that her wayward behavior had totally stopped, and for good. She has repeatedly assured me it will never happen again. She recognizes how it destroyed me, our kids, and her. She is putting the proper boundaries in place now (she has had a cop and two men at stores hit on her or ask her out since, and she rejected them all). I was happy to announce to her the night before she had to travel across the country with one of our daughters that I trusted her 100% again, and it was a powerful moment for both of us.

I know that that person who was cheating on me was not my wife. She was struggling with something that I would liken to a drug or alcohol addiction. She told me it was all about the attention she was getting from other men (two were co-workers, the rest were online). She was acting very impulsively, which is likely a symptom of her ADHD, and she just could not stop. I knew that if she could just stop her behavior and I could get her back, we could succeed. I also realized that I needed to be a better husband to her. She said she felt I was pushing her away, which I did not do intentionally, but that was how she felt. So I have taken the measures needed to avoid doing that again.

We had to recommit to each other to bring that joy back to our marriage. Now a bit over 2 years from DD#4, I am so proud of my wife. She has had major promotions at work (including a new one coming this week), we are living in our dream house that we worked very hard to get, we are at the best we have ever been financially, and our children are all thriving. I would have made a huge mistake leaving her, even though I came very close. I wanted to give her a chance to change. I would have been miserable without her in my life, because when things are good for us, like they are now, they are so good! I am very proud of us and how far we have come!

Good luck to you! I hope you will one day be able to celebrate your anniversary like you used to again. I recommend individual counseling and couples counseling if you are able. We did all of that, and I know for me it was essential to help me recover. There is hope for you!

You know, there is no marriage that is perfect, because it’s composed of two imperfect people.

Infidelity underlines that feeling of not knowing your partner because they just exposed a whole underbelly to you that calls into question everything you believed about them, your ability to trust yourself, and how you view your security and life.

This is why reconciliation is hard to see the other side of until you are about there. You are reconciling all those things and there is a lot of check and verify and question and grief that has to all be processed.

And that’s also why reconciliation has some similarities but also is so unique to each couple. There are so many variables. Did we have a good marriage before? Are there areas I still trust this person, it underlines places to heal for the bs in their past and present and also the same for the ws. For some time you have two very broken people trying to find their way back to themselves as we also either cling to the other or check out of the relationship or somewhere in between.

But it’s possible. I learned I still trusted my husband with a lot of things after we got through our first year. I learned our shared history and the family we built were not something I could throw away as easily as I thought when I walked in my ws shoes.

Somehow, this process did nothing but affirm us, but none of that happened in either of our first year after dday. That first year, I am convinced is one long recovery for both people. For some, the second or third year is worse. My h experienced that after my affair, I did not experience that- after the first year things just continually got better. I don’t know if it was because I was on the healing path longer or because I understood ws thinking. I feel it was the first more than the second.

It’s messy, and the clean up is arduous. But I know in my heart that even the marriage we had before the affairs was better than most, and now I am unlikely to find anything that could even compare to the marriage now. I don’t know how much of that is my perception or if it even matters. I can only tell you that there is joy in it all again. I think I was made to love this man and he was made for me.

Everyone’s journey is different so I will leave you with this- whether the marriage goes away tomorrow, I now have a relationship with myself that I will maintain for a life time. The healing and work I have done is what I feel most proud of because no one can take it away with their decisions. If he leaves me tomorrow, I know I can stand on my own two feet, and that I can get through the pain of that too. To me, that is a goal everyone here can get to if they keep their eye on that. If you can save your marriage or choose to divorce there is a way that it will make sense in your path and you can and will find peace.

[This message edited by hikingout at 7:40 PM, Tuesday, May 28th]

9 years past Dday 1 and a bunch of revelations after that, we are thriving. It took a lot of hard work from both of us. I think what Hikingout said is true, a marriage is two flawed people who will not give up on each other.

Here is what I have learned that helped me through (in a nutshell). The A had really nothing to do with me or my shortcomings as a husband, man or father. I am not a victim, but I was traumatized, so I had to conduct myself not like a victim, but I had to be honest that I was hurt in the process. I hope that makes sense. I had to set clear boundaries of what I expected in R, and help her live up to them. Transparency, honesty, all the normal stuff you can read about in other posts. And she had to figure out what was broken in her that allowed her to be so dishonest and disjointed from our marriage that she felt she could do those awful things.

It took time, and she found what her hole was she was trying to fill. She got help, and some meds to get her where she needed to be. She re-framed her thinking about what marriage was. Instead of putting herself at the center of everything, she needed to learn how to put the family or our marriage at the center. At first, she tried to say she was putting herself last, and me first. I called bull$h!t on that. Putting the marriage or family first, she was still part of that equation, so she was not putting herself last, she was putting everyone else at the same level. Further, she had to re-frame WHAT marriage meant. She thought what she did would not affect others. She needed to learn that every action had an impact on me, the boys and the world around her. I could go on and on.

In the end, we have a better marriage, she is a better person, we are better together. But there is no doubt, we live with the trauma she brought to our marriage, and that is sad if we dwell on it. 9 years later, that trauma is not as big as the rest of our relationship. We have to mourn the "what could have been" and focus on what is. I hope that helps.