SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

my SO and i have been together for a little over a year and a half. things have been great until a few months ago, where he's been getting busier and busier with personal stuff. it's been turning into days where we can't call each other and hang out, and days where we can't even be physically intimate. during those days i've been feeling alone and neglected. i know he doesn't mean to make me feel that way, but it still deeply affects me. it feels like there's just been a void inside of me growing more and more by the day.

so, to fill that void i've resorted to joining "spicy" discord servers. i've gotten a few people to dm me to talk and get to know me, and it felt amazing being able to feel that spark and finally have those needs met that have been neglected for so long. out of all of the people i've dmed, i've grown really attached to two people. i tend to talk to them the most, and i've played games with them too. SO almost caught me once talking to this specific person...

i've realized how far i've gotten, and it's to the point where i really want to stop, but i feel like i can't. i feel that if i do stop now, i will feel all alone again. especially since i know SO may not be consistently available again anytime soon.

i want to stop this. i need to stop this. i wish i could be happy with being alone again. i have distractions and things i do throughout the day to keep busy, but i can only do those things for so long. i don't want to feel like i have to be dependent on people to fill a void that my SO can't fill (at the moment) anymore. i don't want to feel the need to hide certain things from my phone whenever my SO and i can actually meet in person anymore. i want to be able to have him look at my phone without constantly worrying he'll see something he shouldn't. i still love him so much. he's the only person i can actually see spending the rest of my life with. at the same time, even if i'm not talking these two people intimately, i still enjoy talking to them. i think i've made really great friends with them and we can have great conversations about anything. it's to the point where i really can't fathom not talking to them either, because they make me feel less alone. i hate how i have to hide from one out of the two that i have an SO (the other person knows and is fully understanding of my situation). i just want to snap out of this and feel like an actual monogamous person once again.

i'm sorry, i feel like this isn't really the right website to post something like this in, but i think this is the only place i can rant here to about this without getting shunned too horribly. i know that what i'm doing is wrong. i feel constant guilt and i want to stop it. i want to leave the dark side that is being an unloyal partner. this is too much.

what can i do? :(

Well you already know what you are doing is wrong and you are feeling the effects of that. I think you should remove the app and start working on yourself in therapy. Have you always felt this need to feel this void with other people or with a SO This is what you need to work on finding happiness in being alone. Other people will never fill that void it's a coping mechanism. Could be an abandonment issue from childhood.

How often do you and your SO connect? Life can be very busy, but it is important to connect when you have the time together. Maybe this isn't the relationship for you. I would definitely work on being ok with being alone it will help you fill that void. Do you have friends and family to spend time with? I suggest spending time with friends, maybe going on a vacation with them and not put all your energy into one person.

thank you for your response, i really appreciate it.

the "need" i have is kind of weird. there are times where i truly want to be alone and not talk to anyone, but at the same time, i still want to be able to have access to people and feel some sort of validation from them. my SO (still not knowing what i did) has became aware of this issue i have, and has recommended for me to find myself and learn to be happy by myself.

i'm just not really sure where to start on that. the only things going for me are video games and coding...

we call each other pretty frequently, i'd say a few times a week or so. however, that has been decreasing more and more lately, which is what led me to do the things i've been talking about.

i do have friends, and i'm sadly not in contact with any family members besides my parents and siblings. my friends and i do plan to hang out a couple of more times before i move out of town soon, so i am looking forward to that.

I am responding as a BS, I do appreciate you are taking the first step a lot of Waywards don’t and seeking help. I will preface that I may be blunt, but I am not attacking.

First, you need to admit that you are emotionally cheating, and by everything you have described it is absolutely what you are doing. Probably involving sexual messages/pics as well. Whatever it contains it’s more than enough for you to know it’s wrong and more so that you don’t want your SO to see it. Yes, you are cheating.

The person you are cheating on him with isn’t at all who you think they are. Especially when it’s online only, that person is showing you only the best possible version of himself, and you truthfully don’t know anything about him. He doesn’t make you feel anything, your feelings come from inside your mind, and you are associating those feelings with the made up image of this person. It’s nothing more than a fantasy.

All relationships have rough patches. There will be times when your SO will be busy and not able to put everything in, and vice versa. However, you need to really examine yourself. Only a short time and you immediately go for an emotional affair. This is only the first year or so, and as quickly as possible when you had negative feelings, your response is to seek out someone else.

Your SO isn’t the cause of this, you are. Is he truly neglecting you? Think about what that really means, I doubt strongly that he is. He’s busy with work and trying to build up his life
which is including you, he might not be showing up the best he can, but is he really neglecting you? Or is it something you came up with to justify cheating?

Real, long term relationships take a lot of work, trust, and communication. Also a lot of seeing the other person from their side. Did you ever take a moment, think about all of the good things he is doing for both of you, or was it I feel bad and if I’m feeling bad it’s because of him.

Now the real hard part. You want your relationship to have a chance, you need to do two things. Tell your SO, and this includes allowing him to see the conversations you have been having behind his back, and let him decide.
Then you have to go completely no contact, delete the app and account, treat this as a drug addiction. And that might require more steps going forward. For me, it meant things like my WW could no longer have guys as friends, as she broke that barrier, and has proven she can’t be trusted. Since you aren’t married or have any long term investments in the relationship I am not going to say open access to all SM/Phones etc. but if you two do continue and go down that road, then yes, that has to be your plan.

More can be said if you continue to post here and take the initiative to make a change.

You know what you should do, are you going to be able?

You clearly know you crossed a line or you wouldn’t feel guilty.

The right thing to do now is stop and go no contact and tell your SO. You can not keep being "friends" with these people and be respectful to your spouse. It will get worse you will cross more uncrossable lines

Do yourself a favour and buy "Not Just Friends" and try reading in the Just Found Out section. As a wayward you can not comment there but you will get exposed to the raw anguish of what the other side looks like.

Find a therapist, something is driving you to these kinds of behaviours and regardless of whether you stay in this relationship you’re going to need to figure it out to have a healthy relationship in the future

Make it make sense. You felt lonely so you joined a spicy chat line instead of make a friend dot com?

You felt so "neglected" you skipped past friends and family and went straight to spicy chat line?

You're "neglected" for days so you use chat lines to fill a void and have your needs met that aren't being met for a few days while he's gone?

The reasons seem flimsy at best but maybe I'm wrong

finally have those needs met

Food, water, and shelter are needs. You are having your "wants" met.

be dependent on people to fill a void that my SO can't fill

The problem is the void itself, not the filling of it. Nothing can fill that void, nothing can truly give you the validation of your self externally for more than a brief moment. It has to come internally. If you don’t tackle the core problem, you’ll be a lifetime cheater.

You are doing the right thing by recognizing the problem. Be mindful of what you are really after when you get the impulse. What itch are you really scratching?

[This message edited by HouseOfPlane at 6:58 PM, Monday, July 1st]

Hi TwistedNeck,

You need to ask yourself a very important question, one you may not like the answer to. Do you really love your SO? Or do you love how your SO makes you feel? There is a difference between actual love and love, which is dependent on what we take from the relationship.

Many (almost all) WS's tend to find themselves in the latter camp. You pretty much said it yourself... You feel lonely, rejected, and alone when he is not around, so you go looking to fill those empty spaces in yourself when he isn't around. And that's not love, that's need. You love him when he's around because he fulfills your needs, but when he's gone, there is no one to make you feel special and wanted, and it makes you desperate to the point where you step outside the relationship in order to feel better about yourself.

Here's the thing. Most emotionally healthy people are capable of self-love. That is to say, they don't need someone else to make them feel loved, feel special, or feel good about themselves in general. Sure, it's wonderful for them to have that extra love and attention coming in, but they don't NEED IT to feel whole, like a good person, or to feel valued and appreciated. They believe enough in themselves to fulfill their own needs. When their SO isn't around, they miss the PERSON who is gone, but they don't fall apart and feel unloved. They don't need the incoming flow of love; they miss the outflowing love they give to another person.

On the other hand, people such as you and me have trouble feeling special and worthy and loved unless there is a steady stream of love flowing in at all times. In other words, we only feel valued, respected, and loved when we receive that love from an outside source. We literally need other people to love us and tell us that we're great/special/funny/smart/talented/sexy because we can't feel those ways on our own. As long as someone else keeps the good vibes coming in, we're all good. But as soon as that influx of love and attention goes away, we feel empty. We feel alone. We feel worthless. We can't produce those feelings on our own, and if we lack an outside person to fill our needs, we turn to someone else to do it.

A friend once explained it to me like this. Imagine that you have a "love tank", much the same way a car has a gas tank. When your love tank is full, all is good. But some of us have a hole in our love tank, so unless the love keeps pouring in at a fast enough rate, our love tank starts to go empty. When someone such as your SO goes away, the love tank empties completely, and since you can't fill it yourself, you crash instead. You feel ugly, unwanted, unspecial. This is why instead of looking for a friend, you look for a "special friend", one who gives you the attention you need.

So what to do about this? Well, therapy is really the first step. Many WS's experience traumas in their life that leave us in this "broken" state. Maybe you were sexually molested as a child? Maybe your parents divorced. Maybe you were bullied. Maybe you were just ignored, or even something as simple as maybe your parents weren't able to teach you self-love. These are things you can discuss and discover with a therapist, and then take steps to learn how to fill those holes in yourself by yourself, without needing an external source of validation.

Let me be clear about something, however... as long as you are in this same state, you are a danger to your SO. Why? Because every time he goes away, you are going to fall to pieces and go looking for validation in places that you shouldn't. Notice how scary it seems to you to let go of these "other people" that you lean on when your SO is gone. That's not love. That's not a concern for your SO. That's all about you. And as long as things are all about you, they cannot, and will not, be about him. It's about need, not love, which is NOT FAIR TO HIM OR YOU. Unless you fix this, you will always have an open door to infidelity.

It took a lot of bravery, self-honesty, and integrity to reach out to us and realize that this is NOT who you want to be. That's a great start. I cannot tell you how many WS's come here in complete denial (such as myself when I got here 8+ years ago). If it were me, I'd start by seeing a therapist right away, just to help get a grip on why you are the way you are and what steps you can take to mitigate some of the problems. That's the easy part. The other part is that you need to talk to your SO as well. Look, I know how those words feel when said to you. It can feel terrifying, and it is. The truth is, if your SO was online talking up some hot babes while he was away, I think you'd want to know. And you'd want to have the dignity and respect to make some decisions for yourself about that. Your SO deserves those same things. He may be understanding and supportive. Or, he may be pissed off and leave. Either way, by telling him, you give him back his agency and show him that you care enough about him and yourself to be honest and willing to work through the hard stuff together. That's what a real relationship is based on - honesty, integrity, and respect.

I wish you the best. Please keep coming back.

Oh, and before I leave, please get your hands on a copy of the book "Not Just Friends." It will help you a lot to start understanding what's going on within yourself and what's happened so far.

even if i'm not talking these two people intimately, i still enjoy talking to them. i think i've made really great friends with them and we can have great conversations about anything.

I wanted to point out this part. This is not an option. It's distorted thinking.

I had thoughts after discovery that I was sad I hadn't just kept things to a friendship because then I could have had a good friend. In my case, thinking it could have been platonic was staying in my fantasy that he was a good person--in other words, a distorted way to keep romantizing him. In yours, you are trying to come up with excuses to hold on to that relationship by convincing yourself it could still be platonic. These are the same kinds of justifications that got you into this in the first place.

And since getting some distance I've realized he's gross and not somebody the healthy me would want a friendship with anyway. Not saying this part will happen to you, too, but there's a very real possibility it could.

Relatedly, I tried telling myself and the people around me that part of what I wanted when I was breaking boundaries and then having emotional affairs were things like feeling like I belonged in certain social spaces or getting ahead professionally. But I could have gotten those things from different people (I actually just talked to my therapist about this last week, so I'm not trying to come across as holier than thou, just sharing.) I didn't because that wasn't the heart of what I was trying to get. Like other people have said, if you were/are looking for company or to feel less lonely or whatever, there are healthy ways to do that but you chose this way because that's not actually what you were looking for. If you are looking for friendship there are so many ways to get that too. This is not one of them.

[This message edited by PleaseBeFixable at 5:50 PM, Tuesday, July 2nd]

thinking it could have been platonic was staying in my fantasy that he was a good person--in other words, a distorted way to keep romantizing him. In yours, you are trying to come up with excuses to hold on to that relationship by convincing yourself it could still be platonic. These are the same kinds of justifications that got you into this in the first place.

And since getting some distance I've realized he's gross and not somebody the healthy me would want a friendship with anyway. Not saying this part will happen to you, too, but there's a very real possibility it could.

^^^THIS THIS THIS. I made a lot of statements like "I'm sorry for hurting BS, but I'm not sorry for loving AP." I thought my opinion of him would never change in a million years. But boy, it did. Getting a handle on the true nature of infidelity (thank you SI! And thank you Shirley Glass and Linda MacDonald and Eckhart Tolle and Pema Chodron and Brene Brown) resulted in me seeing AP (and myself) in a very different light. How I related to AP changed completely. But it took time, no contact, and fiercely wanting to figure out how and why I had come to that place in my life as well as acknowledging and wanting to repair the damage I had done to BS. It didn't all happen in an instant. It was a few years of slow evolution punctuated by occasional epiphanies. Would not have been possible if I had stayed in contact with AP.

Proceed with conviction and valor.

Strength and healing to you from a still EvolvingSoul.

OK - BS here and no stop sign. So...

First of all - this is the right website for this. And...good for you for coming here and posting on this forum. Bonus points for leaving the STOP sign off [please note - you reserve the right to ask the Mods to turn it on at any time].

What you are speaking of, going through and feeling is not unusual around these parts. In fact, please read Maia's Withdrawal Survival Guide (repost for newbies) at the top of this forum. Then read it again.

This "need" you speak of and try to justify - that's dopamine withdraw. I think you know this deep down. It isn't unusual, your situation isn't unique or special, and all the justifications/rationalizations for keeping this "relationship" are bullshit and straight from the Cheater's Handbook.

You ask what you can do? That's simple. STOP! Just stop. But understand, you will (sadly) go through that withdraw. Read Maia's Withdrawal Survival Guide (repost for newbies). Print it out and keep it handy. Refer to it often. And keep coming here. Read and post. You are not alone.

Okay, I think that you may need to consider staying out of relationships for a while. You aren’t married, no kids, spend some time getting to know yourself and things that can light you up that doesn’t rely on a guy.

That might sound extreme, but you have immense work to do on yourself that if you buckle down and do, you will learn how to make yourself happy, how to live yourself. That is the void you feel. Do therapy. Try and find some new hobbies to enjoy. Work on yourself to where you always know just how to fill your own cup. Then renter the world of dating.

Not only will you attract someone who will be able to fulfill more of your wants, but you will be a loving partner and a blessing to them as well. You will be able to discuss your wants in a relationship, and through that understanding will be able to also take in their wants and honor those equally.

You are not ready to keep moving forward in this relationship. But if you want to stay in it then you have to confess and stop the behavior and still do the work I just mentioned. but if you aren’t going to be honest or you have an addiction to this behavior (which I strongly suspect) you are just going to drag him through a lot of extra pain that I am sure you agree he doesn’t deserve.

I am giving you extreme advice that I wish I had done before getting married a without this work it will be a pattern for you to use escapism whenever you are bored or needy. And I think in the end it will hold you back from having the happiest and healthiest life you can possibly have. Every outside relationship is a mirror of our relationship with ourselves.

And blaming the behavior on the relationship is a fallacy. There is always a different answer than cheating. Expressing what you want is one, and if they refuse then they may not be right for you. It’s infinitely better to break up with someone than to betray them.

Read the book "Rising strong" by a Brene Brown as it was pivotal in me understanding these concepts and practice, practice, practice.