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I am so early in my journey but the folks that are down the line, do you feel proud of your WH and your marriage again? Is it possible to get this back? I feel like all my husbands achievements and sacrifices prior to his affair have been wiped out by this act, his entire character is tainted, he is so deep in shame that I don't think we can even work on the marriage yet, his shame and guilt has got him to a suicide attempt, so this is something that I can discuss with him as I am just telling him what he already knows. Would love people's thoughts on this that are deep in the reconciliation journey

DD was NYE 2024 so I’m new here and struggling with this myself and I understand how you feel.
I’m sorry to hear about your H attempt to end his life, I can’t even begin to imagine what you feeling I just want to say that my heart goes out to you.
As I said I struggle with feelings of not being proud of my H and it makes me very sad, hurt and sort of ashamed of myself if that makes sense?, because why would I be with someone who I’m not proud of? That’s disgusting right? Fake almost?, am I living a fake life? all these questions I ask myself.
I try to remember that for all the bad things he’s done he’s done good things too. He’s still the man that asked ME to marry him, still the man who has always gone out to work and provide for his family every day no matter how he’s felt, he’s still the man that had to sit through 2 horrific child births even though he’s terrified of blood, still the man who worked 3 jobs so we could have a 3 week Disney World holiday, still the same man who at 40 decided to get a new career and qualification so we could have a more comfortable life and he’s still the same man who’s given me everything I’ve ever asked for within his ability.
I’m not proud of his infidelity neither is he, I’m not proud of the man that did that and neither is he I’m not proud of how long it lasted and neither is he.
I know it’s difficult to separate things but I find it does help, I almost feel it’s our brain telling us we shouldn’t be proud of them and no, we shouldn’t but for some things we should and that’s ok.

I remember when renovating our house and we had a new roof, we ordered around 6 pallets of roof tiles and they were quite expensive, it pained me paying for them. In every single pallet there we a few broken tiles, I was furious and was complaining to my dad about it, my dad is a builder and obviously was helping with the renovation, I told Dad we should send these tiles back because there’s a few broken, he laughed and said ‘you don’t send 6 full pallets of tiles back because there’s a few broken’.
My dad was right.

Take care of yourself Drowning45

I am not a religious person but one of the pillars of Christianity that I admire is the possibility of redemption. If you haven’t already, please read the pinned post at the very top of the Reconciliation forum, "Beyond regret and remorse", by onlytime. Perhaps your husband could benefit from this posting, too. He will never be the same guy who you once thought he was, but there is always hope that he can redeem himself and become another version of his former self, more weathered and scarred, but still honorable. If he thinks that his only escape from the failure and shame is to kill himself, maybe he is ready for contrition and a new chance at being an honorable man. Read the post.

I am by no means an expert- just please take this with a mountain of salt because I don’t know your full story. I’m just wondering when I read this if his suicidal ideation was an attempt to distract you from what he did?

And no, I’m not proud of what my WH has done in the past year- yes he’s gone to counseling and ticked a lot of boxes, but there’s so much more than he sees to dig into. Like he and society expect me to set a really low bar for his attempts at recovery and I will not buy into that. Neither should you. Don’t set your bar lower for him than you would want for you daughter or best friend or yourself. Hold your head up and demand the world.

Well he isn't avoiding it, we talk about it all the time, he finds it hard to answer my questions as he is still so deep in the shame but he will answer but won't give detail like say positions etc as he knows that won't help me and will just be an image ingrained in my brain. I just think the shame and guilt of having it all exposed and him facing the person he became is overwhelming for him, so untill he can steady himself a bit and deal with those issues, the reconciliation work has to wait.

Yes. I am proud of him and us now. In the thick of it, I never imagined I could say that. I’m only proud because we both went all in. We are much more connected, generally happier, and lean into each other. We’ve both grown.

Shortly after DDay for us, a friend told me that I might end up with a happier marriage. At the time, I thought my friend was nuts.

I’m proud of the things we both did to get here. I AM proud of who we became through the work we did. Though, I still hate the reason why.

It is a marathon….such a marathon.

Be not elated at an excellence which is not your own. If the horse in his pride were to say, ‘I am handsome’, we could bear with it. But when you say with pride, ‘I have a handsome horse’, know that the good horse is the ground of your pride.

You ask then what you can call your own. ‘The answer is—the way you deal with your impressions. ‘Therefore when you deal with your impressions in accord with nature, then you may be proud in deed, for your pride will be in a good which is your own.

—Epictetus, The Handbook, Chapter 6 (tr Matheson)

You shouldn't be proud of someone else's actions. You cannot control them. I'm proud of how I have handled R. I'm content with my wife's efforts.

Maybe stoicism on this topic isn't for everyone, but I'm simply not investing the emotion of pride in my marriage anymore. It was a misdirected feeling in the first place.

I’m about 18months past D-Day and there is no way I’ll ever be proud of my marriage. There is no way I could ever be proud of a marriage that has had infidelity involved.

I’m not even going to be proud of my husband even if he becomes the ‘perfect’ husband for the rest of our married life, because he will have done so at my expense.
I may feel proud of him if he gets a promotion or gets a sport award etc etc but that is as good as it’s going to get.

I’m not a huge fan of Epictetus, but I’m more or less with ThisIsFine on this issue. I was proud of my marriage before my husband’s affair, and I’m not sure that was a good thing. Pride made me naive about the vulnerability of relationships, and it made me see my marriage as an established edifice rather than an organic relationship that changes over time.

I value and appreciate my marriage and my husband, and those are the things I lean into in the post affair reconciliation landscape of our marriage. Those feel healthier to me than pride.

But it took me a long while to settle into this space. My husband’s affair was profoundly disorienting and made me question everything about him and about our relationship. I wondered if all the good things he had done were just a veneer, or if they had always existed alongside deceit and betrayal. I wondered if I had been fooling myself to think we had a good marriage. Those thoughts were frequent/dominant for at least a couple of years, and they would pop up off and on for at least a couple more.

It takes a lot of time to sort everything out, but when both partners’ emotions and efforts combine to make reconciliation possible, you can gradually get back to a place where you feel good about your marriage and your spouse, even if that good feeling is different than the pride you had before.

But healing is a long, hard process. It’s a marathon, like LBM said.

Dear op ,
I am reaching the 3 year mark from dd and just this morning l,I sent a message to wh telling him for the first time that I am proud of us. This became possible only through his consistency and efforts. It was the most difficult thing for me to do, I mean to stay, but yes I am proud of us. I couldn’t imagine back then that I would ever send again something like that, but… here we are. And now I am ready to use this terrible experience to strive for better things for me and for us. But, it was a loooong process….
Wishing you healing!

I'm not defined by the worst moments or worst mistakes in my life -- I define myself by how I changed and improved from those worst choices, worst days.

I look at my wife the same, exact way.

I don't define her by her worst, I look at her entire run at life, and see a more complex and complete person now, as someone who dug deep to understand her horrific choices.

My wife could have quit, walked away, denied she had any issues, but she has worked hard to become the best version of herself.

In that sense, I'm very proud of her and us for the work we've done to rebuild the relationship into something worthy of both of us.

[This message edited by Oldwounds at 6:00 PM, Monday, March 17th]

Grieving, very well put and a little less grim than my wording. I agree with what you have said.

In that sense, I'm very proud of her and us for the work we've done to rebuild the relationship into something worthy of both of us.

Same. Plus I have learned to protect my peace by staying more with the present version of us.

Because:

Pride made me naive about the vulnerability of relationships, and it made me see my marriage as an established edifice rather than an organic relationship that changes over time.

Mine leaned more into the "take it for granted" on the spectrum rather than what I suspect it means to grieving. I wish I recognized I didn’t have the skills that I needed to cross certain areas of my life. The only thing I can do moving forward is to be aware of the now and if things feel off to speak up. Being present in a long term marriage is a commitment, but I also see it as self care - because tending to my relationship is fullfilling and mutual now.

Sometimes self care is finding ways to make yourself feel safe that do not rely on him. Set aside money for what happens if this doesn’t work out. Learn your options. Lean into your own healing.

You may have chosen to try and work through this for now but it’s better if you can think about this first 6 months or so recovery. You will find yourself moving back and forth in the stages of grief and as you mentioned your husband is so messed up right now he will need some time to get his footing as well. So focus on the things you can control that are for specific to you.

You are in early days.

He’s needs to get into some Individual counseling and work on himself prior to digging into the marriage.

I remember reading that advice when I first came to SI and dismissing it because it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to fix us and get right back to where I thought we were.

There is no going back. An OG poster had a phrase.. ‘You can’t un@#%& the donkey’. Perhaps a blunt way to say it. But the truth is, you are now Drowning & Partner plus infidelity. It doesn’t have to define you but it will always be there.

Since I’m a copy cat I’ll parrot something else, I read on this forum. Right now infidelity is in the forefront of the landscape of your life. Grieving, talking, questioning, perhaps hysterical bonding…. It’s overwhelming.

Over time, it will recede to the background of your landscape. It will jump up and bite you occasionally, but if you both do the work… you can find an authentic, loving partnership again. There is something to weathering the fire, and coming out the other side after all the pain and work that I can’t explain other that to say it’s a wistful reverence of the process of building a new thing out of the rubble. It’s not necessarily as pretty, and curated for instagram as the old us, but this raggedy pair found knowledge of and vulnerability in each other again.

Some people choose to reconcile, some people move on alone. I’m 13 years out now, and I can say without a doubt that I would avoid the infidelity head on collision if I could have. But I also wonder if forced me to face some things about myself and my marriage that I might have continued to ignore….

You do your work, he does his work. And down the line a bit you’ll do the couple work.

When you start in CC it will most certainly focus a microscope on the infidelity. Hopefully his IC will prepare him for that. But over time you move on to other areas, issues, challenges….

What drew me to your post was the talk of pride and shame. My H found an huge amount internal validation in his integrity, work ethic and his role as great dad/husband.

Ego, I guess to some extent. I was drawn to his confidence when we met in college. He wasn’t a braggart, but he had a quiet self assurance that was attractive to me. I could go off on my co dependency radar, but I’ll limit it to say, we fit like an imperfect glove.

He chose to make some decisions and act counter to who he prided himself to be. Humbling himself to the fact that he was, in fact, a cheater was a very tough step for him. Others in my family knew, but that exposure didn’t seem to matter as much as the shift in his perception of himself. And he dove into that shame and lamented the loss of his character along with the damage he did to myself and the family. The fact that he mourned the damage to himself was not something I could have tolerated in early R. But that’s why it’s good to work separately for awhile.

I will say that I had to know certain details that mattered to me. If he had the audacity to do it, he could find the courage to speak and acknowledge it with me. I can say that part of my motivation was control, if I could gain the facts and I could better direct me/ us to the R I was tap dancing toward. But I also know I would not have been comfortable being intimate with him again without knowing what happened between them sexually.

I only say that to encourage you to make your own considered decisions on what you want to know. You can’t unknow it’s when’s it’s on the table. He may not be able to do so now, but it’s okay to make that disclosure part of your R. Your journey won’t match mine or others but we are here to support you as you navigate this mess.

Sending you virtual hugs tonight.

[This message edited by redrock at 2:22 AM, Wednesday, March 19th]