SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Update: My WW has accepted my conditions for beginning to reestablish trust and sought IC. I'm not doing any convincing and what got us here was advice from this thread and elsewhere on SI.

I've read the Tactical Primer and the Newbie Guide.

D-Day was last week. I'm pretty fucked up but I think I can move past this for the sake of my marriage and our kid. But I think when my WS looks at me all she sees is the guy that she stopped liking, my own prior mistakes and bad habits.

I can see why she wouldn't want to be with that guy but a months long affair spending time with AP instead of me or our kid certainly wasn't the answer. I wish she'd said how bad things were. I'm not taking responsibility for the affair but I'm willing to take responsibility for letting our marriage weaken.

She's lied or obfuscated since I confronted her.

1. She denied at first but after I demanded that I be able to look at her phone she admitted that it happened though she still wouldn't let me look through her phone.

2. She let me look through her phone the next day but she deleted texts from him and from a friend of hers that knew about it the previous evening. She said, "oh I delete texts all the time" but then admitted to having deliberately cleaned out her phone.

3. She's said that it wasn't that often but I'm a bit more tech savvy than she is and I've gotten evidence of most of not all of her visits to his house. It's nearly 50 over the course of seven months including multiple instances where she spent the night there, probably after telling me that she was picking up a night shift at the hospital.

4. She's said that she ended things in November but I know she went there once in December and once in January. I know that clean breaks in an affair are rare so I understand it but I still hate that she misled me.

Even though she had broken off the physical part of the affair they talked or texted every day until the day after D-Day. Which is either when they really stopped talking or started talking on a platform I can't track from the cell phone bill.

I got Healing From Infidelity and read the first chapters for the BS and WS. It helped me get perspective and start feeling better about myself and that reconciliation was possible.

But my WS doesn't seem to want to read the book. She has had bad experiences with therapy before and is reluctant to get couples counseling. It's infuriating that she'd rather give up than try.

I'm doing my best on following the principles of the 180 in hopes that she'll get on board but it's so damned painful when I don't even know if the result is attainable.

[This message edited by BobTheBuilder at 1:08 PM, Monday, April 24th]

If you have to talk her into it,it will fail. In order for there to be a successful reconciliation, the WS has to be honest,transparent, and willing to do the hard work to fix whatever inside of them said infidelity was a good choice. They must do the heavy lifting. They must be all in,and willing to move mountains.

If he is married,or has a girlfriend, call her and tell her.

Get tested for stds.

She needs IC. No MC. She is the problem,not the marriage.

Follow the 180,and take care of yourself.

Set boundaries.

[This message edited by HellFire at 3:55 PM, Tuesday, April 18th]

No.

Your WS behavior was similar to mine on Dday and it seemed like a second layer of betrayal that they did not think the marriage was even worth working for. It’s infuriating and honestly sad and it took me a couple of days to get over the shock.

I think at some point I realized the focus has to be solely on me and not the marriage. I would recommend a hard core 180 and that you shift your focus now with a therapist, talk to a lawyer to see what divorce looks like ( not necessarily file yet). Take it one day at a time but essentially start working on strengthening yourself emotionally and financially.

My WH decided to change his ways at some point and now I am the one that he needs to convince to work on the marriage.
I am realizing my worth and that I deserve better and that the person that cheated needs to put in the work, not the poor betrayed spouse!

A confident self assured person is very attractive. Your WS may realize the value of working on the marriage when she is close to losing it. If she doesn’t its her loss, but you need to be well equipped to move on.

Don’t sell yourself short and don’t settle for less. This means full disclosure, true NC with AP, open phone policy, therapy etc etc.

Thanks, everyone so far.

Hellfire, she is in IC. She started around the end of November. I think her therapist knows about the affair now but didn't until after D-Day. AP is not married.

Abalone, good to hear that there could be a turn around. I think feeling like there wasn't a way to get us on the same page was pretty demoralizing. But I guess that's the point of the 180, right? Displaying that you're the person who is worth the effort even when they're all fogged up.

EDIT: How do I set some healthy boundaries for my WS's behavior while following the 180? That would seem to fall afoul of a couple of the principles. But I know where she met her AP and I know he still goes there. I can't stand the idea of them even seeing each other from across the room. Is it ok to tell her not to go there without setting back my progress on being a 180 version of myself?

[This message edited by BobTheBuilder at 4:31 PM, Tuesday, April 18th]

If you have to talk her into it, it will fail.

This is the answer on a nutshell. Don’t waste your energy trying to convince your cheating spouse R is possible.

BTDT.

You don't set boundaries on an unremorseful cheating spouse's behavior. You set boundaries for what you won't tolerate.

The 180 is designed to help you feel stronger. It has nothing to do with getting the ws to see you as worth the effort.

If she doesn't see that you are worth the effort,she isn't worthy of reconciliation.

You are the prize. Not her.

What consequences has she had? Have you exposed the affair to family and friends? Is she sleeping in another room? Have you seen an attorney,to find out your rights?

Please don't think you will somehow win her back,by being Mr nice guy.

The men who have had the nosy success in reconciliation, are the men who took control,immediately, and refused to tolerate one more second of abuse. Women typically don't respond well to husbands who don't respect themselves.

Also, there is software available to restore deleted texts.

[This message edited by HellFire at 5:03 PM, Tuesday, April 18th]

Sorry you find yourself here but you will receive good support. In order to put everything in proper perspective you need to implement the 180 and take time to really think about what you want. Your emotions will be all over the place for a long time. Understand that you can not nice her back. You can’t make her want to be in the M. Do not beg or plead. Do not do the pick me dance. It never works. In the same vein, you did not cause your WW to cheat. You don’t control her. She decided to cheat because she wanted to do it. Period.

Any rationalization or excuse blaming you for her horrible decisions is total BS. Nothing you did or didn’t do in your M caused her to cheat. You are not a perfect partner. Neither is she. There is no perfect spouse. Wedding vows are not conditional for a reason. Do not accept any blame. If your WW was unhappy in the M she had many legitimate options to address them rather than cheating. As a builder, you will understand. Your M was like a house in need of repair. A leaky roof, a broken furnace, and bad plumbing. Instead of working with you to repair the house, she poured gasoline on it and lit a match and destroyed it. It is up to her to face her own failings and how her integrity failed allowing her to betray your trust. Always value yourself. Your M did not fail, your WW failed her wedding vows.

It takes courage and humility to face betraying your BS. Your WW needs to demonstrate remorse and empathy for your pain, not wallow in her own shame and guilt. Watch her actions, not her words.

Take care of you. Continue the 180. Decide what your boundaries are for you to continue in the M. Good luck.

[This message edited by SI Staff at 5:59 PM, Tuesday, April 18th]

D-Day was last week. I'm pretty fucked up but I think I can move past this for the sake of my marriage and our kid. But I think when my WS looks at me all she sees is the guy that she stopped liking, my own prior mistakes and bad habits.

I can see why she wouldn't want to be with that guy but a months long affair spending time with AP instead of me or our kid certainly wasn't the answer. I wish she'd said how bad things were. I'm not taking responsibility for the affair but I'm willing to take responsibility for letting our marriage weaken

Very gently, I do think you are probably taking some blame here when you speak about "letting our marriage weaken". The weakness of your marriage is a shared problem that you contributed to, yes. However you really need to separate the decision to have the affair from the environment under which the decision was made. You can make the environment better from your end, but there is nothing you can do to change her decision making. Just to be super clear. Repair from the affair FIRST. If you try to fix marital problems and fidelity problems at the same time, they will inevitably get intermingled into a sort of blameshifting that will be very damaging to R.

There is actually a mild appeal to "taking responsibility for your half" to the BS. It grants a larger sense of control, but it is completely and totally false.

You were in the same "bad marriage" as her. You didn't cheat. You might have made other bad decisions, but you probably kept your vows intact.

She is the one that should be crawling across broken glass to get back to you. Yes, you can also fix marital problems but in the beginning it's really only worth the initial triage. You sort of speak to that in your post. The question is "Even if my WS didn't cheat, do I have a marriage worth saving from divorce?" If the answer is NO, you really shouldn't try to R. If the answer is YES, then R may work. It still has a decent chance of failing.

Personally, based on your timeline and that you are using "misled" for continued to intentionally lie, I think you are still giving her too much benefit of the doubt.

Which is either when they really stopped talking or started talking on a platform I can't track from the cell phone bill.

If you haven't see the "No Contact" letter/message/whatever, it's safer to assume the A is ongoing and underground. Something along the lines of "AP it was wrong of me to cheat on my husband and I'm no longer interested in any contact with you. I am committed to repairing my marriage."

There is some boilerplate advice and I'll give you a short rundown:

1) Get a complete written timeline of the affair, and optionally a polygraph to confirm (others might not take it so optionally). This is the best way to stop the trickle truth that you are still under.
2) Complete electronic transparency. All devices, all passwords, all accounts. You can't police this forever but it's an opening gesture that is critical to rebuilding trust.
3) No contact letter that you see send, AP blocked on all platforms
4) New job if AP is a coworker. I took a softer approach recommended in not just friends that was reported work contact only because they were mostly remote and not sharing a physical location. People told me it was a bad idea. I didn't listen. It was a bad idea.
5) Two books: Not Just Friends, by Shirley Glass. How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair, by Linda MacDonald. Pushback against the second book is likely since most freshly minted WS's will say it is something like "too harsh and one sided". You know what is harsh and one sided? Cheating on your spouse.

To be clear, has your wife said she wants to divorce? If not, has she expressed any desire to stay married?

My first response to you was a trite "No" because my situation was very similar to yours. My ex owned up to nothing and seemed very ambivalent about the marriage. He was hoping that I would either stick my head in the sand and ignore what he was doing or save him the trouble/responsibility of ending our marriage and file for divorce myself. I wasn't willing to do the former so the latter was my only choice.

[This message edited by BluerThanBlue at 6:46 PM, Tuesday, April 18th]

I am sad to have to say this Bob but your balls are right now in your WW's purse. Instead of trying to win your WW back aka the Pick-Me Dance you are doing now (which NEVER works), you should instead be angry that your WW cheated on you in the first place.

[This message edited by WontBeFooledAgai at 12:01 AM, Wednesday, April 19th]

I remember Bob The Builder from my kids early days.

"Can he fix it?"
"YES HE CAN!!"

Nope. Sorry Bob. You didn't cause it,you didn't do it, and you can't fix it."

That's her work.

On dday, I told my fWH that I was divorcing him. It wasn't a ploy or a tactic. I meant it. I was done. I didn't care to hear the details, didn't want any information, didn't even cry. He could split the banking and I'd find us a lawyer to say grace over it. We'd been married for over thirty years. All he could manage was a hangdog look and some nodded agreement that it was for the best, and then he was toddling off to go text the OW du jour. Within a week though, it was him asking ME for more time, time to prove he could be trusted. He messed that up, of course, and when I caught him in contact with the OW again a few weeks later, he had about thirty seconds to decided whether he was "all in" or "all out". He ghosted the OW and has worked his butt off in R since then.

I think these guys are right when they tell you that the answer to your question is "we don't". We don't try to convince the WS. We move on with the facts in front of us and devil take the hindmost. If the WS can catch up and convince us that they want to be "all in", that can be a starting point for R, that is, IF we even still want R. Sometimes, a BS gets past the kneejerk reaction of wanting to restore the status quo and decides they don't.

Hellfire said:

You don't set boundaries on an unremorseful cheating spouse's behavior. You set boundaries for what you won't tolerate.

This right here^^^^

The 180 is for me, not we. It’s to remove yourself from her infidelity. You can’t save what is already gone. 180 simply means to turn and head the other direction.

So much great feedback. This is going to be long as I try to respond to everyone.

---

Hellfire, you're absolutely right that setting clear boundaries isn't talking about the future, it's talking about the present. I'll be making my boundaries clear today.

I'm not going to tell anyone unless we're getting divorced. Michelle Wiener-Davis advises against it and having seen fallout from similar situations I'm not willing to put myself through that. I haven't forced any consequences other than the distance required by the 180. I know y'all are going to disagree with me but I know my wife and I'm certain that trying to be severe will put her back up. She has her own trauma from previous sexual assault and emotional abuse and I can't become associated with those traumas in her mind. I have done research on the legal issues and my brother just wrapped up his own divorce.

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Fareast, thanks for the advice and kind words. I'm doing my best to strike that balance where I acknowledge my own faults as a husband without letting myself believe that I caused an affair. She's said something to the effect of "by the time I had the affair I felt like the marriage was already over." But just because she felt that way doesn't mean I did and until it is over infidelity is unacceptable.

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This0Is0Fine, I felt a wild mix of comfort, grief, and near panic attack reading this. The comfort outweighed the others and I thank you for that. As I mentioned above, I am trying to strike that balance between taking responsibility for what I'm responsible for without minimizing how deeply betrayed I feel.

I'm sticking with the 180 and when she comes to me I will absolutely use your suggestions for ensuring that NC is set and working and create a situation where I feel like I can trust (but verify) again.

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BluerThanBlue, not really. On D-Day we talked for a bit but she was deflecting and blaming me instead of taking responsibility so I shut the conversation down rather than talk in circles. When we talked next, she said that she thought I was done with her and had started to figure out how divorce would work. When I told her that I was willing to reconcile if it was possible she agreed to try but hadn't seemed hopeful. That's slowly changing as the days pass and I keep doing the 180 as best as I can. I think we're turning a corner towards progress but that corner leads to a hard conversation about boundaries, transparency, and remorse. We'll see how that goes when she approaches me to talk about the future.

---

I think that's as much as I can handle. I need to pace myself or I start spiraling.

Thanks again to everyone for the support.

Michelle Wiener-Davis advises against it

Well I don't know who this is. But you are on a forum dull of people who have hard earned wisdom when it comes to infidelity. We know what works,and what doesn't work. No,we didn't wrote a book. But we ARE experts on the subject. Many of us have been here for years. Not because we're bitter or haven't moved past our spouse's cheating,but because this site saved us,and we like to give back.

You can ignore the advice. Many do. And, many of those members return, after another dday, saying they wish they had listened.

This site is an invaluable resource. If you choose to use it as such.

I know y'all are going to disagree with me but I know my wife and I'm certain that trying to be severe will put her back up.

Very gently, you are coming from a place of fear. You cannot be fearful, she is at this time an enemy of your marriage and family. Brother your house is on fire and you are sitting inside hoping the fire goes out. You have to fight for this, she will not see the light until she has real consequences.

I tell you this from experience, hard earned lessons I wish I’d had when my WW was jerking me around.

The 180 is not a manipulation tactic, it’s a "I’ve had a fucking nuff!!" I took my life and my family back and she was odd man out. It was not bluffing or playing and she knew right away this was someone she’d never seen before.

You are in a fight brother, please take care of yourself.

"She's said something to the effect of "by the time I had the affair I felt like the marriage was already over."

I just need to mention how often you see these exact words coming from a WS as a rationalization for cheating. It's like a script. This is the type of thing they tell themselves to make cheating okay. Its never okay. Your WW needs to figure out how she became so broken.

You know your situation and pace yourself as you need. But be firm and do not do the pick me dance. Always value yourself. Your emotions are very normal. We all wanted to go back to our pre-A marriage at first. Give yourself time to heal. Watch her actions for remorse and empathy. Good luck.

Hi BobtheBuilder,

Welcome to SI. I'm so sorry about the awful, no-win situation you seem to find yourself in.

Gently, your wife is still in the A. She may not still be actively physically cheating at the moment, but she her actions demonstrate that she is still very much in Wayward mode. You cannot convince her that R is possible when she is like this. You cannot convince her to stay when she is already gone.

Your pre-A marriage may not have been perfect, no marriage is. But if she truly believed it was over, she could have ended it. She didn't. That suggests that she didn't actually want to end the marriage. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. In fact, by trying to nice her back into the marriage, she STILL doing that. She has the best of both worlds. As long as she is in this mindset, and she knows that you are not going anywhere, she is unlikely to feel the need to make a decision.

She is doing that thing that most waywards do where she is so committed to her own narrative, that she has re-written history. No one wants to be the bad guy in their own story and so she has made YOU the bad guy in order to justify her actions. This wasn't about you though and it wasn't about your marriage. It was about her. Bad marriages don't make people cheat. Bad (or permeable) morals do.

I get it. Ultimatums are scary, especially if you aren't actually prepared to follow through with actually leaving your wife at this time. Most people aren't ready to do that overnight. I know you have a child, that complicates things too. I do believe that if she stays in her current mindset, you don't really have a lot of choice in the matter though, as the marriage will become untenable for you both. That said, you don't have to make that decision today. That's what the 180 is for. It is not about convincing or manipulating HER to stay, it is about YOU. It's about prioritizing you and your interests and detaching yourself (emotionally, physically, logistically, financially) from the Wayward to the greatest extent possible in order to make sure you are in the strongest possible position/headspace to rebuild your life - with or without her.

Until now, your WW has been in the drivers seat and she is most comfortable there. You know that she is not a safe driver though and that she certainly does not have your best interest at heart. The 180 is about YOU taking control of the wheel. When reality sets in and she realizes that you are not going to sit around and play house with her while she hums and haws about your marriage and carries on with other men, the fantasy world that she has been living in may start to look different.

You are the prize. It may not feel that way right now, but it's true. You deserve a marriage where you are valued and loved and treated with respect, whether it is with her or (eventually) with someone else. Please keep this in mind as you move forward. In my own experience with infidelity and in many years of reading other people's stories here, I have found that the people who are unwilling to compromise on that are the ones that tend to get the best results.

This is hard - maybe the hardest thing you have ever had to deal with. You will make it through this, one way or another. We are here to help.

[This message edited by emergent8 at 7:54 PM, Wednesday, April 19th]

You don't. She is still lying to you.

I know my wife

No, you don't, or her infidelity wouldn't have fucked you up so bad. You THOUGHT you knew her.

and I'm certain that trying to be severe will put her back up.

And...?
Stop doing the pick me dance. Find your righteous anger and take control of your life. SHE cheated, SHE lied over and over again, SHE desecrated your wedding vows. SHE brought the possibility of disease into your marriage bed, SHE put your whole family at risk.

She is not a unicorn. Should you try to reconcile (ill-advised) there will be months of trickle truth and at least one more D-Day, I guarantee it.