I truly believed that there was zero chance that my wife would have ever cheated.
The greater the trust, the deeper the wound of the betrayal. I was this way, trusted my wife completely. Her father, mother, sisters, all cheaters in their family lives. She hated it, despised it. She joined them eventually. Who did she blame? Me of course.
She said that I didn't show her affection and that I wasn't intimate with her. Both true to some degree.
This is what cheaters do, you will see it referred to as "the cheaters handbook". Almost everyone does the same thing when they cheat; cheat, justify it in their own mind, sneak around, deny when questioned, lie when caught, minimize when confessing, and blame the BS. You actually don't know why she cheated. The real reason she cheated is much more complex, and much harder to process.
She said she had sex with him 3-4 times over a few months.
Almost all WS's lie about this and many other aspects of the affair. Yours may be the exception. However, she blamed you, he was single, and like many others she probably never told you the full truth.
Our sex life is pretty much non-existent, because touching, or being intimate with her in any way makes me want to cringe, because of what she did. Harsh, but true.
Sometimes you just need to move on. Understand this, know this, accept this. The marriage that you had was destroyed, completely. Thus far, the two of you have failed to build a new one. If you cannot, there is no failure in moving on without each other, currently you are doing that, but just living in the same house.
I'm very private about my personal life. I have never spoken to anyone about her A.
This is the most important reason to get IC. However, IC will not heal your marriage. MC is where you go to work on that aspect. Hard to find a good one. We did, second time around, and six months in, after cautious steady work by the counselor, my FWS broke down and the confessions rolled out, the remorse truly began, the real work on the marriage rebuilding started. This was 9 years after the affair. But, my wife, who wanted to go to MC, sat in the MC office and blamed me repeatedly for her cheating, month after month after month. It took four years of MC.
IC will help you process your feelings, your responses to the current crisis, and your week to week as well as day today, and minute, 10 minute emotional swings that will occur. It may also help you develop clarity around your own feelings, which may help you with the direction you want to go with your relationship.
As somebody else said, let go of the end result, work to get to a healthy place, whether that healthy place is with your current spouse or not. For 10 years, you, and your spouse, have rugswept her cheating, that is a lot to unwind and process.
As you go through this, keep in mind that your wife cheated because of her own personal internal issues, not because of issues with the marriage, not because of issues with you, but because of her issues.
You are not one of those issues.
The marriage is not one of those issues.
If the sex life in our marriage, or our lack of true intimacy at other levels, had been a valid reason to cheat, I would've cheated many many times. What I found out in marital counseling was that I was the only one actually truly working on trying to improve those parts of our marriage.
At the time of my wife's confession, and the onset of true remorse, we had been married for 18 years. My wife had been lying to me from the day we met. I had never, and still have never lied to her.
She wanted to be open and honest, but didn't know how to do it, had never been in a relationship where any such thing existed, had grown up in an environment where everybody lied to everybody else all the time, about everything. She was so full of resentment and rage about her childhood and her parents and other things in her past, that she never truly fully and openly talked about, and constructively dealt with, that she had to blame me for some of it.
[This message edited by standinghere at 3:10 AM, Sunday, December 3rd]
