SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Thank you all for posting on this thread. I went and read back through all the posts from this year and found each of them helpful and encouraging.

Alright, my turn.

I haven’t posted on this site for years - it was never quite the right fit for someone in my situation (newly married, no kids). The advice was almost overwhelmingly to divorce, which would have been a respectable and easier path. I logically understood the advice then, and even more so now. But I stayed (?naive, ?insecure, ?ignorantly optimistic).

For whatever reason, here I am. 6+ years out, still married, now with two kids… you can make R work if that’s the goal you both have. Individual counselling (mainly for him), some couples counselling, a lot of hard conversations and hard moments.. we have survived it. The affair simply doesn’t factor in to our day to day. it changed us as people, of course, but the pain is gone and the life we have chosen to build is far more important.

I’m grateful to this site for leading me to a group of incredible people who have helped me for years, and still do. And although I am no longer a regular, I thought I would post this brief little update so someone in my shoes might find hope here if they need it. I know I desperately searched for success stories back in the day. So, you can work through it, or you can call it quits - I am certain you will survive it all no matter what <3

I call it the barrier. At 20 yrs of marriage I found out I wasn't married at all. Repeated infidelities, lies, alcoholism, verbal abuse finally bared its soul, and I was married to a total lie.
I had many, many choices along the way. Read my profile if you want it all, but in the end I drew a line, dead set in sand, to my husband. No booze, drugs, bitches. One time chance before I took him out with every single thing I had in me other than violence. The sand was me.

On August 18 we will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. It was so, so, so hard. All of it. In the end it came up to him standing up to the plate, to himself, to his family and past. Facing it. Because in the end the women, me, booze, the arrogance was all a lie to himself.

The hardest part was realizing that I had no part in any of it. None. I wasn't even on the playing field. He loved me in a place so totally separate from all his pain, all his past, all the booze and everything he felt as a child with every hit from his mother. In his eyes I was the safe place, but he didn't know it was him that was killing me.

I was a safe and totally separate place in his mind. It wasn't until I made him join himself in the past, present and future that he knew himself. Saw himself and stopped drinking to mask the pain. It was so fucking hard. Why did I do it?
Because he came to me one day on his knees, literally. He said to me that he would rather live with me the rest of his life as friends than lose me. Begged me, told everything to me on his knees, the truth, all of it. He didn't beg my forgiveness, he begged for time to change. He committed to so. I committed not one thing. I drew a line in the sand. No more pain.
It hasn't been easy. I won't lie to you, but I have my best friend back in my life, sober, kind, thoughtful and committed. He has faithfully committed to me and sobriety for 20 yrs.

I didn't save him because I wanted to stay his wife, I tried so hard because I wanted to save my daughter's father. No lie.

If I cannot forgive him completely, I can at least admit, I love him deeply, with all my heart, respect him now. I do know that surviving infidelity is the harder road, but my grandson comes to "Grandpa and Grandma's farm" his future is more intact because of our survived past.

I just wanted to let people hear know that I could not have made it without this website. The support I received gave me strength to draw a line in the sand that needed to be drawn to save myself as much as my marriage.

Not all marriages are worth saving. Mine was very, very close to the edge of giving myself more pain, rather than giving myself a new life. Make your own decision, but know that what ever you decide, is you taking your power back.

For me, in the end of it all, I have lived my life with my best friend, dearest lover and life partner. Our life and love was worth trying to save. It wasn't me in the end that saved it, it was him by being honest to me, to himself and to his past.

My heart reaches out to all that have felt this awful pain and betrayal. May you next venture in life be with our without your former lover/spouse, let this new chapter be about you. Heal yourself with kindness focused on you.

Tryingtwo

It's been a year and a half since I discovered she had a affair. It was a truly difficult and traumatic time for both of us. I admitted to my own infidelity and took responsibility for my actions that led her to seek love elsewhere.

Accepting that our first marriage was over was incredibly hard and felt like a monumental failure. However, we've managed to build something new and far better than what we had before. I still have my days and triggers, but my biggest regret now is that we didn't have this level of mature love and communication from the start.

7 years out.

Still with many conflicting feelings.

Celebrating 30 yrs in 6 weeks.

Resentments I still hold:

The gaslighting that it was ALL my fault. She takes responsibility but only with a qualifying "but, you know why don't you?" --alluding to my part to which it all never would have happened if I had just done....whatever she feels she was missing at the time. That also gripes me a little. Ever since her postpartum depression onset 13 yrs before the event, I got nothing but moving goal posts and rising bars. "If you just do THIS, I'll be happy". OK, that isn't asking much, I can do that...but then that is not enough anymore. It is now the bare minimum that will be tolerated, and more is demanded. Ok, I can step it up some more...only to find it isn't enough anymore, I got to jump an ever rising bar.

She goes to a therapist, the one that enabled the whole affair to begin with. I'm sure she didn't tell her to have one, but I am sure she got the old "you deserve to be happy" line of reasoning and didn't discourage it, especially after telling my wife about her own affair and how she managed it. She went to couples therapy exactly twice. When she found our female therapist wasn't going to back her up, she stopped going...then insisted I record my personal sessions to replay to her (since she was OUR therapist, not mine). After that I stopped going also.

Another resentment, loss of libido. We were hypersexual for a while, until she developed genital warts, and 2 months later so did I. Neither of us had them prior to her being boinked by her high school crush AP. After that, just nearly impossible to get motivation. Since she went through menopause, her libido has crashed as well. That was one of her bones of contention. Not enough sex from me. Even though the 3 years prior to the affair, we had more sex than the 10 years prior. "You never wanted to, you just did it to shut me up". Ok, anyone who knows physiology, men CAN'T go through the motions. Unless aroused, sex ain't happening. It was a principle her intellect could not fathom. It may have been just an excuse or justification for seeking outside partners.

Resentment 3. Enablers that pretended to be my friends. One was one of her best friends from childhood and for 25 years I counted as a treasured friend of mine also. To this day this woman has never apologized for her role or her betrayal of our friendship. She was the main "coach" for my wife. Teaching her how not to be so careless, things to do together to stay under the radar. She was experienced in the art of infidelity, a real pro. Another was recently discovered cousin that my wife had found during her geneology searches, who was trying to "help us through the reconciliation". He was all helpful and seemed to be on my side as he had been on the receiving end of infidelity also....until I declined to loan him $35,000 to get himself out of credit card debt. Then he stabbed me in the back a number of times....even trying to convince my wife that I was having affairs all along.

Resentment 4. She resents that I was always the same man that I was before we got married. I didn't change. She resents that I didn't act like we were on a perpetual honeymoon. That she "sacrificed" soooo much to stay married to me. That I didn't meet the standards that all other women get from their husbands as far as sex and attention. On at least a dozen occasions accusing me of having affairs. More gaslighting. Alot of this I chalked up to her mental illness that drugs would variably and usually unsuccessfully suppress. 3 over doses and prescription drug addiction...also basically my fault at the time. Though to be fair, she in retrospect takes full responsibility for all that.

I have other that I might share should I need to vent more.

But I am also compelled to give some kudos as well.

First, I have seen and heard her defend me when when her enablers and even her AP tried to poison her further. I actually overheard her say she wasn't just going to leave me immediately for AP because "he's been good to me and taking very good care of me." Of course that was a few minutes after she reminisced about one of their sexual encounters... statement that will forever be burned into my memory..."you had me so greasy I about slid off the seat! You fucked my brains out! It was the best I EVER had!" Good Grief. Should have heard all the whoppers she had trying to explain that one...

Second, she admitted she was a liar. not just since the time around the affair, but a gradual comfort level with lying, big ones and small ones, for years prior to that. Queen of easier to ask forgiveness than for permission. Being married to a physician, she found that because of our trained approach to making diagnosis, that we are also natural detectives. She may have been adequately shamed...or might have just got tired of being caught in a lie... that she no longer even tells white lies. She now realizes that I truly do handle the harshest truth better than I handle even the politest of lies.

Third, she now realizes that the sacrifices I made to stay married to her were far deeper and numerous than the ones she made to stay married to me.

Well, this was therapeutic. Thanks SI.com!

[This message edited by DrTarzan at 1:20 AM, Thursday, August 15th]

I met W2b on 9/14/65, 59 years and 3 days ago. We got married this week in 1967, 57 years ago. It wasn't until a year or so ago that I realized it was just 2 years from meeting to marrying. As I went through those 2 years, the time between 'no' and 'yes' to ** TMI ** seemed excruciatingly long. Now I see it was only a brief part of my life.

On 9/14, I wrote her off as a prissy co-ed looking for good grades. A few weeks later, I was in love with her. Then I found out she was passionate about what she was learning, not the grades (although her grades were top-notch). She was pretty puritanical, though, which is probably what I mean by 'prissy'.

We've grown old together. We've grown together, each in our own way. We've enjoyed each other's triumphs and mourned each other's screw-ups.

I'm still in limerence to some extent. I read Love and Limerence a month ago and realized I've been ashamed of that all along - the myth is that love is good, limerence isn't. Now I know limerence is biological and maybe genetic, and I'm no longer ashamed. I just accept that if I hadn't fallen in love, we wouldn't be together. Often, maybe every day, I go to bed and wake up thinking of the contrast between the times I wanted her in the 1965-67 period and heard 'no' with all the years of hearing 'yes'. I have no idea how love lasts, but I'm glad it did.

I haven't rug-swept the A. It's definitely part of our story, and I could have lived without the A very well. But it DID happen. My W, my partner conducted an A right in front of me, and I didn't see it. Worse, she aimed to keep it hidden because I wasn't evolved enough to accept it. She was right, at least, about that - but I think I've evolved beyond accepting my partner's cheating. But d-day for me was almost 14 years ago.

Since I'm on SI almost every day, I think about the A almost every day. I just remembered that this day in 2010 was Yom Kippur, a very solemn day. She was supposed to come clean and ask my forgiveness for any pain she caused me in the past year on the evening of the 16th. I wouldn't have thought of this if I weren't writing this post. Even so, the pain is in the past. This memory doesn't even rise to the level of an annoyance.

But the A is just a small part of our story, and the vast majority of the rest is filled with joy and/or contentment. And the A is just one of the traumas that I've experienced.

Patience, all. One's perspective changes as time moves on, especially if one processes the anger, grief, fear, and shame out of their body.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 9:24 PM, Tuesday, September 17th]

I promise to go back and read the 30+ pages of stories, but for today I just need to say some things about reconciliation and loss of a partner.

Twelve years ago, I found out my husband had cheated on me multiple times in our, then, 40 years of marriage. Maybe only one was a prolonged 'serious' affair that he was tempted to leave me for, but all five were serious enough that I considered leaving him. As the stories changed with trickle-truth, I became more determined to find out what really happened and make him bear witness to the pain it caused. At five years, I began climbing out of depression, and for the next nine years we gradually reconciled. He relapsed with cancer three years ago and finally died in April.

During the first years of my digging, he resisted full disclosure, but I got better and better at getting him to confess until he'd explode at the final revelation. There's some narcissism in that kind of rage and shame, and I'm not sure he ever really understood that, but he did fully accept and apologize for his actions and spent the past decade doing everything he could to make it up to me.

What I'd like to share is the view from this side of reconciliation - when there's no more time to say or do anything else. Our truce was never perfect because I could never let go a piece of guardedness and resentment. My main regret is not that I couldn't, however, because I really had no choice, but that I could not fully give myself to what could have beenpossible between us. I wish I could tell him again my recognition and gratitude for his constant effort to make up to me the pain he caused as well as my respect for his acceptance and understanding of my reaction. He spent the last few years trying to be the best husband, friend and lover he could be.

Occasionally the old bitterness does creep back in, especially perusing old photos taken during a time that he had been cheating, but the thing about seeing a marriage through to old age is that we have both been many people during this life. Whether we were better or worse as individuals at the end, we were fully one as a couple. This was our final passage together, and we gave ourselves over to our roles as each other's witness, defender and protector.

He left us in April and at the end all he could say was "I love you" to each person that took leave of him. I wish I'd told him again that he had more than made amends and didn't need to do or prove anything else. He was perfect and absolutely worthy of all my love.

merrmeade, what a beautiful post. I'm so sorry for your loss.

Thank you, SacredSoul.

I understand that this is just a small step in (hopefully) a long path to reconciliation, but my WH has been doing as well as I could expect or hope. Last weekend, he was very depressed (and depression definitely played a role in seeking outside validation through infidelity). Despite being depressed, he initiated reassurance that his feelings were nothing to do with me and that his mental state would not lead to the destructive behaviour of the past.
This was a real step forward in him being able to be empathetic whilst being in a terrible place internally. I am really proud of the empathy he has learned.
This sounds very small, but it has oddly meant a whole week of me not really thinking about his infidelity and being able to put it in its place when it has reared its head.
Fingers crossed for the next few days and their rollercoaster!