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I also changed the subject a lot, but it’s usually because I see parallels between seemingly unrelated things.

That's an ADHD symptom. As is your ability to focus on video games. As is your rage.

Have you ever been evaluated by a shrink? If you have ADHD, there are many good treatments, and at least one of them may work for you. IME, if you ARE ADHD and get a good treatment, you will be amazed at how your life will improve.

You got your hearing tested. Might as well get your brain tested, too.

There are self-tests on the web that may help, but the results need to be confirmed by a pro.

Have you noticed how your wife has successfully shifted your focus from her affair (in particular, your need for the full truth and transparency) to her pre-affair complaints about you as a husband?

Based on your discussions and her actions thus far, do you think that your wife is interested in making a good faith effort to rebuild your marriage or do you think you're being set up to fail?

How do you think your wife would react if you offered her a generous divorce settlement? Do you think she would balk at the suggestion of ending your marriage or jump at the opportunity?

It's probably a good idea to have an evaluation.

My son had some issues when he was young, and the doctor we sent him to asked if I would take a test to see if I had anything that had been undiagnosed. I actually forget the result but remember that I was "probably somewhere on the spectrum". I did not have any leanings towards ADHD though.

In fact, I would be shocked if I had ADHD because I'm known for being able to sit with my thoughts for very long periods of time. I believe I could actually set a world record for solitary confinement if needed. But who knows, maybe I just don't understand what ADHD is.

During my next physical I'll schedule something and find out.

[This message edited by 4characters at 6:38 PM, Tuesday, January 14th]

In fact, I would be shocked if I had ADHD because I'm known for being able to sit with my thoughts for very long periods of time. I believe I could actually set a world record for solitary confinement if needed. But who knows, maybe I just don't understand what ADHD is.

I have ADHD and it doesn't mean you can't focus on anything; in fact, I often get hyperfocused on and immersed in one thing, and then completely ignore everything else that requires my attention. Personally, my biggest challenge (when not treated) is being able to prioritize multiple tasks (or organize one large task into smaller, manageable ones). Eventually, the competing demands on my attention and time--and the feelings of inadequacy that accompany "unfinished business"-- raise my stress and anxiety levels, which leads to angry outbursts or fits of depression.

If that sounds like you, then yeah, get evaluated!

Ugh. I’m sorry you’re going through this.

I think if she starts venting about issues in the marriage that "made her have an affair," I would say something along the lines of, "yes, it’s clear you were very unhappy. So here is your freedom. I am granting you a divorce."

Ugh. She sounds atrocious. And not fixable.
And like an energy suck.

You should ask yourself what’s in it for you to stay?

Just to be clear, here's how my WW usually discusses the affair:

"I know I was wrong. You didn't deserve it. I take 100% responsibility for the affair. I'm working through my issues, but you have issues too. And it was 22 years of your issues."

She has to work her shit out.

IF she had chosen to address the marriage issues BEFORE betraying you, then she could be rightly making complaints about your marital behavior, but even then she would have had to keep a strong balance of addressing her own issues.

Given that she has had an affair, those things don’t matter at this time. It’s like telling someone they should lose a few pounds when they come into the ER with a gunshot wound.

InkHulk is exactly right.

If your marriage was a house, your wife just set it on fire by having affair.

If she wants to save the house, she will help you put out the fire... instead of complaining about how you never fixed the leaky faucets or the mildew problem in the basement-- while you get third degree burns.

And lastly

but you have issues too. And it was 22 years of your issues.

Any apology that includes the word "but" isn't an apology; it's blameshifting. In fact, if you want to know someone's intentions, just ignore anything they say before the word "but."

Hi-

I read through your JFO, and combined with this it sounds eerily familiar to me.

There are two things I want to preface this post with:

1. Just because I identify with a lot about what you have described in your wife and what she says, understand i identify with her as who I was as a cheater. I have no idea if she will be be diligent with her healing or yours or even get to the stage she is worthy of consideration for reconciliation. Right now she is not. I did do the rebuild, but it was a long journey.

2. I am going to give you some insight, because I have a fair amount that I think applies in your situation. But I am not giving you this insight to help her because you can’t. That is wasted effort and energy. More on that later. But because I can see that you are confused and are blaming yourself for a lot of it and I would like to help you begin to see her choices here are not on you.

Quick background: I had an affair almost 8 years ago with someone who was as inappropriate of a choice of your wife. He wasn’t a criminal but a married man who was old enough to be my father and it was a situation where I could have lost my career. I had an exit affair, but then didn’t exit. I dropped heavy clues with my husband hoping it would make me stop. The weight of the secrets were heavy at times and I would say things very similar to what you describe your wife saying to you.. I was a people pleaser too and it had worn me out. But I kept doing what I thought was right in the role of wife and lost myself in that process. As time went along I just kept pushing it down until I was actually not even aware of the resentment that had built up. I was blaming my husband for my unhappiness, not recognizing I made every choice that created my unhappiness.

The problem with a people pleaser is we do all of it to earn love. It’s transactional. And if we are not getting appreciation in return we will keep trying harder until we decide we are unloved. The reality is my husband did show me love but my self worth was so low I wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

Enter the other man, giving validation. It starts off feeling so good. You tend to ignore the source and tend to start playing this other narrative in your head in which you basically project what you want to see.

The cognitive dissonance one experiences in an affair starts you down this path of justifications. Starting by making a case for your entitlement to go ahead and do what you want. That starts the rewriting of the marriage. I am sure in your marriage there were happy times and unhappy times. I am sure you were not perfect and neither was she. But, she exaggerated the AP’s goodness and your badness.

The problem is she is assigning that big dose of dopamine and adrenaline caused by the affair to love instead of a predictable chemical response that many people have in an affair.

I would not be settled you have the truth. Some people become actually addicted to those chemicals and seeing the AP will cause relapse. I think it’s a good sign she is looking for a different job but I do not think you should trust her right now.

I am not saying you don’t have the truth but this sounds like it was very intense and it’s a bit hard for me to think they never crossed into the physical realm. Especially considering she was looking at his dick for work periodically. It doesn’t mean I am right, it just doesn’t compute for me. Your wife would have been willing to do a lot to keep raising her value in this man’s eyes, not because of him at all. But because she was playing a role in this narrative. She likely portrayed herself falsely to him to a certain degree. You have seen the texts, is she unrecognizable in some of that?

For me, the affair was a powerful escape because I got to pretend I was someone that I wasn’t. Funnier, younger, sexier. The dopamine and adrenaline made me feel alive. It would not have mattered had the AP looked just like a toad.

I strongly suspect your wife is in a state of feeling done because she came to that point because she compares the feelings of a long term marriage versus the affair, not realizing neither one of those things is what actual connection feels like.

I am going to be honest, between the secret nature of the affair, the amount of risk she was taking, that’s a lot of dopamine and adrenaline she isn’t getting now.

The best thing you can do if you are adamant about staying married is to do the 180 (read about it in the healing library) or separate. Get in therapy, let her do her therapy. And if you want to reassess again in some predefined time period, then do so. I know it’s not easy to leave a long term marriage without seeing what can be done. But she needs to find herself out of these woods and I do not think she is at all clear headed due to likely missing the affair feelings. Even if she recommitted now it would be a fake it until you make it.

Many ws tend to brainwash themselves to get past their resistance of cheating and then the guilt/shame make them justify it harder. She is living in her justifications while carrying deep resentment that she has to face accountability for.

Resentments are the responsibility of those who carry them. Yes I had some talks over the years with my husband, but had I actively stayed engaged with myself I would have worked on my life in a healthy way with the goal of increasing my happiness. That would have included focusing on myself more- finding healthy hobbies and things I do for me so I learned to light up my own world. I might have had us go to MC or a couples retreat and worked on understanding each other better. And I could have gone on to consider divorce even, which is a far healthier decision than to cheat. What your wife and I both did was chose escapism instead and it’s why none of this makes sense. It’s all LaLa fantasy land bullshit that we often don’t want to let go of as easily as it looks like we do.

You can not trust her right now. I am sorry. I do not know where it will go from here but I have been there and people just don’t change gears from that so fast. It doesn’t mean you can’t try in the future. I also told my husband I was committed to the marriage and I will say that can be an honest answer. I did commit to bring myself back into the marriage, but it took me time to work through some of what I shared with you. I think it’s important for you to focus on you during this time. Make preparations for the divorce, even if it’s quietly. You can always not execute it.

[This message edited by hikingout at 1:28 AM, Wednesday, January 15th]

@hikingout

Thank you for sharing your story. It's helpful to get this insight.

I can relate to much of what you're saying. Especially the idea that my wife was performing an exit affair.

If there's a DDay 2, my first thought will be Exit Affair 2.

Her current state, from my point of view, doesn't seem to have much to do with her AP or the affair. But perhaps that's what she wants me to think. I don't know.

She told me that her most recent IC was very productive. From what I was told it seems that she's working on figuring out what's best for her and doing a lot of self-care. She needs this because by her own account, she's been people pleasing her whole life, and that's what got us into this mess. I married and fell in love with a master people pleaser.

Intellectually, I understand that it's not healthy to wish that person would return, and so I'm very careful to pay attention to how she reacts to me, and I will even occasionally tell her, "Please don't people please. If you don't want to do something, let's not do it. It's ok."

It's really tough because when I look back at the happiest moments of our marriage, I can't help but think it was times where she was people pleasing the fuck out of me. I simply didn't realize this was going on. I didn't realize that her participation and engagement in the marriage was driven by her need for attention and love. I thought she was doing "stuff" with me because she liked being with me and doing the stuff. I thought we had common interests.

As of right now, I'm not sure if we have any common interests at all. Her only real interest seems to be talking about her work. The people she talked to, the people that didn't do the job right, the people that are weird or annoying. All the gossip and politics. Outside of that, we can barely hold a conversation. And of course, because her AP is there, each work story feels like a mine field where I'm constantly wondering what proximity is the AP to her during this time, during this event?

So yeah, I'm definitely leaning towards a working plan for divorce. Not because I want that to happen, but because it feels like that is where things are headed. It feels like I'm one revelation away from a DDAY 2, or I'm increasingly going to feel like she's inching closer and closer to realizing that the world she imagines for herself doesn't include a husband that she has nothing in common with, is 8 years older than her, has ED, and uses a CPAP machine.

Last night I tried to explain to her that the way I look at our marriage is not through the lens of what did we do that was so much fun today, but through the lens of what did we build together over time. I told her to think about whenever you go to a wedding reception and the DJ has all the couples go out to the dance floor and then tells anyone that hasn't been married for X years to leave the floor. And eventually you have just one old couple on the floor that's been married for like 50+ years.

That's what I want. I want to be that couple. And it's without question that after 50+ years they know everything there is to know about each other. They don't have "new" stories to tell. They don't have days of pure excitement or passion. But what they do have (hopefully) is a deep love and respect that you can only get over time. They have survived all the challenges and the heartbreaks that come with life, together. And you just can't match that with new love. New love is cheap, old love is priceless.

She said that's what she wants too. But it was clear that she doesn't see that yet with me, and it may be that she never will.

. I didn't realize that her participation and engagement in the marriage was driven by her need for attention and love. I thought she was doing "stuff" with me because she liked being with me and doing the stuff. I thought we had common interests.

I think it’s both things likely.

It isn’t that I never enjoyed my husband or didn’t love him. Not at all. My people pleasing started one way and became more toxic over time. The longer it went in the more I was looking for appreciation and to be seen as the best wife ever.

So don’t misunderstand just because she has rewritten the marital history though her current lens. Long term relationships (we have been married a similiar amount of time) things can morph and change and be more than just one way.

The putting down people pleasing (even though there is still a tendency to want to make my husband happy- it’s just not in a martyr way)helped me learn to feel his love. I learned to care about what I wanted and that made space to see I wanted him. So if she is going to decide that it will be through seeing she is loved for her and not what she has to offer. I hope that makes sense. So in that way I think she is on track. The other thing that you have going for you is that she is engaged in her IC, it sounds like she is doing that for herself and that is a good sign that she wants to change for her. That in my opinion is the only time that works. We never fully change for other people it’s just not in our make up.

I still contend you don’t go from getting all that dopamine and adrenaline to being satisfied. She has some brain chemistry that is going to have to get back to normal and until that happens her clarity is not fully there.

I think if I were you I would give her some things to think about in terms of honesty. If she hides it went physical and six months from now comes clean it’s going to be far more damaging than if she gets it on the table now. I just feel very suspicious of this item. I hope I am wrong.

When there is an emotional aspect to an affair the confusion will always be there as the smoke clears. But the main thing is not to rise that rollercoaster with her. You are right to encourage authenticity.

I sounded batshit crazy after my affair and was convinced we should divorce. I don’t want to give you false hope because every situation is different but I am very in love with my husband, and our relationship is a lot closer and deeper today than it’s ever been. I hate it took an affair for me to do that work and I will always wish it came to me differently but the personal growth that came from it made me much better equipped for a happy marriage.

Right now I can only tell you as a cheater she sounds very similar to a lot of what I experience but I have no idea how she will do as a reconciler. Be careful but it’s normal that there is some time when both of you are working towards getting out of the initial disorientation.

[This message edited by hikingout at 2:48 PM, Wednesday, January 15th]

And it's without question that after 50+ years they know everything there is to know about each other.

Nothing can be further from the truth. We still find out new things - some are new realizations, some are realizations that we didn't have reasons for sharing earlier, but one keeps discovering new things about life.

They don't have days of pure excitement or passion.

'Old' is not the same as 'dead.' Of course we have excitement and passion in our lives.

They have survived all the challenges and the heartbreaks that come with life, together.

Again, old isn't dead. New challenges keep coming up. And keep coming up.

And you just can't match that with new love.

True. W & I know each other better than we used to because it takes time to learn about another person

New love is cheap, old love is priceless.

You can't get to old love without going through new love.

@sisoon

What do I know, I'm only 51! ;)

Lots of life left, 4characters. Live and learn.

(signed) sisoon, who triggers when he thinks shade is being thrown at people past middle age (and who wants everyone to know that life is good after middle age, too

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:51 PM, Friday, January 17th]