SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Bluelights, I feel like I could have done more while I was in the relationship too, but the fact that they chose this course of action and left in such a brutal way means for me there is no way back. I think this is something that will become easier with time. Cheated in every respect.

bluelights, in time you won't even remember this person. Getting to that point though is certainly a battle, but you've just got to stay strong. It's been 10 months since my DDay and I have a hard time remembering what the hell I even saw in her.

Abandonedguy. I’m looking forward to getting to the stage you’re at 👍 I’m three and a half months since DD and it is starting to get a bit easier. He is still with his new girlfriend and that is hurtful. The best thing I ever did so far is decide to have no face to face contact with him. I arrange childcare by email. It’s a tiny bit of control over the situation. I’ve also taken all his family off my Facebook so I don’t have any contact that way. It is a horrible shocking process, but surely we can be okay eventually. I have a joint mortgage with my ex, and this will be my next battle 😞

No contact is step one in healing every single time. The prolonged pain that we read about here is mostly a direct result of having to look in the face of the cheating spouse every single day, desperately searching for remnants of that person you fell in love with but being severely disappointed over and over again because you're only seeing a cold, selfish shithead in his or her place. Time heals all wounds, but so does distance. Time is just distance in the fourth dimension. Distance in the other 3 dimensions is also very important.

Good luck sorting through your assets with this guy. Make sure you get what you can. I took a smaller than 50% portion of our assets, but only so I could get away from her as fast as possible. If you have kids with this person, you're stuck being connected to them anyway, so you've got some time to really dig into things.

Edit: grammar

[This message edited by AbandonedGuy at 3:22 PM, July 11th (Thursday)]

Feeling so down today. Can’t stop wishing none of this had happened and keep thinking over and over again about the cheating and the betrayal and basically feel really let down and lonely. I still can’t understand how somebody I trusted has done something so horrible and hurtful to me. I had no idea our relationship was at the point of no return for him and today I feel worthless and flat. Like I have no joy in me at all. I don’t know why it is something I just can’t shake. I’m trying so hard to appear okay for my kids, but it’s difficult because I feel so sad 😞

[This message edited by Bookgirl at 10:33 AM, July 15th (Monday)]

That unique flavor of agony following a massive discard like our exes did to us will persist for a while. The thought, "Yeah but how could someone just up and leave like that, and how the hell could they act like everything's fine right up until I caught them, what kind of sick monster did I marry???", dipped in and out of my brain even long after I stopped missing her or our relationship.

It blows up your self esteem and your ideas about "true love" and "life partners" in one fell swoop. You feel like worthless scum, even when things are going your way. You feel like they wasted your damn time. You wish they gave the marriage another shot, despite the shitty odds of that succeeding, instead of running away like a damn coward.

It takes a very long time to remove those thoughts, and they leave in stages. Sometimes it helps to just take a day to wallow, as long as you cut it off and keep on movinf the day after. Time is your best friend right now.

Thank you. I know you’re right. It’s still sort of arriving in waves of disbelief. I think I tried to provide everything and make everything okay for him. It’s a difficult habit to break. In time I know I will be okay. My perspective has changed hugely in the last three months and hopefully another three months and I will feel more clear headed and hopeful. Thank you so much for your continued support.

I wake up in the morning and it feels like someone died 😞

three weeks since dday, full 180 no contact apart from the kids.

she is still fucking him. her glassy eyed happy pictures allover facebook as if she hasn't got a soul.

the 180 is causing her major discomfort though, and so is ANY talk of divorce. Stone walling, tears welling in eyes, slammed doors.

can someone explain to me that she is openly fucking another guy, updating her relationship status on facebook to include him, etc

but still gets huffy when i push for divorce?

how actually SICK can you get? How twisted are you when you have someone who loves you sprawling and writhing on a pin? It's like i'm a fucking voodo doll or something, with her evils pins all over me.

she has turned into trash. she wasnt always like this.

abandoned guy, i love your posts

I wake up in the morning and it feels like someone died

It will feel like this for a while. It's actually a good way to view it, as the trauma from this is similar to that of losing a loved one to death. Treat it that way, allow yourself to go through all the stages of grief.

Also, be aware that you likely will not progress through those stages in a linear way. It's normal to cycle back and forth between anger, sadness, bargaining etc. before you get to acceptance.

I’m struggling tonight. Long story short: DDay #1 Nov. 2018, took him back, DDay #2, Jan. 2019, took him back, DDay #3, April 2019, I couldn’t do it anymore. All with the same AP, who’s 15 years younger than him. We have 3 children, and been married 18 years. The pain I feel that he kept choosing her is immeasurable. The life we built meant nothing...he chose her, someone he’s known in person for 9 months. I don’t understand it. After everything he did, I was willing to forgive and work to make our marriage stronger. But it didn’t matter, he still chose her. Why? Why did our marriage and family mean nothing? Why did he stop loving me? Why did he discard me like yesterday’s trash?

heartinpain.

i think these people are just stone cold narcacists in teh main, or suffering an episode of narcism. when i look back on how my WW was throughout our whole marriage I see some worrying things -

a lack of depth. nothing really there beyond the eyes. I wouldn't describe her as a deep person, more like someone who just skips through life without anything really setting in deep.

Manipulative - i can remember week long silent treatments for minor infractions.

A lack of a bond - she never seem to really bond with anyone, including me. Again, a sort of shallowness.

Compulsive - feels good, give me it. Never really addictive, but a constant dopamine junky all the same.

But i loved/love her. She was funny. She could be kind. She had a lovely affectionate way about her. She was so cute and engaging. Damn, I loved her.

But alas the problems i highlight i once overlooked at they become clearer. I think they do what they do because they have bad characters and it is as simple as that, for me, anyway.

wow the first month since DDay and her leaving with him is FUCKING SHIT!

what a roller coaster. I have moved out, and he is visiting the house for booty calls and to spend time with my kids.

I am filing, no contact, 180 etc. She seems ambivilant, but not enough to stop seeing him. I don't know what she thinks, tbh.

We have the horrible situation where we want to keep the family home post divorce, for the kids, and selling it would mean downsizing (we live in expensive London) and massive disruption to the kids. Plus my elderly folk live nearby (where I am currently living - 38 fucking years old and staying in my old bedroom) and we cannot just desert them. So we are going to keep the family home post D - but only one problem, she can't afford the mortgage on her own, so that means I would still pay as normal but I get to stay at home with my already stressed folk. FFS. Anyway, we are meeting the bank next week to hopefully sort something out.

To be honest, I would rather stay in a dingy house share at the moment than spend another night with this acting out narcassist who is day by day destroying my soul by carrying on with her new, fat, alcoholic, chain smoking piece of shit.

Grrrrrr.

i might take up residence in this thread, i hope you dont mind.

(I still want her to wake up and come back )

people have said i will get some clarity. Meditation is helping with this. I can catch memories and let them sit in my mind. I am still only just under a month out.

Dots are being joined up, denial is being swept away. I am starting to see her in a different light. A much different light.

I am not talking about the A, I am talking about who she was before that. Traits:

A shallowness. I don't mean shallow in the sense that she can't enjoy say literature or in the sense of liking consumerism, etc. I mean a shollowness of emotions. Nothing ever seemed to strike deep cords within her. Me, I had certain deep obsessions in my life - music, literature, poetry, friends, community, politics, art, Buddhism. these things were deep preoccupations that i would bond with other people with, that would deeply affect my thought. But with her - there was nothing really that deep, nothing really in the "well" of her, if you like. All my friends and family have a depth to them, but her - I don't see this in her. It was like nothing really settled into her, and when it did, she just moved onto the next thing, a skipping over, like a stone being skipped on water like you do when you are a kid. But I loved her all the same. Maybe this was what I loved about her. A sort of non-attachment, enabling her to glide along with charm and wit. But I ignored it pre A, pushing my suspicions to one side. I ignored it all through our marriage. But I see it now. I see it and it makes me feel cold.

I can also see that people didn't really matter much to her in the sense of connections. She enjoyed her friends, but I would call none of her relationships deeply bonded.

I am beginning to see things clearer.

Can anyone else relate to these traits? Am i describing a particular personality?

Vent away puffstuff. And yes, that shallowness of emotions was something I felt with my XW as well. Don't know if it was only towards me or in general but at the end, I really saw how little I mattered to her. We met young so I chalked lots of shitty stuff like the tantrums, silent treatment as something that she'll grow out of and she for the most parts did but while leaving, it did dawn on me as to how inadequate she was to handle any conflict without escalating it into a me vs her fight that she HAS to win.

She had lots of great quality that I find attractive(ambitious, determined, passionate, and so much more) and my laid back personality meant that we stuck around for long but it never was a relationship that had the foundation to last. Maybe someday she'll realise how great we could've been if she had made some changes to herself. Because her default is to grind the other person down according to her whims, and the moment I decided to put my foot down, it was curtains.

I hope it gets better for you soon. Same for you bookgirl.

[This message edited by Rustylife at 11:55 AM, July 17th (Wednesday)]

These discarding shits are all different, but my ex-snake in the grass was exactly as you described.

She never maintained any close friends. I think maybe 3 or 4 times over 12 years did we visit or accommodate a college or high school friend. Half those times were weddings, then we never saw them again and she never spoke of them. She was always just close to coworkers, and then when she'd switch jobs, she'd forget the old ones and her new coworkers were now her "friends". It's no wonder she cheated with a coworker (and carried on an inappropriate friendship with one 6 years prior, both older men of course). I've got close friends who I've known for two decades, people I'd go to bat for every time. She reaped the benefits of my social circle.

So yeah, her lack of attachment to people never bothered me but in retrospect, it's an alarming trait, plus it assures me that she'll never ever reach out to me again. Imagine spending 12 years with someone, they act like everything's fine up until the day you catch them cheating, they tell you immediately they want out, then after 6 weeks of disassembling the marriage, they never speak to you again. Last contact was 9 months ago and not a peep. Creepy, really.

She was also bereft of any kind of interests. She never read, or had favorite things, or talked deeply about stuff, or pursued hobbies. She spent all her free time playing games on her phone, reading celebrity gossip, and shopping. So so so much shopping. Her interests were my interests and she was fine with that.

You know what this might be a sign of, though? A fucking chameleon, someone who gloms onto someone and becomes that person, pretends to share in their interests, so they can infiltrate their lives and foster a deeper attachment from that target. Narcs do that. The Narc term gets thrown around a lot, but you can only check over half the boxes on so many "is your spouse a narc" checklists before you start to think "you know what, that bitch was a narc!" and carry that with you for the rest of time. Another thing they do is "love-bombing", and that also includes the aforementioned chameleon bullshit.

I had access to our shared Amazon account for weeks after we split and I saw her purchase activity during and a few weeks after the separation. This guy shared similar interests as me--I feel like I was replaced in some regard, which sickened me for a while--as evident by the shit she was buying this guy. He's also, apparently, an avid hunter because she bought him that kind of stuff, too. All this mere weeks after I caught her affair, a day which started with me 100% thinking she was on board the "we're going to love each other forever" train. The level of deception that this fuckface achieved disturbed me for a very long time. Anyway, her buying him shit is of course a sign of love-bombing a new source of "ego kibbles" as a lot of people in the Infidelity World call it.

I could go on and on, but really I just want you to keep thinking critically about the full relationship. See the trends, spot the bad behaviors that you ignored, adjust your thinking to cope and move on. It's amazing how much we ignore when we're in love with these people. When someone you would've DIED FOR, very literally, casually rejects you and then show zero fucking remorse while doing it, it does a number on you. Keep posting, keep talking it out, exercise and eat right, sleep as regularly as you can, and take care of the legal shit as soon as possible. There's light at the end of this tunnel of shit.

Edit: Adding onto RustyLife's post, mine also threw tantrums and acted extremely childishly when things didn't go her way. But she was very good at her job, mostly pleasant around my friends and family, and very much into physical intimacy (cuddling and such, not just sex), so she wasn't all bad. Partially why it was so hard to fully appreciate all the very bad (such as secretly going off her birth control to force a baby).

[This message edited by AbandonedGuy at 12:02 PM, July 17th (Wednesday)]

I’ve been trying some meditation too, just to try and stop my brain from constantly being in overdrive. I think it helps. This thread has made me think about my ex too and he also had very shallow relationships that he didn’t maintain with any enthusiasm. After Dday I actually worried that if I didn’t encourage him to see our children he might feel disconnected and might not be interested in a strong relationship with them. He didn’t really invite anybody to our house and wasn’t very sociable. I always thankfully kept a strong friendship group. I think that no contact helps us to see the relationships more clearly with less gut wrenching emotion. I can see that he was emotionally immature too. But like everybody else here,I also completely miss how my life was before and my family being intact and happy. Although he has told me he was unhappy 🤷‍♀️ I wish he had spoken to me instead of all this. I also can’t help thinking that no contact makes it easier for him and his new girlfriend to have a stress free relationship which makes me feel horrible 😞

[This message edited by Bookgirl at 4:03 PM, July 17th (Wednesday)]

Also, the same as abandonedguy, puffstuff and rustylife, my ex had tantrums in the form of sort of flash anger which sort of silenced me. Thank you for advice hehadadoublelife, I’m going between all the stages of grief at the moment. I’m actually boring myself 🙄😔

I'm part of this club.

Fuck them. They can have each other.

OM divorced his wife on my XWWs whim. He left with nothing. Left his wife, daughter, and I guess took no marital assets. Lost his job. In some form of debt. His marriage was apparently "good but he wasn't in love with his wife"

My XWW in massive debt she hid. Pregnant with his child. Has probably cheated on me before in retrospect. "loved me soooooop much all these years". Is extremely lazy. Can't hold a steady job. Multiple failed businesses. Shit people skills.

Match made in heaven, I'm sure.

Not sure I'm actually a member of this subset, as I'm still with WS, but struggling with the same rejection but followed by his return, which is how I came to be reading this thread.

While WS was fully immersed in his A (unknown to me) he came back home at the weekend (was away every week, all week) and out of the blue told me it wasn't working and he was leaving. I think he actually said we should separate as 'it' wasn't working, so tried to share the blame/responsibility for that instead of coming clean about the years he'd had an EA with a friend, and was two months into a weekly, twice a night PA. No real reason given. I even asked if there was anyone else and mentioned her by name. Nope. No reason, except I wasn't happy him being away all the time, which was apparently difficult for him. Ignoring the fact he'd had sex with her at her place just days ago.

Unfortunately, he had an attack of the guilts, and stayed. I only found out about the A a bit over a year ago, and it kills me that he made the decision to deceitfully dump me to be with her. Even though he now says he chose me, he actually chose her first, when it came to decision time. So he obviously thought she was the better choice. Someone who knew full well he was with me at the time. So I'm second choice, and he stayed out of guilt. He had days to make his decision before he came home to me, without either of us there to influence him. And chose her.

I don't feel of any value to him, now I know. And now I also know about his long term heavy use of porn despite knowing I find it disrespectful, and EA-light interactions with other women.

So how do you deal with being second place to a morally lacking friend who hooked him with a home cooked dinner and a bj? Who he was leaving me for. I'm the guilt option. It must be so very hard when they leave, but after so many years of ignorance and being disrespected, I truly wish I'd known at the time. That he'd had the balls to be honest and left. I feel like our life together after that is a sham. A waste of my life on someone who doesn't deserve it.

Anyone else struggling with this right now, or have any words of wisdom for dealing with it?