SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Limerickence (I hope I spelled that right), I think you're doing your best to avoid any real negative feelings, especially anger or grief or sense of betrayal, you probably do have in your wife. For your wife to be screwing around literally in your house, on her birthday, that I would guess you arranged for her, telling you to leave your own bedroom because she wants to have sex with someone else....and you are still associating with these people, whom I understand are STILL married and probably the OBS' don't know about this shenanigans, I think you are deeply deeply not in love with your wife or in limerance.....I think you are just in denial. I think you have such a desperate need to cling to or hold on to this woman, and she sounds pretty awful to me, very disrespectful to you, and you just sound like a masochist who is willing to accept and try to find reasons or excuses for this abominable treatment of you. She might well be a mental case or alcoholic, I don't know, but she is NOT A NICE PERSON. And she is NOT respectful of you, which is a basic requirement for a spouse.

I think you need to stop wondering about her...I'm just gonna say flat out that i think she's just a bitch but you are afraid of losing her or perhaps being on your own. This is why I ask you to think about not what you want with her, but what you want out of life and specifically a relationship - in general, what your needs and goals are without factoring her specifically in. Once you have some idea of that, then maybe you can consider how this relationship fits in, but I think you are in severe denial about what she is like, what she did, how you feel about this, and what the future will be like. How can you want to continue in a relationship with someone who does only what she wants unilaterally and shows NO RESPECT FOR YOU?

This is what I see and I think you might actively consider at least some of this instead of just burrowing in.
I'm sorry if I seem harsh but I'm trying to shake you up because you seem like you're sleep walking through this relationship and maybe through life.

your response to me about therapy is bizarre and smacks of codependency. What I meant by things in your control is YOU. It is unhealthy to stake your self-determination on anyone else's thoughts on anything. I cosign 5Decades on therapy, it seems like you would benefit so much from IC: a space for you to work out these bad feelings that are coming up. I'm not sure what your resistance is there.

It should be no surprise that chat GPT mirrored back your thoughts; it's explicitly programmed to interact that way. That's why chat GPT is not an appropriate replacement for therapy, and has caused many people harm who have unfortunately mistaken it for therapy or mental health treatment.

You've said WW is compartmentalizing, but you come across as the compartmentalizer here. You are the one that wants to stash your bad feelings away and go back to "normal," except you're also struggling to form boundaries around your needs in a normal relationship for you. WW does what she wants and you are left with this "missing step" in the staircase emotionally.

It's not quite that I'm completely unbothered by infidelity, I think it's just less important to me than other considerations.

Then the infidelity will continue.

I really think Torso might be onto something here...

You've said WW is compartmentalizing, but you come across as the compartmentalizer here. You are the one that wants to stash your bad feelings away and go back to "normal," except you're also struggling to form boundaries around your needs in a normal relationship for you.

Just some food for thought.

This also raises the question, what, exactly, is "normal" for you? I ask because what you describe about your relationship is not what most married people would define as "normal."

Lim,

My observations of what you have written seem to tell me that you want to wrap this up in a box and put it away, not think about it anymore.

And that isn’t happening.

It’s nagging you.

Being betrayed and lied to for decades isn’t something you can just ignore. You know that now because it keeps coming back up, even though you try to stuff it down, or tune it out, or pretend it away. You have tried logic, reasoning, "accepting", philosophizing……..all the things to try to tell yourself that your wife didn’t ACTUALLY betray you.

That she didn’t REALLY do anything wrong, just had physical contact with other people, carried on over years with another woman, "failed to mention" sexual encounters, but but but but it really didn’t happen and besides, it was hormones.

If it was really "perimenopause" causing or contributing to her infidelity, please ask yourself how it is that she was doing all of this long before perimenopause?

ChatGPT tells you what you want to hear if you ask for supportive feedback. Try asking it to be harsh and frank with you, and see what feedback that AI "therapy" hits you with.

Because you can have a real-life human interaction that will just tell you what you want to hear, too. Or, you can decide that hearing yourself echoed back is NOT helping you solve your inner conflict, and seek out actual real-life experienced counselors who can and will get you to see what’s really happening in your life.

Hint: what’s happening is that your wife is a serial cheater, you’re afraid she will leave you if you don’t let her continue, and you do not know how to handle the pain, address the loss of self-worth, and the fact that you face a future with more of the same unless you figure out exactly how you feel and what YOU want out of this relationship.

I always say that when we discover our spouse has cheated, it’s like waking up in a different life story where all the the same but the storyline is totally different.

You can choose to stuff this in the box, and to live in fear and insecurity. That’s an option.

Or you can decide to get a professional into your life to help you understand what happened, why it happened, how to deal openly and honestly with your feelings and needs, how to deal with your fears, how to self-advocate in this relationship, and how to establish boundaries for yourself that offer you a sense of safety and security in the relationship.

You are not skilled in those things. If you tried to rewire your house, you would get a licensed electrician. If you needed to install a septic system, you would hire help. If you are sick, you get medical professionals to care for you.

Now is the time to get professional care for your emotional and mental health, and IMHO insist the same for your wife.