Did I already mess up?
I’ve been reading through a lot of posts on the sight. It’s been 2 months since dday and about 3 since my suspicion started. We have agreed to R, he is remorseful and reiterates constantly that he wants to work this out. We both are in IC and MC together. 3 therapies a week, it’s heavy right now. But what I’m reading is at least temporarily, most people removed their WH/WW from the home. I did not. My mother is currently living with us and I didn’t really want anyone to suspect anything. I also lived in fear that if I kicked him out it’d just give him more time with her.
But did I mess up a real chance of R without taking the space from him? Can he feel truly sorry and feel the weight of what he did without me going NC? Or mostly NC anyway. We have children so full NC would be impossible.
Has anyone successfully made it to R while remaining in the same home the entire time?
15 comments posted: Friday, December 29th, 2023
Where do I go from here?
So this is hard for me. It’s been about 2 months since I found out, but I feel like the fog has recently lifted and I’m more unsure than ever.
My husband became very closed off in September. We’ve been married for almost 9 years, together for 11. I know him. I noticed immediately and my gut told
me his interest was elsewhere. I started trying to watch him more carefully, check his phone, watch his location, things I wasn’t typically doing.
I also tried just confronting him about it all but he remained shut down.
We finally went to talk one night and had a really good conversation where he opened up a bit. He’s always struggled with mental health (anxiety and depression) and he disclosed that recently it just felt a bit worse, more overwhelming, like a light switch. He didn’t know what happened but he was just different. We agreed to keep pushing, I asked him to look into therapy and we continued on.
But things still felt off.
I kept checking his phone randomly until one night I went to a hidden photos album on his phone and there was a screenshot of a message between him and his supervisor - where she was asking him not to go to sleep, and to continue talking to her - which he agreed to do. There wasn’t much more in the screenshot besides her reiterating that she really loved him as a friend (specifically as a friend) and that she liked talking to him. But it was saved and hidden. And this thread in his phone I had been skipping when I looked through it because I knew it was his supervisor and I truly didn’t think there’d be anything to find.
Boy was I wrong.
I confronted him, he apologized. He said he had started having trouble at work, that she was helping him and also encouraging him to seek therapy. She began checking on him outside of work which turned into conversations about their personal lives (and inevitably issues about their personal relationships) and this lead to emotional feelings between the two of them, which then lead to the physical. He cheated on me.
I know most people say this, but I NEVER saw this coming. He has been the most nurturing, committed (or I thought) thoughtful, hands on and giving partner and father. We have children together, young children. This is so not the man I know him to be. I couldn’t have been fooled this long, and my gut knew the second something was off, so I know I couldn’t have ignored it for years.
He told her I knew, they immediately ended it (or so he says) he got into individual therapy, as did I, and we began couples as well. He says he regrets it, that it was the biggest mistake of his life, that he desperately wants his family together and that he will do anything to fix it… I don’t know if I believe him. I don’t know if I didn’t search for it, if it’d still be going on.
I am shattered, I am at a loss, I feel like the life I’ve lived blissfully happy for a decade was a lie.
Do people really work it out after something like this? Can someone really cheat once and never do it again? How can he love me and do that to me? Why wasn’t I enough to keep him loyal? Why weren’t our girls?
I’ll never know, but I just don’t know if I should continue to pour into this relationship to save it or if it’s a lost cause.
8 comments posted: Tuesday, December 26th, 2023
