It’s a hard comparison for me.
I was in worse pain after my affair. My mental state was compounded by having the affair in the midst of a diagnosed emotional exhaustion event. I had long lost a sense of self, had been deeply depressed and no idea how I was going to climb out of the pit that I had found myself in. It was a very dark time of crisis of the depths I only now can sort of fathom in hindsight. My affair was only a piece of what was going wrong in my life- it was more one of the effects of what had gone wrong.
To get to a place of remorse, I had to get to a point of a more stable state of mind. So it’s hard to separate the darkness I felt in feeling so lost and what I felt about what I did to him and developing empathy of what he felt. For me this is still balled together. It wasn’t just about dealing with all these intense emotions I needed to figure out how did I get where I was? And I knew saving us both relied on me getting myself together and figuring it out. Logically I could do that but emotionally and spiritually I was numb and could not make it all work together. I kept digging and digging and trying and trying and spinning my wheels. It was so raw so much of the time.
When my husband cheated I was in a much more stable place. I didn’t feel the responsibility to have to figure as much out.
We had already been to the brink of divorce and really had just been starting to get closer, things had seemed better between us. I guess it was his guilt that was creating that. I did have to work on not blaming myself but I wasn’t lost to myself the way I had been during the existential crisis that I was experiencing at the time of my affair.
That doesn’t mean it wasn’t painful. I had looked up to him through our whole marriage, always thought he was the better of the two of us. And despite what I did, I finally felt the comfort of truly being loved. And having come from such a dark long time not feeling worthy of love, and watching how much he conducted himself in grace, I felt a debt was there that I would never be able to re-pay, a gratitude I could never fully express, try as hard as I might.
When he cheated, he lost that belief I had in him. That sense of gratitude gone. So in some ways it was like a resonance of my remorse. I now see all the things he lost by being unfaithful and I knew now what I lost from him. And that was just so damned sad. But I had the advantage of having better coping tools at that point from time here and in therapy.
I think commitment got me through for most of it because honestly I didn’t cheat on him while feeling so in love with him. Some people who cheat are cake eaters. I was more of a blow it all up because all this sucks for me and I am not having any fun kind of cheater. So feeling love was something I had been unburying in the midst of all the debris that I had to wade through. But it was there for sure.
Between the time of my affair and his I had discovered it wasn’t his fault that we disconnected so badly - it had been mine by hiding behind my people pleasing and not taking up the space a normal person should in a relationship.
Anyway, I said commitment, because that first year we didn’t reconnect, the second year we were actively dating each other and trying to re-engineer our life and relationship. And in year three is when I started to feel that warmer feelings between us were percolating. It was in year three I thought hell we may really make it. So our connection felt to be there but it was still in the space of growing back. (I hadn’t lost what he lost when I cheated- from his standpoint our marriage was solid)
At the end of year three when I discovered his affair it was not as hard to detach. I felt at first like I was having an out of body experience, and then as it sank in further, it was easier to slip back into that uncertain feeling. And the uncertain feeling was more comfortable because the pressure was not on me to figure it out. We had already gone through the path towards divorce at the end of year one. I was pretty sure in the beginning that I wanted to reconcile if he agreed to go to therapy and work on his issues.
Then I went through a. Long period of maybe we should just divorce because things felt hopeless. I mean we’d both cheated, our marriage was a dumpster fire, what were we even fighting for anymore?
We had already planned to go on a long term traveling hiatus, and so uncertain of I wanted to be married to him anymore, and maybe feeling a bit more certain that I didn’t, after all the struggles of now four years, I just felt like maybe it wasn’t meant to be.
But I decided that I wanted to go on the trip. I didn’t see a reason either of us should miss it. I mean on the surface we could still get along, we shared similar sensibilities. He was aware that I was leaning towards divorce, so this was all in the open.
And it was from a place of great detachment that we found ourselves falling in love out there on the trails, the tours, the exploration and adventure. But that was an extraordinary circumstance. I don’t know if it saved our marriage or not, maybe we would have fiddled around at home until that happened.
I guess why I went into the full story is this- both times we were on the brink of divorce. Both times there was uncertainty. I did feel like I was more in the drivers seat after he cheated, but I was aware enough of being the origin of the chaos that it had kept me humble. So I think that was in check.
But in the first story so much of me died and new parts grew. But I lost his love and his image of me too. In the second story my love for him died because I had no faith in him or in us as a couple. New love grew in its place but it’s definitely a different love than it was before when he was still on my pedestal. Losing myself, losing his love and image of me and losing my love for him were all painful. But if I had to say which was worse it would have been losing myself.
In the aftermath of his affair I already knew who I was becoming and never lost sight of her. And I don’t think I will ever lose sight of her again, she just keeps coming in clearer all the time.
[This message edited by hikingout at 2:38 AM, Thursday, November 20th]
