SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

It feels good to look at eachother and know that we're almost on the same page, communication is getting easier now.I've been do a lot more reading then posting but I have to say thank you to all you brave hearts out there who share your stories good bad and ugly it gives me hope that we can all change and find that happy ending I know our struggle is not just yet over but knowing he's is this with me and that WE are worth it speaks volume and again thank you to all bc if I didn't read and take a lil from each story I wouldn't have thought we could move forward.

[This message edited by Lostly88 at 12:06 PM, August 25th (Sunday)]

I can't tell you how much I needed this thread. I am more in love with my FWH and my new self than I ever imagined possible. Thank you all for sharing, it can feel like losing your mind at so many stages of reconciliation and doubt is so terrifying. This thread is a tool I will use when I get lost in fear and uncertainty.

My husband revealed the affair with the fact that he was leaving me and going to the other woman, and within an hour of the discovery I told him no. That simple fact has beaten me down so much, that it sometimes overshadows the amazing relationship work we have done.

I think I am actually lucky. If not for this atomic bomb in our marriage, we had a dismal future of non-communication and parallel unhappiness. We are free now. We are free to say anything to each other, because the unimaginable has happened. That freedom leads to real love, a real love that I truly believe not many couples are privileged enough to live inside of.

I am so proud of myself for saying no, and for my husband to be willing to try when he felt that all hope was lost.

From great pain comes great rewards, there is only the path that exists behind us - that we cannot alter. We are building the path ahead of us with purposeful decisions and love each and every waking moment.

I am 3 years in and wondering how engaged we are in our lives again. it makes me uneasy when all of a sudden the W sends me a note.

"LHAP,

know I don’t tell you this enough, but I am very grateful and blessed to have both you and DS in my life each and every day. I know you had a choice to make to stay, and still have that choice every day, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about that. Thank you for making the choice to stay, even when I gave you every reason in the world to leave. I am beyond grateful for that.

We really do have a blessed life."

That my friends is worth more than any amount in gold.

This can work, people do change and remorse with love provides a fuel for connection.

1year Dday is just 11 days away. The road has been steep and filled with hell but the benefits at the top of the mountain couldn't be better. Our marriage is so much better, more fulfilling, sexier and happy then it has been in years. Even with the ups and downs I wouldn't trade it for going back to my old life. The old life was broken.....this one is a keeper !!!!

T

I realized after the fact that yesterday was the 9 month Anti-versary and I didn't get caught up in it. I didn't walk myself through that night - dredge it up.

I am so happy with where we are right now. We are genuinely happy to be with one another and it appears many of our family and friends have noticed too. I am sure their jaws would hit the floor if they knew what is behind our new-found awareness of each other.

It has taken so much to get to where we are. I can only hope that we can keep moving forward.

LA

As requested, I'm reposting this.

I posted in OT(http://www.survivinginfidelity.com/forums.asp?tid=507808) about my panic last night thinking I had lost the box containing all the pictures and mementos that I have of the daughter I gave up for adoption. My wonderful H remembered exactly where the box was and brought it down from the attic today.

And there was so much stuff in the box that I didn't remember.

After dday # God Only Knows in August/September 2011, I took our wedding album, tore it to pieces and threw all the pages into the front yard. They sat there for days, getting rained on, etc. They were ruined and at some point, JM picked it all up and disposed of them.

After we R and renewed our vows, I regretted destroying the pictures because I thought they were all we had. I thought our professional album had been destroyed in the house fire we had in 2000.

Well, when I was going through the stuff in this box tonight, I opened up a very old jewelry box, and inside was our original wedding album. All of the professional pics from our wedding were there. I wept, tears of relief that these pictures still existed. Tears of... grief, seeing the hope and anticipation on those young faces and knowing the pain that the future held for that bride and that groom. Tears of healing, realizing that God has taken the broken shards of our past and made a beautiful mosaic of our life.

I wish we could have learned the lessons and become who we are today some other way. But I know me, and I know JM, and we both always had to take the longer, harder path to everything. We could never do anything the easy way.

So here we are. I can now look at those wedding pictures and smile, knowing that we are here, we are together, we are not beaten or broken.

And I am happy.

Very sad

[This message edited by Lifeshattered at 5:38 AM, October 1st (Monday)]

I am a spouse who has fully reconciled with my husband who was with prostitutes. I think my story is #81 on this thread. We have worked together to create the marriage we both want. A marriage with love, lust,laughter, communication and honesty. I'm sure there are others.

My H used prostitutes, and I think our reconciliation is longer and harder because it's so gross. On DDay I threw up.

90% of the time we do ok, but we still have the occasional bad few days. The only way I could come to terms with it was to find out 'why'. For him he was badly sexually abused and although I know that's not an excuse,

it's a reason. He was very broken.

With prostitutes there's no EA. I comforted myself that they were never going to want him, and he didn't want them either. It was a business arrangement.

The one that bothered me the most was an ex pupil of his who said she loved him and wanted him for herself.

At almost a year out, I'm optimistic that it'll be ok. I honestly believe that people can change if there's enough love.

Our marriage is getting better and better. We're making it.

My heart goes out to you, it's got to be the worst sort of infidelity, but even this isn't beyond repair.

[This message edited by Healinggirl at 8:12 AM, October 1st (Monday)]

Can't post here just yet I'm afriad, but just wanted to say that reading here is giving me a boost to keep going.

THanks to everyone for sharing.

This is one of the most positive stories I have found:

http://wemadeitblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/this-is-my-story.html?m=1

It helped me a lot just knowing that someone made it through and found a new normal! This has given me a lot of hope. When D-Day happened I had never heard a successful story, so I searched everywhere to find one. I liked that he posted his entire story because it made it easier to relate to where he was coming from, and how far he had come to get where he is today!

After all the help and support I've received from SI these past few months, I'm so glad to have a positive story to add.

My husband and I have been in R, and while things are going well I was anxious about our having to spend Thanksgiving apart. Long story - has to do with one of our kids attending an out-of-state camp over the holiday - the point is that on top of everything else that's happened this year, we're now spending a holiday apart for the first time and we're apart as a family.

The day after I put husband and child on the plane, I was getting ready in the morning and discovered a card hidden in my dresser drawer. It was from my husband, who had written a long note that came as close to baring his soul as he's ever done in all the years we've been together. If I were to write out everything one would want to hear from a fWH, all of those things were in this note...and it came at just the right time, when we were beginning a week apart. The "old" husband wouldn't have thought ahead to how he might do something nice for me while we were apart, nor would have have shared such personal sentiments...so both huge signs of how much has changed in our M.

And....the other day was the six-month anti-versary, which I didn't realize until I was falling asleep at night. I was absolutely thrilled to realize that after counting down the days and weeks since D-Day for months...I actually forgot this milestone!

Time to add another post here... Friday was the 2nd antiversary of Dday. The day came and went without a hitch. There was about a three minute conversation about how shitty that day was. The rest of the day was about how far we have come. Dday feels much more like a starting point than an ending point.

Just in love with my husband and family today. Feeling so grateful to both of us for being strong enough and willing to go through this for each other.

Merry merry.

Was cleaning out some old emails and found this email from my BH from almost two years ago. It pretty much sums up our positive reconciliation story :

So I am sitting at my desk and thinking of the last 25 years of our life together. So many extreme events both good and bad and so many emotions both good and bad. The one constant through it all has been our love for each other. We battled the odds that were stacked against us from the beginning and came out on top.

In 73 days we will celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary in Jamaica, the place we began as us. I cant wait to just forget about everything and just take time to relax with the woman I love.

If I look at our life together like a book it would have 5 chapters

Chapter 1: The early years.

We were two kids living the life. We had our own place and we were so grown up. We painted and decorated our first place with such love and to us it was our castle.

A couple of years went by and then we started our family. We had it all, we were so much in love and had two beautiful healthy kids, who could ask for more?

Chapter 2: My selfish years

Looking back I can now see that I had everything and almost threw it all away. I was only thinking of myself back then. I think back then we both resented each other for different reasons. We had no tools to communicate our feelings or our needs to each other. I know we tried but we just didn’t know how to listen.

The funny thing is I never for one minute stopped loving you. You were on my mind always.

Chapter 3: Moving on

We worked through our problems the best we knew how and moved on in more than one way. First we rebuilt our marriage to the best of our capabilities. Then we literally moved. We took our family to the suburbs and ended up in ---------. At the time I thought we were in heaven. I remember loving coming home from work and feeling like I was on vacation. The first part of this chapter was great. We had a fresh start in a beautiful little town and our love was as strong as ever. Our two babies were doing great. What else could we ask for?

Then bam 9/11 hits us and turns our world upside down. It took a couple of years for me to recover emotionally from that.

Chapter 4: A living hell

This chapter starts with my mom getting sick and then passing away. The four of us took this real hard. She was a great mother to us and a wonderful grandmother to our kids.

The following year the bottom began to drop out. Although it would take two years for the bottom to completely fall out it had begun.

Looking back now I can see us growing apart and taking each other for granted. Not to mention the resentment that was growing.

Then that horrible day in August came that would change the landscape our lives forever.

How the hell do we recover from this? And to make matters worse we were having huge problems with our son.

By the end of this chapter we started to rebuild the foundation of our marriage with such tenacity. We were so motivated to fix what had been so badly broken. I truly believe that we succeeded in doing that.

Chapter 5: A new beginning--- on our way to a happy ending.

So we start this final chapter so much in love with each other. We both have a new found love and respect for one another

We watch our baby graduate and leave the nest.

We then buy a beautiful house in ----- and we are empty nesters so much in love with each other. I am so much enjoying this part of our lives.

This chapter is not over yet but one thing I know for sure is it will have a happy ending.

Happy Anniversary my love.

Thank you for this topic. Just over a year post DDay, wanting to stay in this marriage, but finding it hard. Positive stories help. Hope I will be able to post my own some day.

Can anyone please give me some specific advice about how to make the transition from "just getting through each day" to having a relationship that we actually enjoy again? I think that I deserve better. D-Day was 1.5 yrs ago; affair was 1 1.5 years long, after 22 years of marriage. There seems to be very little emotional attachment. We went through counseling for a short while, and it did help but our insurance is terrible....I do not want to be the one to do the "heavy lifting" - I'll admit it.....I appreciate any specific pointers.

Hello suddenlysad, welcome to SI. There are a ton of people here who have a lot of experience navigating their way through this chaos. You will get many more responses by starting a new thread whenever you are ready. We are here to help.

An, your post was awesome

Great post AN! I know when our bottom started falling out and I know when it got worse. We ignored too much for too long. Tired of that, I ran into the fire, he, on the other hand checked out. Then Dec, 6, 2012. It changed us forever and I believe for the better. Didn't see that last year at this time but I do now.

((suddenlysad)), Welcome to SI. I am sorry for your hurt. And no. You should NOT be doing all the heavy lifting.

As Chicho wrote, start a new post in Recon bc many are not likely to see this one in this particular thread.