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Lately I’ve been obsessing over things I’ll never know. Things I know he never meant , none the less I can’t help but wonder the stupid comments they told each other. I mean he’s told me some but obviously he won’t remember them all. He reminds me none of them mattered but it doesn’t help me.

I will imagine them laying in her car and him telling her bullshit compliments and vice Versa.

How did you all calm your thoughts around this?
There are so many things I’ll never know.

[This message edited by Groot1988 at 9:51 PM, Wednesday, September 4th]

Yup. I ask my H constantly, did you compliment them? He claims no, ha! There's no way that's possible. So then he changes it to I complimented them on their jobs because I know that's what they care about It would hurt, but I'd rather know what was said then know it's so bad he won't cop to it.

I also ask about inside jokes they had and he swears there were none. But then he lets slip that they used to quote a social media video to each other... that he also showed me and laughed about with me. So I was the sloppy seconds in their in-joke.

How lovely.

The answer for me was time and space to myself which ultimately brought acceptance. The amount of time that took? Hmmm - maybe around six months after d-day 3 (which was the last d-day). After d-day 1 I obsessed about those details. After d-day 2 (1 year of false-R - ongoing underground A continuing with same person) I had the phone forensically recovered and got more details than I ever wanted to know, and I only read about 4 months of the 16 months I recovered - it was just too much. After D-day 3, 3 months of no A followed by more false-R for about 2 months before I caught them again) I knew I had to get away from him and that really altered my thought process. And honestly, I got to a point where I was just sick of wondering and thinking about it and admitting to myself that I was doing a bit of pain shopping when I engaged in that behavior.

Now we date, even after we terminated our marriage and no longer live together, but I still don't go back to those thoughts. They hold nothing for me now - like nothing at all. I am unbothered by them and they do not effect my feelings or self-esteem. Zero.

I do think it also depends on how much you know about the A. In my case WH's A went on for about 2 years. Did I really need to know if he complimented her underwear choice or the shape of her breasts or whatever else and when/how often when I already KNEW for 100% certainty that they had a lot of sex in the beginning (first 4 months) when I was out of state working, swapped "I love you's" daily, had even more disgusting sexting and non-in-person sexual experiences multiple times a week, texted each other hundreds of times a day while working, if not more, for roughly TWO YEARS??? I eventually had to ask myself "why did I care about the specifics so much?" And the answer I think was a combination of my mind trying to tell me not to let my guard down as this person was unsafe, and to not forget he was unsafe, and my own pain-shopping.

The real fact is you KNOW you will never ever know everything, and honestly my WH could not recall every little thing he said anyway (just like he can't recall everything he's ever said to me). It's just not realistic.

I saw text messages and that provided enough info so that I knew he put me down and bad-mouthed me and our M, she also put me down, so they were mirroring each other. While I didn't see any ILYs in text, they said it over the phone. They spoke on the phone a lot, so I knew he wouldn't remember everything.

I knew that I would never know everything, but I knew when I had learned enough. For obsessing thoughts, I used meditation to refocus my attention to stop the thought spirals.

I found out a fair bit of what they shared. It made me crazy knowing. When I think back, I kind of wish I was less obsessive about knowing. It
Hurt more and added a healthy dosage of bitter. He used his words to compliment her, to lie to me, to lie to her, words mean so much less than choices and actions.

Maybe try to switch your focus to now, your healing. If you are in R, what is he saying to You. How do you feel? Is he committed to R by repeated actions.

I am sorry you are hurt. Infidelity is crushing.

Tall girl.

His actions are consistent and he is being a model H now.
He reminds me he loves me and that anything he did then was all just bullcrap and a way to get his ego fed by telling her lies so he could get those ego kibbles in return but it doesn't change the fact he said them or had sex with her.

I wish his actions meant more to me than they do and it is so frustrating because I see the changes, I see the new man that is transforming in front of me who was always emotionally and mentally immature and he is becoming so much more than I ever thought he could.
I still don't like him much most days and even though he keeps trying I see the sadness and defeat in his eyes when I stay sad and want to be alone. he never voices it and he gives me my space but deep down I want to be beside him and laugh but I can't. Right now I feel like what he did to us and who he was capable of being is almost a deal breaker for me... as time goes on I can see the broken pieces of him that were always there and how none of this was our fault but what he did set of a chain of events that has been horrible.

I am doing my best and I know actions always speak louder than words, he always came home to us, even though I hate how that sounds, he never had any intentions on making it anything other than what it was with her.
I am big on words, lyrics, compliments, poetry, all of that is like healing to my soul so the things he said to her or could have said to her cut like knives, if that makes sense? The never ending nightmares about them doesn't help either.

It all just sucks so bad.

I am sorry you are struggling. The one thing that I know to be true is the pain is in the details. And I each of these details have to be processed. It’s like drinking from a fire hydrant.

With my husband, this aspect bothered me a lot. It touched every insecurity I have/had. Yes, as a fellow ws I know the woman he was saying this stuff to- the compliments, the bad things he said about me, the way they discussed very intimate areas of our marriage- that woman was a figment of his imagination. I know that. He didn’t really want her, and I know that too.

It takes time to release some of these things, and you will put them down and circle back. And I do believe that each time you circle back it hurts a little less, stays a shorter time.

While you hate to see the disappointment in his eyes, what you are doing is the best thing you can do for either of you. You have to have room to process it in order to heal. And I suspect it will be a long time before you are feeling like you know for sure what you want to do. And that too is an aspect of the discomfort- not having that security, that easiness between you. You are not purposefully punishing him, and it’s obvious by what you wrote he isn’t going anywhere. You don’t know it yet, but if you do ultimately reconcile part of it will be from all the time you watched him put what you need first. Each time he swallows his consequences and keeps improving will mean something later.

But there is no room for that yet. There is only room for your processing. You are doing what is needed because of what he did.

If you were two years out I might talk more about how things get reframed or how you need to change the channel. But right now you are bravely grieving.

I will imagine them laying in her car and him telling her bullshit compliments and vice Versa.

That struck a chord with me.

The best times for me have always been when we've been together, in tune with each other, not needing to talk. I guess that's what bother me the most - I imagine them doing that. That’s an image that still has power over me. Thanks for bringing it up.

I'll share this with my W. Maybe it applies to you, Groot, or to another reader.

I was an absolute super sleuth, digging up everything I could find. I feel grateful now that the words that they exchanged were 99% inaccessible to me since they used work email and chat to communicate. I only found one personal email; he called her a cute little nickname and asked her on a picnic, and that was yucky enough. Like you, I'm a words, music, quotes, poems girl.

Hugs.

Absolutely agree - the things that were said, or that I imagine having been said, really cut deep. It sounds like some of you have more communicative husbands than I do. So that cuts both ways…they probably said things to their AP that they probably didn’t mean but were sweet or cutesy or compliments which sucks. I get the impression (also overhead some VAR convos) that lead me to believe my husband said very little. But, he also says very little to me. So it’s like yeah!! You didn’t compliment her much, didn’t use a sweet name but then again I sometimes wish I had a husband that was capable of saying those things. I mean he has vocal chords so I guess technically he COULD say them…

The one thing he admitted was responding to her fishing with "…I’m really insecure, no one has ever told me I was beautiful………". To which he said "no you are beautiful…". When I think of those things I would like to see him drawn and quartered.

For me it really didn’t matter what he said to the OW.

But the hateful things he said to me during his affair may have been his biggest regret.

Because when he decided he wanted to R, I threw every horrible thing he said right back at him. As in "why would you want to R with me because if you remember, you said I was ……".

1st Wife, I am right there with you too!

The things that he said to me was another topic i posted a while ago when I first joined.. they still sit with me too like a ton of bricks and I carry them around still..

for a few hours he teeter tottered on the idea of staying with me and HIS Children, it didn't last long but he continued his A for another week , I didn't know then that it was going on.

He told me how "great" she was.
How she "knew" him better.
How she was "funnier"

blah blah blah

trust me, I get that too...

Of course the cheater has to be mean and nasty to the BS.

It’s how they justify the affair to themselves.

How sad!😔

1st wife - absolutely agree. WH told me since we got married I wasn’t very nice to him. Always angry and talking down to him. Whilst I can admit towards the end before the A I was unkind sometimes I was not the tyrant he tried to tell me I was. And he also regretted it as I always through it in his face that he was married to a ‘tyrant’ of a wife and must be sooooo terrible to be married to me, why stay?

Also, WH didn’t really have much communication with AP except for talking poorly about other workers (fucking hypocrite’s) and little sexual meme’s, gif’s and emojis. Just shows how pathetic they both were really. I’ve told WH he now needs to not bother sending me ‘cute’ pictures and needs to use his big boy words 🤣

I found a number of messages my WH put on a dating chat room to someone he had just ‘met’ online.
What was really stomach churning was that the things he said about his ‘skills’ in the bedroom were all things I had told him and complimented him on, and he even quoted my phrasing. Ugh!
I am personally glad I chose not to read everything, as all that I read is imprinted in my brain (and, luckily, saved in a number of different places digitally!).

But the hateful things he said to me during his affair may have been his biggest regret.

This is really key, especially as quite a lot came from the AP. Apparently, I ‘didn’t deserve him’ (this was a week after he had committed adultery) and I was ‘f……ing disgusting’… this was the day after he had sex with the AP. I was also called a liar repeatedly (when I had not lied).

A perceptive friend pointed out that every horrible thing he said to me was actually how he felt about himself. That has really helped me not take those words to heart but deflect them (in terms of my own self-esteem). It doesn’t undo the fact he said such venomous things, however.

In this way I suppose the cheaters do not seem to follow the handbook - After I had the phone forensically recovered I had access to just about every thing they sent to each other for 14 months. I read about 6 of it in total and honestly I was rarely mentioned, and when I was, it was almost always by AP and WH really just refused to talk about me unless pressed.

For a time (after d-day 1 and during the year of false R) WH was lying to AP about how I was looking for work out of state and was planning to leave him - seriously he made it sound (in like 4 sentences) that he and I had spoken about ending our relationship and that I was looking for work elsewhere so I could move away. And for a bit she would ask if I had found work and he would respond "no." Of course this was about as far from the truth as possible - WH on the daily was asking me about local jobs as for a time during my 1 year of false R I had talked about just leaving my 2 year contract and moving away because I was doing so poorly with my job that I felt I should quit instead of getting fired, which I felt was imminent (it wasn't by some miracle). So then, after like 4 months of that, WH told her I had decided to stay out the contract, and that was it. She asked like 3 questions and he just totally ignored them aside from saying "what's done is done" and moving on.

But to echo others - I too was a super sleuth to the point I found a bunch of old emails he had saved in a folder from YEARS before we met to his old girlfriend (I was searching his whole hard drive). I accessed the router logs in our house. I had his phone forensically recovered. And, I saw too much really, that I simply did not need to, as I mentioned in my first post.

Glad to see this topic come up. I've always wondered what my WW and AP texted/wrote to each other, and I never did see any of it. They used gaming/chat apps that left no trace, or at least a trace that I could figure out. Supposedly they never talked on the phone, it was completely via written words (and pictures).

For me, I would have preferred to see what they wrote each other, but then again, maybe it's better that I didn't. If I had, it's possible I never would have accepted her back, because words mean something to me.

Also, I'd say that the one thing as a whole that bothered me a great deal was everything I didn't know about the affair. Not knowing is probably a blessing...but also a curse for me.

I only saw one day of sext messages between my wife and her coworker and she was smart/deceitful enough to delete them every day before she left work yet claims she thought it was harmless flirting :/

I have asked multiple times what else they said to each other but she claims she cannot remember, says it was just superficial compliments, that it meant nothing. Her saying she would have sat in his lap had he sat down in a chair in her office-yup, very superficial :/

The questions she claims to not have answers to, that is keeping me from moving forward.

When did this start? I don't remember
What else did you say to each other? I don't remember
Did you communicate outside the office? No (but then that answer changed to I don't know which to me screams yes but I know if I say yes my husband will know I initially lied so I better keep my mouth shut and claim I don't know)

T/J -

WB1340, Your W is piling betrayal onto betrayal with her IDR answers. I never had to go through that, so I can't imagine how painful that is, but I suspect it's lot more painful than getting straight answers.

Groot started this thread, though, and she'll get the bulk of the support. I urge you to start your own thread so support can go directly to you.

End T/J