SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I know that it is hard to reconcile everything when you find out so far after the A. I just found this forum. I notice there isn't alot of activity here too. I just want you to know I heard you. I too think it is a different process learning after the fact. I am so new to this whole thing as I just found out a couple weeks ago. But he ended the affair on his own years ago. It makes me so sad.

Amialone....thanks so much for your reply. I'm so sorry you are dealing with this as well. It's now been 26 years since my FWH affair (I found out approx 14 months ago) and it IS hard to go from 25 years of basically a good M and good husband/father/papa (grandpa) to being hurt, angry, sad, resentment. AND...that so many details have been forgotten or compartmentalized or whatever happened to them. My FWH is very remorseful and doing everything he can to help me heal, but it's still so difficult, as you know!

How long ago was your Husband's A? How did you finally find out? Please do not feel you have to answer these questions or share anything else unless you want to and are ready. Feel free to PM me anytime too.

I just think it's different finding out so long after. I'm not saying it's any worse by any means,just different. It's hard to explain unless it's the way it happened to someone.

Again, thank you for responding! It meant alot.

Wishing you all the best!

Tryingtoloveagain-

I too think it is a different situation finding out after the fact. I don't mind sharing my story with you. Since I am new to the site I can't send private messages yet. You are more than welcome to message me if you are able. It helps me just talking since I have kept this private from all of my family and most of my friends.

I have been married for 13 years. Our marriage started to get difficult after year 2. After our first year of M my H made a friend with a woman from work. We all became friends. Our kids and her kids were the same age. We went dancing together vacationed together she was married part of the time. She became one of my closest friends. But after a year or so of "friendship" I started to get a bad feeling about her. So I began to avoid her. Her and my husband remained friends. While the affair was happening I was very suspicious. They would meet for lunch and go dancing without me. But I would never believe it unless I caught them in the act. My situation is a little crazy since they were going out with each other almost every night as "friends" for years. My H is a recovering addict. He was not a good husband or father. About 19 months ago he had a huge change. Started AA and going to church. A total turn around. It was eating me up since I always thought that he was unfaithful during those years. He was awful to me and the kids. I told him during those rough years if he was cheating on me I'd leave. About 2 weeks ago he came to the part of the 12 steps program that ask to make amends. He didn't want to tell me but I asked about this "friend" that is how I found out the "truth".

It has been awful trying to come to terms with everything. He had ended the affair I don't know exactly when. He is unclear. But since they were trying to "protect" my feelings. She remained in contact with me and him. Until D-day 2 weeks ago. It is sick that she could continue communicating with me after she slept with my husband.

Piecing together has been a challenge because he doesn't "remember" because it was awhile ago. And because he was abusing drugs.

Finding out now changes everything too. Since I would have left him then for sure. But now he is becoming the man he should have always been. We are going to work through this. But it tears me up so much. I'm just sad that he really did that. He is very remorseful and is trying very hard. He says he will do whatever it takes. And he loves me so much. I ask "why didn't you love me this much back then?"

How about you? How are you doing? How did you find out so far after the fact? I am so sorry that this is happening to you. Anytime you just need to talk or share I'm here. It's sad that we can find relief through shared grief. But it helps knowing that someone else gets it.

Trying 2 love again I'm so sorry you are going thru this. I'm 22 months from dd. My FWH had a PA 24 years ago. He purposely blocked out all but the actual act. I feel I could get past this ( whatever that means) if he could remember and give some kind of a timeline. My FWH is in IC. I hope you are able to get whatever you need to get thru each day.(hugs)

Trying2Love,

Yes, not much activity, so I hang around the Reconciliation thread a lot because I am trying to R.

I learned a year ago about a texting affair and a ONS but 11 months later found out about 4 other As dating back 18 years, just 3 years into our marriage. I feel like my life is a lie but am working on trying to think about him being there for me and vis versa over the years and holding onto that. It sounds like your H moved on to become a good partner, no? Anytime we find out about affairs current or past it is horrible. I'm so sorry you find yourself here.

Itstohard....thanks so much for your post...My FWH affair was 26 years ago (we had been M about 10 years at the time) however I only found out about it 14 months ago. I did suspicion something though for several years. You can read my story on my profile if you want. I seem to do better for a while and then go thru a rough spell again. My H is doing all he can for the most part to help me heal, but I just have so much anger and resentment! To be deceived for 25 years is hard to get past!

Like your H, he blocked SO much, and it's hard to heal when certain details seem to be missing! I know you fully understand this too! He says he doesn't WANT to remember this horrid time and I appreciate that, but at the same time...WE need certain details too!

We'll keep working and praying to some day overcome this battle!

Prayers for you as well! I'm thankful for people here who honestly understand! PM me anytime you might need some "private" talk....

ReeseR1....Thank you so much for your post! As far as what my FWH has told me, his A 26 years ago was the only time anything happened with anyone outside our M. I do believe him as our M between the A and now has been good (of course the usual ups & downs happened, like in all M). But a part of me still can't help but say...If he could lie to me about this A for SO long..could he still have other secrets???? I'm just not very trusting of him or anyone else anymore!

I feel like you do...that my M and life has just been one big lie! He keeps trying to reassure me that it wasn't. That he loved me even during the A. And really, I do think he did, in his own perception of what love was back then.

Yes, he has been a good partner since then and honestly was a good one before the A, I would say up until about 6 months to a year before it happened. At about that time we were having lots of personal, as well as financial problems. You can read my story on my profile if you'd like. There's more detail there.

I'm so glad you are working on R and praying you will make it! It sounds like you are doing well with it? We are trying to R as well, it's just that I am still going through periods where I'm not sure I'LL make it! Hoping this is just normal!

If you ever find yourself needing some "private " talk, I gladly welcome PM.

Thank you again for your post and prayers for your R.

Amialone...Sent you a PM. But forgot to add in it that I am SO glad to hear your H is in recovery! I have dealt with addiction with several family members and friends, so am not a stranger to it. God bless you for standing by him! It's not easy to do I'm sure! Mine is not with my H, but some people I love very much, and it's tough!

Hang in there! We are stronger than we realize!

I read here from time to time and sometimes post. I am one who found out seven years later and tried to r. It was vert difficult because I felt like I never got the whole story. It was also hard because at the time my gut told me something was up and when I asked him about it, I got the you're crazy speech.

I think it's much harder to recover and reconcile when a WS keeps the secret for so long but also that if and when asked about cheating, lied.

I gave my ws and marriage a second chance but either he couldn't face me after I found out or he couldn't face his self. Either way four years later I have a new day and an impending divorce.

The questions I would have to ask myself, can I really get past this? Do I want to? What does WS need to do for me? Why am I really staying?

copy this

I found out that my WH had had a 2 year PA four years after it had ended. The OW broke it off, by text! a few days before he was going to tell me he was leaving me to move in with her. Ironically, she chose her 'other man' that my WH had not known about. The emotional trauma this caused him (poor lamb!) resulted in him having a minor nervous breakdown, which I nursed him through, totally unaware of the cause.

So, over 4 years later I feel like I have been unwittingly living on a primed minefield. He thought I would never find out, but his texts to a male friend detailing how difficult it had been for him leading a double life during the A alerted me to it, and some active snooping and recovering deleted texts on his phone uncovered it all. This wasn't the first A either, and when I found out about the first one and we supposedly R I'd told him that he was only getting that one chance. Now I know about the 2nd one and all the lies and deceit that went with it I know i have to leave him. I feel so resentful that he used me as his Plan B when the OW dumped him and hadn't the balls to be honest about what was causing his mental state. How disrespectful and selfish.

I'd thought that we were doing ok after he recovered from 'the breakdown ', but having uncovered this A I just feel like the last 4 years were a waste of time. He is totally unremorseful. He says he 'is not proud of' having had this A, but says it in a tone of voice that makes it sound as if he IS proud of it. No show of remorse whatsoever. He just says if I want a D he won't try and talk me out of it and he's not surprised if that's my decision.

I'm done and making plans to move out and am strangely calm about it. Typical that I have to be the one to make the move even though I am the 'victim' rather than the one who caused the trouble, but I feel it gives me the control. If I tried to get him out it could take years, and I just want to get on with my life now.

I found out 2 months ago my W had an 18 month affair back in 2008. We had been married for 3 years and my W had just been through some major surgery....she never really confronted her own mortality and this caused some depression issues. I didn't really understand depression back then either....perfect recipe for a OM who I thought was a friend to move in....

Anyway we have had a fantastic marriage for the past 5 years (things were a bit rocky in 2008..... Guess I know why now though!)

But I think because our marriage has been so good that makes it harder to accept and deal with...... I feel like I missed a few steps!

I found out after 13 years of me asking and him denying (hard to get proof in 1995). I was made to feel like a crazy person! Now, I am an emotional wreck. We have reconciled, but I feel like 13 years were just wasted and I no longer have any intuition.

Wow! When I hear so many of you who were suspicious, I feel even more like a fool!!! I uncovered an affair last year that my husband had ended just two weeks earlier. After a month, he confessed that he had also had an affair 12 years earlier when our first child was about 5 or 6 months old for a couple of months tithe the same AP, his ex girlfriend. I was absolutely stunned. His mother had invited the husband's AP to the place she was staying at and tried to get him to meet her there so that they would get back together when she was visiting for our son's first birthday and they got into a terrible argument. Despite my husband's pleading with her not to go back home, his mother did leave before the birthday party and I comforted him because I felt absolutely terrible that his mother was not there for our child's first birthday (I had absolutely NO idea what was going on back then).

I find it hard because I am dealing with the effects of the current affair, and then there is the matter of the old one, and all the years in between where I had NO idea that my marriage was not what I believed it to be. I am very sorry that you are all dealing with the gas lighting part of the affair; I don't know what is worse; being completely blindsided after having NO suspicion at all, or confronting with suspicions and being told that you instincts are wrong. I think it sucks all the way around!

If Whoareu and Camalus are still monitoring this, I have to tell you I'm in your club, too.

You go thru life working hard, doing your best, and finally get to you "sweet spot" of early retirement, land, home, time....Then, you find out of infidelity years ago, and all the shine is gone. No more giddy delight with what you've managed.

Break it up after 30 years and start over? Kick her out with half the assets, and look for a job again?

Until you're sitting on that, you'll never understand.

My situation doesn't seem to fit into any one category other than this one. I can't find a similar situation anywhere so hope that there is someone out there who maybe went through what I am going through and can help me out a little.

I was cleaning up an old work laptop of my H's and found some pager messages, notes and stories to an obvious OW. The stuff was dated from 1996 through 2006 (!). When questioned about it he told me it was someone he had met at a conference and was initially an ONS, but then turned to a few messages/notes/calls. The opportunity to meet up with her again came a year and a half later and he took it. All in all they had only 4 meetings in the 10 years and one attempted (by him) in early 2007 that didn't work out. In between, there were the emails, pager messages, notes and calls. He says they were not an everyday thing and that they would go for considerable amounts of time with no contact at all.

So, here I am, 8 years after the fact, no indication at all of any issues like that in my M. It's been a really great M BTW. Normal ups and downs but we are now, and have always been, completely crazy about each other.

We started long conversations right away. I keep old calendars and we were able to piece somewhat of a timeline together. I had the info from the notes and messages to fill in some gaps and jog his memory. He has been completely upfront and trying to remember as many details as he can. I have asked really specific, intimate details and he has not hesitated (much)in telling me what I ask. He has been truly apologetic and is bending over backwards to try and make it up to me. I do not doubt his sincerity, he's not that good at faking it.

I spent the first couple of days really upset and angry. He was out of town on the third day and I pulled down the box of all of our love letters, notes, cards etc and went through them. At that point I remembered how we felt about each other and told him that I fully intended on getting through this together and reconciling. He wants that too and is willing to do ANYTHING he can to work towards that end.

I guess my main problem(s) are trying to go back 18 years and figure out if anything we went through wasn't "real" for him/us and just trying to get to as many details about the A as I can so that I can fit it all in. He says there were no times that he was with me that he wasn't "with me". If the A had just been the 4 meetings I would have no trouble taking him at his word, but I did read all of the messages and it was slightly more than just the sex, though, thank god, never any mention of loving her or really any mention of emotions at all, or very little in that regard. However, I still feel like I have a past that has large gaps in it and, of course, the dates of their meetings are now the only thing that comes to mind when I think of an entire year.

It's all so much to take in. We are looking into MC and he is willing to go to IC so that he better understands his decision to do this. At the moment, he says it was so compartmentalized that it didn't even feel like it was part of our life together.

Sorry so long, needed to get at least some of it off my chest as I have elected to not share with friends and family. I don't really want their view of H to change, he is a great person despite this one bad decision.

Sorry you are her Demeter. ((Hugs)) it's seems like those of us on this post have our own special battles-remembering. It's like it alters our history.

Reading your story I wonder if those of us who found out later are less likely to tell anyone. Like - will people think we were dumb to miss the signs? Idk.

Know you are not alone.

Thanks for the hugs itstoohard, I need all of them I can get. As to feeling dumb as not being the reason for sharing with friends and family, I don't think it's that, I don't really believe there were any indications I could have picked up on since it all happened during out of town trips and through emails and whatnot, and there was nothing seriously wrong in our relationship that would have made me think something was going on. It's mainly why I believe him when he says our past is no different, she was not in his head when he was not either with her or specifically writing to her. I really just don't want our family and our friends to take a different view of us/him. We have the sort of relationship that everyone is envious of, we are one of those "perfect" couples, we do everything together, truly like each other, still hug and hold hands all of the time in public (after 22 years of being together), people tell us we light up the room. It's bad enough I have to factor this issue into all of that, I really don't want to impose that on the other people in our life. Besides, I at least have the way I feel about him to soften any judgement of him and try to not make this about us per se. Other people may not cut him that much slack.

I did feel a little stupid the first couple of days but after talking about it for the last couple of months now, I really don't believe there was anything to miss. I have the memory of an elephant and have combed our past, especially those times closest to their meetings (and there were some pretty memorable events surrounding those) and he acted no different towards me/us at those times. Throughout our life, I have always been able to tell when something is up with him and always force him to sit down and talk about it, this was not one of those things. I can't figure out how he was able to keep it all from affecting us too much, I don't think that will ever make sense to me, but at this point am trying to read the WS forum and draw correlations from it about the "fog" and "compartmentalisation" because that seems to be the only explanation I have.

How did some of you feel about your H afterwards? Oddly enough, we seem to be relatively "normal" most of the time. There are bumps...especially when something comes at me unbidden and triggers something I read or that he told me, I do sort of freeze up at those times, but for the most part we are doing better than I expected. A little of the "shiny" is gone, but I am trying to restore as much of that as possible. I keep EVERYTHING and have spent some of my time going through the minutiae of our lives together so that those are the prominent memories in my head (as opposed to the new info that I have regarding dates and years). We spend a lot of our talking time reminiscing and that seems to help a lot too, especially when I can hear the fondness about a memory in his voice, I know it wasn't a "facade" when we were going through it. It feels like an unusual way to go about things, but having never been in this situation before, I don't really have a clue as to what is "usual".

demter- You're right. For those who found out later it is very difficult to understand and I know I went back over the years and tried to figure things out. I knew in my gut. I could probably tell you the time and date they first had sex just by instinct. To this date I never got the full story and that was just as hard for me to accept. He had another realty. If I had had any true evidence or caught them I would've been gone. I was a lot younger and not as tolerant. I do have good memories during the time after and much to my embarassment during. I only told a couple people when I found out. a good friend, his sister, and my sister. I think what kept me from telling was my shame at being so stupid. I believed him over my own intuition. That never happened again.

We did try to R after the fact but I think I couldn't get past the lies and even more lies once the truth was out- actually I never got the full truth. I thought we had made it and we were doing great. We were actually closer and were doing things together and then he checked out. Very suddenly he hadan exit A and his planning on marrying his AP as soon as the ink is dry on our D paper.

I truly hope things turn out well for you and from your post I feel it will. My best advice is to keep talking about until you feel you have all the information you need. I never asked about the sexual part because I didn't want to know, many do. I hope he understands that this will change many things and he has to be an openbook. No unknowns about his life, co-workers, phone, computer, if he is willing to be 150% open to you that'll help. The fact that he speaks fondly of your past speaks volumes about him.

I would suggest some reading for you both 5 Love languages and not just friends. There are several others out there but these two help. 5 love languages is great as there are exercsies to help you reconnect. Of course Dr' Phil's book that is usually on the left hand side here- relationship rescue may be a big help for you.

To MeanieMouse -

has literally done everything a wayward spouse should do in order to save the marriage and let her know that the person who did that isn't the person he really is.

This isn't my situation but I wanted to add another perspective. With all respect, the above isn't true. He may have done everything else right, except Tell Her The Truth. He continued to lie to her for 16 years! A lie of omission is still a lie. It doesn't matter how many cars he washed or flowers he brought home. He was living a lie by keeping something so fundamentally hurtful and damaging from his wife. He betrayed her and kept the truth from her for years. He essentially made a fool of her for years. So I can understand her total devastation.