SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

Hi all.

We are almost 11 months past d-day. I want to recover our marriage and BH says he does too, but he is still very angry pretty much all the time. He had an affair years ago, but of course he says mine was much worse. He has been in and out of counseling with me because he doesn't like when we talk about his issues - anger before and after the affair. I admit
I was wrong all the way through the affair and did a bunch of very stupid things. Nothing is soothing his anger and I find myself hating to be home. When he is that angry,I just feel scared, and we never get anywhere. Any suggestions?

Hi, I’m a wayward myself. Kind of hard to know how to respond without details of your story.

Your BH/WH cheated first. Okay. What was your A? Give a breakdown of it and your BH’s. Hard to say which one is objectively "worse" without that info.

Regardless, all infidelity is bad in my eyes. I’ll be damned if I haven’t aged several years in the 2 years post D-Day for me. But this is what happens when you get yourself into this situation.

still. I’m sorry OP. Hope you’re treating yourself well.

Hi, NotBreakin. You registered here 19 years ago. You posted a lot, so you should be quite well-versed on how painful it is to be a BS and how long it takes to even begin to recover. Knowing nothing more than that, I'm inclined to believe that your H might be right that what you did could very well be felt as worse by him simply because you knew better.

Are you in IC or MC? Is he in IC?

What are you afraid of? Is he abusive? If so, do you have somewhere you can go?

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 11:57 PM, Tuesday, August 20th]

Hi- I had a two month affair and my husband had one beginning 18 months later that lasted for mother 18 months.

Was one worse than the other? No, both were destructive and created pain. Some people told me his was worse because he knew the pain.

My feeling on it are that affairs are born often of people in pain that have been doing a lot of numbing. When you numb pain it numbs bith good and feelings because we do not have a toggle switch that allows us to control our feelings this way.

So I believe when my husband cheated he was incapable of caring about my pain because he was so focused on his own.

Anyway, my two cents is the worst affair is the one inflicted upon you. Yes there could be things that would be out of the ordinary that make it worse like doing it in your bed or whatever but fighting over whose is worse is just not productive.

You report your husband has trouble controlling his anger and this sounds like an ongoing problem in your relationship. I think it’s natural to feel angry when someone cheats on you but I do also think that the reactions from that emotion are controllable to a certain extent. Someone a year out from cheating should be able to at least not be abusive. Can you describe this in more detail?

Let me ask you- do you even want this marriage? And why or why not?

[This message edited by hikingout at 9:06 PM, Wednesday, August 21st]

Thank you all for your responses. You have given me a lot to think about. I was writing fast the other day and did not mean to make it seem that his or my affair was worse. They each had bad aspects. But, in his head, mine was the worst that any woman ever did, which of course is not true. But when he thinks like that, he feels worse. We are in MC but he does not go with me all the time as he thinks I am the one who needs counseling because I did this terrible thing, which I did do. We have been married for decades and I never thought I would cheat, even after he did, but I did. Yes, I was hurt for a long time when he cheated, but unfortunately, his hurt goes to anger. On a positive note, since I posted the other day, we did go to counseling and I think we made some progress. Thanks again for your responses.

I'm curious if you feel like you had recovered well from his affair, and how your marriage has been in the interim.

I originally joined SI in 2004, and came back last year when my H was acting out financially. I'm sure we interacted back in the day.

[This message edited by SacredSoul33 at 11:34 PM, Thursday, August 22nd]

Hi SacredSoul,

I think I thought I had recovered because I had started to feel safe again in the marriage. But one mistake that I definitely made was being too focused on keeping our family together and him not cheating again. I did not address the other issues in our marriage. My kids were young and my self-esteem was low. We had a honeymoon period as we were recovering and I was happy that we were still married. But the issues were still there. We were just used to them. We both came from homes with unhappy marriages where they stayed unhappily together. Don't want to solely blame H. I didn't feel valued by H. As years went by and I got older, I realized that more and more. But I know that was due to both of our issues. When I tried to tell him how I felt, he took it as criticism and he would say I was giving him stress by being demanding. Around and around we went for years, but it seemed normal, if that makes sense.

I get it. We did quite a bit of counseling and we thought we were pretty solid, but things cropped up. We fixed our marriage in MC, but we never did IC and focused on ourselves. In our late 50s, I think we're finally getting there.

I think you'd do well to suspend the MC for now and try IC. See what you find out about yourself.